South Carolina Confirmed The Obvious: The GOP Is All Aboard "The Trump Train"
Nikki Haley's Opponent Is No Longer Donald Trump, But Reality
One is tempted to feel sorry for Nikki Haley. There has to be a certain embarrassment to the former governor of South Carolina, a true “favorite daughter” of the Palmetto State, losing to Donald Trump so badly the question was never “if” Trump would win, only what the final margin of victory would be.
So dominating was Trump’s victory over Nikki Haley that the race was called for Trump almost as soon as the polls closed on Saturday.
The race was called just as the polls closed, and the news was no surprise at Nikki Haley’s election party in Charleston, S.C., where the CNN projection played for less than two minutes before organizers returned to playing music instead of the news. Wait staff circulated with appetizers.
A 7:07PM Eastern, New York Times reporter Shane Goldmacher posted that live update to the NYT website. Haley’s own election party gave up on the results two minutes after the polls closed, and Goldmacher posted shortly thereafter. One has to wonder if that isn’t some sort of new speed record on calling an election.
Based on subsequent updates by the Times, Haley’s own supporters expected this result.
Donald Trump just finished his victory speech, and he did not mention Nikki Haley once. He did refer to her being outvoted by a “None of These Candidates” ballot option in the Nevada primary, but he did so without so much as alluding to her participating in the contest. It’s a marked difference from his speech in New Hampshire, when he railed against her for staying in the race and framing her 11-point loss as a success.
Yet despite getting shellacked in her home state, despite her own supporters realizing the hopelessness of her campaign, Nikki Haley refuses to give in, promising to stay in the race until Super Tuesday at least.
Despite the tough talk from Trump and his surrogates, Haley’s team appeared undaunted in the days leading up to the primary. Haley has insisted she will stay in the race until Super Tuesday on 5 March, when 15 states and one territory will hold their primary contests. During a press call with reporters on Friday, Haley’s campaign manager, Betsy Ankney, announced a seven-figure ad buy across Super Tuesday states, indicating the candidate has no plans to drop out after Saturday.
Why on earth is Haley being so stubborn? There are no polls showing Haley having even a snowball’s chance in Hell in any of the Super Tuesday states. There are no polls showing Haley having even a snowball’s chance in Hell in any of the remaining primary contests.
Nikki Haley is no longer campaigning against Donald Trump. Nikki Haley is campaigning against reality.
The futility of Nikki Haley’s campaign can be seen simply by inspecting the margin of victory—Trump took home 59.8% of the vote, while Haley had to make do with 39.5%.
Splitting the vote in her home state 60-40, with Trump getting the lion’s share, is bad enough, but what is even more damning for the future of the campaign is how that percentage stacks up against the RealClearPolitics polling aggregate for South Carolina heading into the primary.
Donald Trump came within a percentage point of what the RCP poll aggregate predicted, while Nikki Haleyy was roughly two percentage points over her RCP poll numbers. Given the margin of error that attaches to most polls, the vote tally was essentially where the polls said it would be. The over- or under-performing by either candidate is little more than statistical noise.
Even more damning for Haley’s campaign is the last poll included by RCP, by the Trafalgar Group in the three days (Wednesday-Friday) just before primary day.
Trafalgar Group was virtually spot on with their projections—particularly since the polling margin of error was 2.9%.
This matters, because once again the vote tally has confirmed the polling data on Donald Trump. We can add South Carolina to the growing roster of primary wins confirming the polling data on Donald Trump.
We cannot simply dismiss the polls as “biased” or slanted towards Donald Trump. We cannot because his dominating poll numbers have been replicated in three separate contests by dominating vote totals. In three states, which encompass the East, Midwest, and West, Donald Trump has proven that he is hands down the candidate the GOP voters want as their nominee for the fall election.
The GOP voters could not be more emphatic in their message, a message which has been replicated from east to west and north to south in the United States: They want Donald Trump in the fall election.
As corporate media drilled into exit polling and interviews to peer into the mindset of South Carolina GOP voters, the overarching reason for Haley’s defeat appears to be simply that she is not Donald Trump.
For younger Republican voters, the hometown connections weren't enough to pull them away from Trump. In fact, her track record within the state is part of the reason that some College Republican chapters chose to endorse the former president ahead of the state's primary.
Noah Lindler, the Vice President of University of South Carolina’s College Republicans chapter, said the decision to endorse Trump was unanimous among the club’s executive board. In their February 2 endorsement of Trump, the group said they “miss when our border was being secured, terrorism was being rooted out and destroyed, and gasoline did not cost an arm and a leg.”
