The only excitement in the South Carolina primary this Saturday was seeing how many points former President Donald Trump won against Nikki Haley, the only rival still in the race for the Republican nomination. Adding to the curiosity was that Haley was playing at home; She was born here and served as governor of the state from 2011 to 2017, but even because of that she could not aim for anything more than a humiliating defeat. After the polls closed, it took less than a minute for the American media to assure the former president of victory with more than 60% of the vote.
The winner gave his victory speech five minutes after 7:00 p.m., the time the polls closed. He did it in the capital, Columbia, and the performance was pure Trump. He began with a racist diatribe against immigrants arriving at the southern border with Mexico: “They come from everywhere, straight from prisons, asylums and other mental institutions,” he said, before going offline with the following argument: “I have “Never before.” We have seen that the Republican Party is more united than it is now!”
After a while, he threatened President Joe Biden with his sudden dismissal, alluding to his past as a reality TV star (“You're fired!”). And then he briefly followed up with three men who have shown him blind loyalty, perhaps the quality he most admires in others: the state's governor, Henry McMaster, and South Carolina's two senators, Lindsey, spoke. Graham and Tim Scott. The latter was one of the 14 candidates for the Republican nomination, but since he threw in the towel he seems to have completely committed himself to a sycophantic defense of the boss who knows whether he can win Trump's favor and thus make him the candidate for the can choose vice-presidency.
Trump has already won the Iowa caucuses, the New Hampshire caucuses and the hybrid caucus-primary vote in Nevada. South Carolina completes the quartet of early elections in the long presidential campaign that culminates with the Nov. 5 vote, where everything points to the Republican nominee running against President Joe Biden, the Democratic Party's bet. There is no record of such a resounding victory by a candidate who does not run in the first four elections with the advantage of being a tenant of the White House.
It also happens that this Saturday's primaries are not only the “first in the South” but also act as a sensational crystal ball for the Republican Party. Since the elections began in 1980, the person elected here has been the candidate for the parliamentary elections, with one exception. In 2012, they chose Newt Gingrich over Mitt Romney, the man ultimately chosen to run against (and lose) then-President Barack Obama.
“I do not go anywhere.”
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Last Tuesday, Haley called on the press, also in Colombia, for one of the most unusual appearances in recent American politics. He wanted to make it known that he had no plans to “go anywhere” no matter how hard the fall in South Carolina was, and that he would hold out at least until Super Tuesday. This also includes next week's primary elections in Michigan. Super Tuesday falls on March 5th this leap year. It's the day when a flurry of votes takes place across the country (15 states decide 874 of 2,429 Republican delegates). The date on which both parties' ballots are normally cast is also set. In this sense, in 2024, the year of great electoral déjà vu in the United States, it does not seem risky to write that it will not be necessary to wait until then to start preparing for a repeat of the Trump Biden duels to begin.
Election day began at 7:00 a.m. and there were no major incidents. It was an open primary, so any South Carolina resident could vote, whether registered as a Republican or not, unless they had voted in the Democratic primary in early February. This time the voter turnout was significantly higher than back when there was less doubt about Biden's election. Chris, an observer at one of the polling stations in a high school west of Greenville, a charming town in the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains, explained at 11:00 a.m. that the number of voters in those four hours had already been exceeded to those who were at the Democratic primaries ran.
On the ballot were the names of Donald Trump and Nikki Haley, but also those of two spontaneous people who want to be president, David Stuckenberg and Ryan Binkley, and some of those who fell by the wayside in the race for the nomination. Republicans: Vivek Ramaswamy, Ron DeSantis and Chris Christie. The explanation? They withdrew before the deadline so election officials could remove them from the list.
As they left the school, Mary and Tom, a retired couple, said they had voted for Trump and that they thought it was a good idea for him to spend the last four years outside the White House “around people to become aware of the problems and now return to the attack strengthened. At another polling place, at a community center outside Columbia, Michael Edmondson defended his vote for Haley. “She was a good governor, and frankly I don’t think Trump is right in the head.”
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