Donald Trump has swept the traditional early states in the Republican presidential nominating contest after defeating Nikki Haley on Saturday in South Carolina.<\/p>\n
News organizations called the race shortly after polls closed, suggesting Haley didn\u2019t come particularly close to making it a contest in her home state. The most recent results show Trump leading 60 percent to 39 percent, with 75 percent of expected votes in.<\/p>\n
Haley has insisted she\u2019ll stay in the race through Super Tuesday, March 5, but the South Carolina results only reinforced her lack of a path to victory.<\/p>\n
Below are some takeaways.<\/p>\n
The result was not surprising, but it was significant. For example:<\/p>\n
Trump was already the first non-incumbent Republican candidate to win both Iowa and New Hampshire. He\u2019s now added Nevada and South Carolina. Since those two states began having early nominating contests in 2008, he\u2019s the only non-incumbent from either party to sweep them. (Trump won three of four in 2016, as did Barack Obama in 2008.)<\/span>Losing your home state is rare for a major candidate who remains in the race: Think Elizabeth Warren in 2020 (finishing third in Massachusetts, 12 points behind now-President Biden) and Marco Rubio in 2016 (losing Florida to Trump by 19 points). Haley\u2019s margin of defeat looks as though it will exceed both of them. Only relatively minor candidates such as Ron Paul (2008), Dennis Kucinich (2004), Alan Keyes (2000) and Pat Robertson (1988) lost their home states by more than it looks like Haley will, as The Washington Post\u2019s Philip Bump noted four years ago.<\/span>South Carolina might have been Haley\u2019s second-best shot at victory in any state. New Hampshire featured an inordinate number of independent and moderate voters \u2014 whom Haley does well with \u2014 and South Carolina had the home-state connection. But even though 8 in 10 South Carolina Republicans liked Haley during her two terms as governor, a Fox News\/AP\/NORC voter analysis showed nearly half of voters Saturday disliked her. And if voters in her home state don\u2019t even like her much, the odds are voters elsewhere won\u2019t.<\/span><\/p>\n It\u2019s not likely to get better from here. Tuesday is the primary in Michigan, where Haley has trailed by even more than she lost each of the four early states. And ahead of a dozen states voting on Super Tuesday, her deficit nationally is north of 60 points.<\/p>\n Given the GOP nominating contest appears to be all but over, the biggest question now might be what the results say about Trump\u2019s general election prospects.<\/p>\n A few exit poll findings stand out.<\/p>\n One is that 31 percent of voters said Trump wouldn\u2019t be fit to serve as president if he\u2019s convicted of a crime. South Carolina becomes the third early state to show that at least 3 in 10 voters said a convicted Trump wouldn\u2019t be fit. (We don\u2019t have data for Nevada.)<\/p>\n Just because these voters say he wouldn\u2019t be fit doesn\u2019t mean they wouldn\u2019t vote for him, but it would surely be a hurdle for at least some voters to get over. And 5 percent of voters voted for Trump but said he would be unfit if convicted.<\/p>\n Another exit poll finding is that a large chunk of Haley\u2019s support was expressly anti-Trump. While about 20 percent of voters picked her and said it was mainly an affirmative vote for her, well more than 1 in 10 voted for her while saying the vote was mostly against her opponent (Trump).<\/p>\n The NORC analysis showed that 35 percent of voters said they would be dissatisfied with Trump as the nominee, and 21 percent said they wouldn\u2019t vote for him in the general election.<\/p>\n At least 20 percent of voters in Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina have now said they will not vote for Trump in November.<\/p>\n A major unknown from there is how many of these voters actually mean it \u2014 and would otherwise be in the GOP camp. South Carolina allows any voter to participate in the Republican primary. But just 4 percent of voters Saturday identified as Democrats.<\/p>\n In a defiant speech signaling she\u2019d stay in the race earlier this week, Haley noted that nearly half of voters in both Iowa and New Hampshire had voted for someone not named Trump. She suggested that was \u201cnot good\u201d since Trump is a \u201cde facto incumbent.\u201d \u201cIt spells disaster in November,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n She added Saturday night of her vote share: \u201cI know 40 percent is not 50 percent, but I also know 40 percent is not some tiny group. There are huge numbers of voters in our Republican primaries who are saying they want an alternative.\u201d<\/p>\n All of that might oversell how much of an anti-Trump GOP contingent there is. Iowa featured lots of votes for other Trump-aligned candidates. And South Carolina is Haley\u2019s home state.<\/p>\n But what we can say in this moment is that Haley has effectively become a symbol of the anti-Trump vote.<\/p>\n Just 1 in 5 Haley voters said they would be satisfied with Trump as the nominee, and virtually the same number said Trump was physically and mentally fit to serve, according to exit polls. (Three-fourths said he was not.) Fewer said he would be fit to serve if convicted.<\/p>\n There are very few Haley voters who are casting Trump as a viable or acceptable alternative. And given both these numbers and the fact that Trump is on a glide path to the nomination \u2014 rendering votes for Haley something amounting to protest votes \u2014 we can effectively look at Haley\u2019s vote shares from now on as a measure of Trump holdouts in the party as much as affirmative votes for her.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n Donald Trump has swept the traditional early states in the Republican presidential nominating contest after defeating Nikki Haley on Saturday in South Carolina. News organizations called the race shortly after polls closed, suggesting Haley didn\u2019t come particularly close to making it a contest in her home state. The most recent results show Trump leading 60 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":1452,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1451","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1451","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1451"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1451\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1452"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1451"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1451"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1451"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}