"There's always gonna be controversies with Donald Trump," Lindler told me. "However, we've seen what his presidency looks like, we know how good it was for America and we want that again."
Younger voters were still able to remember Trump’s pre-COVID Presidency, and are saying loud and clear that they want to return to the way things were then.
Haley also has not confronted the reality that her voter base is simply smaller than Trump’s.
The former South Carolina governor overwhelmingly won voters who identify as moderate or liberal, winning 72% to Trump’s 27%, but they only made up one-fifth of the primary vote. Haley also carried independents, who accounted for just 21% of the electorate, though she won them by 19 points, a smaller margin than Trump won with Republicans.
In the end, all elections are a game of numbers, and Trump has the numbers. Haley does not.
The numbers advantage becomes even more significant when one considers that an overwhelming majority of GOP voters had made up their minds long before the primary date. Nikki Haley’s recent “progress” in the polling data was coming among a constantly shrinking pool of voters legitimately “in play.”
Despite Nikki Haley’s persistent campaigning, the reality of that campaign has been very much like her performance in the January debate against Ron DeSantis: she simply is not delivering the substance or the message that GOP voters want to hear.
Ultimately, because neither candidate wanted to substantively address most of the issues raised during the debate, the winner in my estimation was once again Donald Trump. Neither candidate had the presence or the policy substance to give solid answers to important questions. Neither candidate had the presence or the Constitutional literacy to argue all the ways the current regime has been shredding, ignoring, and violating the Constitution with impunity. Neither candidate articulated even a remotely plausible vision for the future of this country.
Haley’s campaign, however, seems to be oblivious to this. Even as the polls showed that Haley had no chance, some of her supporters were still holding out hope that she would pull off an upset of some kind.
Speaking to the Guardian at Haley’s Mount Pleasant rally, congressman Ralph Norman, the only member of South Carolina’s congressional delegation to endorse Haley, justified her decision to remain in the race. He pointed to Haley’s well-attended campaign events as a sign that her message is resonating with voters, even if she falls short on Saturday.
“Obviously, you’d love to win. Single digits would be great,” Norman said. “But let the people decide. We can pull off a real upset in a lot of different ways.”
Given that Haley did not merely “fall short”, but never even made it off the starting block is by itself absolute proof that Haley’s message was never resonating with voters—certainly not with enough voters. For the Haley campaign team to suggest otherwise is simply delusional.
The corporate media chattering class of course wants Haley to remain in the race, simply so that someone is opposing Donald Trump.
On the other hand, long-shot candidates typically stay in races because they feel like they still have something to offer. What Haley has to offer is a direct, straightforward argument as to why Trump should not be the Republican nominee, and moreover, never again be allowed to sit behind the Resolute Desk.
Better late than never.
Lost in their pathological hatred of all things Trump is, however, the most demonstrable quality of Haley’s “argument” against Donald Trump: it’s a losing argument. What exactly is the point or even relevance of an argument against a politician that voters have already rejected? The media might like the idea of Nikki Haley continuing to make the anti-Trump case, but no one else outside of Nikki Haley’s donors is showing any interest at all in such a case.
So afflicted with Trump Derangement Syndrome are some of the corporate media “analysts” that they are practically salivating at the prospect of Trump being either convicted or coming down with a sudden case of death between now and the GOP convention.
It is also possible, though unlikely, that something could happen to Trump, whether it be legal or even health-related. Haley has a platform and support, and if she continues her current strategy, I hope she stays in the race all the way to the convention, since she is certainly a better alternative to Trump.
This view, however, ignores the reality of Haley’s blowout losses in Nevada and New Hampshire:
Nikki Haley has no chance of winning the Republican Party’s nomination for the fall election. Only if some bizarre turn of events removed Donald Trump from the race would any other candidate have any hope of being the party standard-bearer come the fall.
The Nevada results for both the primary and the caucus show us once again that the GOP voters have rejected Nikki Haley, and there is no reason to believe they will not continue to reject Nikki Haley.
There is little reason for Haley or her campaign team to believe that, should something befall Trump that would keep him off the ballot in 2024, Trump’s base would flock to Haley.
We must pause here to reflect on a quality of Donald Trump’s first term of office that remains unappreciated to this day. As I discussed back in 2020, in the wake of the targeted killing of Iranian Quds Force commander Qassim Suleimani, Donald Trump is truly this country’s first “Reality TV” President.
