Former US President Donald Trump will try to cement his status as the Republican Party's presidential candidate in the South Carolina primary this Saturday.
Meanwhile, her only remaining opponent in the race, former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley, wants to perform better than expected in her own state in order to stay on the campaign trail longer.
Trump is the heavy favorite to win the southern US state's primary and the fifth to vote for the Republican nominee's nomination in a race in which the former president has dominated from the start despite facing dozens of criminal charges in court was.
He won the first four races in Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada and the U.S. Virgin Islands, knocking out the rest of the Republican candidates vying for the nomination.
Opinion polls show Trump with an average lead of 30 percentage points in the state, according to poll statistics website 538.
The Republican Party nominee will face Democrat Joe Biden, the current president, in the November 5 election.
Haley, a South Carolina native who governed the state from 2011 to 2017, this week dismissed information that a home loss would cause her to abandon the race for the White House, even though she had no real shot at the nomination.
“We don’t anoint kings in this country,” she said Tuesday during a campaign rally in Greenvile, South Carolina, adding that she would “not be going anywhere” regardless of the outcome of the primary.
She pledged to stay in the race until Super Tuesday in early March, when 15 states and one U.S. territory will vote, including Texas, Virginia and South Carolina, and distribute about a third of the delegates to the Republican National Convention to be held in July and will select the candidate for the duel with Biden.
But a stunning victory by the 77yearold Trump this Saturday would only increase pressure on Haley, 52, to drop out of the race so the former president can focus on the race against Biden.
The incumbent president is already treating Trump as the Republican candidate and portraying him as a moral threat to the republic.
South Carolina’s primary election is “open,” allowing any registered voter to participate. This could give Haley strength if independents and Democrats, who tend to favor her over Trump, have a large turnout in the election.
In contrast to the start of her campaign, Haley sharply attacked Trump ahead of Saturday's election, warning Republicans that a third consecutive Trump candidacy would end in the former president's defeat.
Haley, whose foreign policy credentials form the core of her campaign, has in recent days focused on Trump's stance toward Russia following the death of Alexei Navalny, the country's main opposition leader.
She criticized Trump for waiting days before commenting on Navalny's death and then for not blaming Russian President Vladimir Putin for the incidents.
She also condemned Trump's recent comments that he would not protect his North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) allies from a Russian attack if he believed they were not spending enough on defense themselves.
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