NY Post: Nikki’s Last Stand in SC?

Could this be the last week of the Republican presidential primary? It might depend on whether anyone believes it’s still a competition at this stage. South Carolina will hold its GOP primary a week from today, and the New York Post reports that Nikki Haley’s approaching it as though it’s a last stand and she has nothing left to lose.

And that’s probably true:

Nikki Haley is preparing for what might be her last stand in her home state.

The former Palmetto State governor is gearing up for the GOP presidential primary in South Carolina on Feb. 24, facing off against former President Trump, who has so far dominated the race and already dispatched other formidable rivals Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and businessman Vivek Ramaswamy.

Trump, 77, has beaten Haley, 52, in Iowa, New Hampshire and Nevada by double-digit margins, but her campaign has soldiered on — much to the annoyance of Team Trump.

Any competition annoys Team Trump, so that’s hardly news. Haley’s status as a Trump appointee to the UN makes it doubly annoying that she ran against him for the nomination, although most of their ‘disloyal’ attacks got directed at Ron DeSantis while he remained in the campaign. Team Trump attacks on Haley didn’t really start in earnest until she got within polling range of DeSantis late in 2023, probably because Haley all but acted as Trump’s surrogate in the debates by attacking DeSantis and all the other challengers while mostly sparing her old boss.

Now it’s just the two of them, and … well, so far it just looks like the one of them. Haley had hoped to gain momentum in moderate-friendly New Hampshire, but Trump ended up dominating there after winning Iowa handily over DeSantis. Haley then swore she could turn the primary around in her home state of South Carolina, even though its GOP electorate is more inclined to conservo-populism than New Hampshire, and has spent much if not all of her remaining resources in the Palmetto State.

Has that changed the trajectory of the race? We finally have a fresh set of polls out of South Carolina, and the answer is not at all. Donald Trump has not scored below 60% in any SC poll in nearly a month, and hasn’t been below 50% since September. The RCP average of five polls in the past month puts Trump up by 31 points, 63.4/32.4. The best poll result for Haley comes from the latest entry, an Insider Advantage poll that has Trump up only 22 points, 60/38.

The RCP graph shows that Haley benefited from the DeSantis withdrawal, but Trump benefited at least as much:

Could this be off? Sure; Haley did somewhat better in New Hampshire than polling indicated too, but not enough to impact the outcome. Polling in both Iowa and New Hampshire was fairly predictive of the outcomes in those states, and there’s nothing to indicate that it’s wide of the mark in South Carolina. If the polling was suspect, you’d see a lot wider variations among five polls (all of likely voters) than we see in this set. We’d expect at least one wild-hair outlier that put Haley within single digits, anyway. 

Perhaps we’ll see something pop up this week. For the moment, though, the Post’s assessment looks grimly accurate. This is a last stand, and it’s in the political sense of a Little Bighorn for Haley on her home turf.