Trump's tweets about the air strikes in Iraq are merely the latest reminder that President Trump is anything but impulsive. He is, rather, deliberate and thoughtful, even in his tweets, paradoxical as that might seem. On social media, he has, for reasons known only to him, adopted an incendiary and bombastic persona, recalling not so much Ronald Reagan as Theodore Roosevelt, the first President in the modern era with a truly "theatrical" persona.
We must remember here that Donald Trump spent fourteen years helming the popular "reality TV" show "The Apprentice," where he became indelibly associated with the catch phrase, "you're fired." We must remember yet again that Donald Trump brings that theatrical flair to his Presidency, that he is truly a "reality TV" style of President--not in that he is the superficial, one-dimensional caricature one sees on reality TV shows, but that he uses the imagery and methods of reality TV to shape public perceptions and to punctuate his public messages--a fact that is once again rather begrudgingly acknowledged by the legacy media.
Throughout this current campaign Trump has continued his incendiary and bombastic approach, and it is continuing to confound the media even as it cheers on his supporters.
It is important to understand this as yet un-replicated facet of Trump’s political strategems, because 2024 is already well established as a national political “Rorschach test”, where people are going to vote not for the policies of the Republicans or the Democrats, but for the personalities of whomever is at the top of the ticket in the fall.
The legal and impeachment woes facing both Donald Trump and Joe Biden have by the election been turned into political Rorschach tests, with each one revealing how the electorate views both of these likely opponents in next year’s election. Before the first primary vote is cast on either side, the Presidential election of 2024 has already become the pinnacle of the politics of personality, rather than the politics of policy. This is not the first election where personality dominated over policy, but it is clearly now an election where personality has completely crowded out policy.
Perversely, corporate media acknowledges this without realizing it or understanding it. The mere fact that MSNBC’s political commentators want Nikki Haley to stay in the race merely to make an “argument” against Donald Trump receiving the Republican nomination that he already all but has locked up alone establishes that corporate media wants to make this election all about Donald Trump.
Given the findings of Special Counsel Robert Hur that Joe Biden is essentially a doddering old fool, it is easy to see why corporate media would want to put the spotlight on Donald Trump—their chosen standard bearer comes with a ginormous load of what can be charitably called “baggage”.
While corporate media is clearly all in on framing the GOP primaries around Donald Trump, that same media strategy for reporting on Donald Trump has also shown the flaws in Haley’s campaign—in particular, it’s lack of substance and original rhetoric.
Simply put, Nikki Haley cannot point to anything about Donald Trump that Trump supporters do not already know. They know Donald Trump’s political persona, they know Donald Trump’s track record from his term in office, they know how Donald Trump has responded to the many cases brought against him by the Kafkaesque cadre of lawfare persecutors prosecutors willing to contort and distort the law in order to “get Trump”. They know all these things and, on balance, they still would rather see Donald Trump in the Oval Office than either Joe Biden or Michelle Obama.
Nikki Haley, in order to prevail in even a single county against Donald Trump, has to change people’s minds about Donald Trump. So far, she has not done so. Her campaign rhetoric has not come even close to moving the needle on Donald Trump. Quite the opposite, nationally she is losing ground to Donald Trump.
Give the accuracy of the state by state poll numbers as validated by the actual primary and caucus vote tallies, we have to regard the national RCP poll aggregate as being more than somewhat reliable. We cannot dismiss these poll numbers as skewing towards one candidate or another.
These poll numbers say that the GOP base wants Donald Trump, and will not be happy with anyone less than Donald Trump.
That is the reality of the Republican Party in 2024. That is the reality that Nikki Haley is now running against more so than she is running against Donald Trump.
Voting on personalities is nothing new to this almost 76 yo gal. Accordingly I will be dropping out of the insane run up to this farce as it will impinge on my mental health and quality of life. I leave it to others to muck around in the cow manure. (Real Manure at least has a useful function) You are stronger than I, sir.
Nikki has come across as just another career politician, and that’s not what the GOP voters want. They want someone who can ACTUALLY get rid of the ‘defund the police’ crowd of woke, anti-white, anti-business, socialist, totalitarian, oppressive elites that is now the Democratic Party. I think people have really lost their patience with it all, and are through with politely looking the other way.
In the wake of Nikki’s latest loss, I read that she has lost the financial support of the Koch Brothers. Decades ago, they were big champions of libertarian ideals,so I was surprised to learn that they had been her backers. I’ve had a few decades where I wasn’t paying attention to the details of politics. Peter, do you know the back story on why the Koch Brothers don’t support Trump? Did they lock horns on some deal back in the nineties, or what?