In a seemingly inevitable march to the Republican nomination to challenge President Joe Biden in November, former President Donald Trump won the South Carolina Republican primary. The New York Times <\/em>reported<\/a> less than 30 minutes after polls closed that Trump had defeated former Gov. Nikki Haley, his only remaining challenger, in her own home state.<\/p>\n

Haley’s defeat should come as no surprise: Going into the primary, polling aggregator FiveThirtyEight<\/em><\/a> gave Trump a 64 percent polling average compared to Haley’s 33 percent. Notably, that number was the highest Haley had polled in her home state since at least April 2023.<\/p>\n

But the defeat will likely still come as a blow to Haley, who reiterated this week<\/a> that she intended to stay in the race “until the last person votes.” To that end, she has planned over $1 million in ad spending<\/a> in states that vote on “Super Tuesday,” March 5. But with the resounding loss on her home turf signaling her increasingly uncertain path<\/a> to the Republican nomination, it’s less clear than ever what hopes she actually has of preventing the Trump-Biden rematch that voters do not want<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Despite framing her campaign as an alternative<\/a> to both Trump and Biden, Haley did not win over her state’s conservative base. In a recent CBS\/YouGov poll<\/a>, 76 percent of respondents said that Haley was not “part of the ‘MAGA’ movement,” which nearly half of South Carolina Republicans consider themselves a part of.<\/p>\n

Ironically, in the same poll, nearly 90 percent of respondents felt that Trump “might” or “would definitely” beat Biden in the general election, while only 75 percent said the same about Haley. A recent Quinnipiac poll<\/a> found Biden leading Trump by 49\u201345, while Haley leads Biden 46\u201343 in a head-to-head matchup.<\/p>\n

The post Donald Trump Defeats Nikki Haley in South Carolina Primary<\/a> appeared first on Reason.com<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Despite holding out against a seemingly inevitable Trump nomination, Haley lost in her home state. …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"tdm_status":"","tdm_grid_status":""},"categories":[19,9],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/3rdcitynews.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/98956"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/3rdcitynews.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/3rdcitynews.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/3rdcitynews.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/3rdcitynews.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=98956"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/3rdcitynews.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/98956\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/3rdcitynews.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=98956"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/3rdcitynews.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=98956"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/3rdcitynews.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=98956"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}