Trump wins South Carolina GOP primary as Haley vows to stay in race

CNN projects that Donald Trump will win South Carolina’s 6th Congressional District and the district’s three delegates. With all the state’s delegates allocated, here’s CNN’s final South Carolina Republican delegate estimate: 

• Trump: 47
• Nikki Haley: 3

Total delegates won to date: 

• Trump: 110
• Haley: 20
• Ron DeSantis: 9
• Vivek Ramaswamy: 3

1,215 delegates are required to win the Republican nomination. 

New Hampshire Republican Gov. Chris Sununu, who has been a strong advocate for Nikki Haley, makes the case for her staying in the race after she lost her home state of South Carolina in the Republican primary.

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Former Trump White House communications director Alyssa Farah Griffin discusses Nikki Haley's determination to continue her presidential campaign despite Donald Trump capturing the Republican primary in Haley's home state.

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If Nikki Haley isn’t likely – at least not at the moment – to win any primaries or caucuses, is there an argument she could amass enough to keep Donald Trump from securing it?

That seems extremely unlikely.

Trump’s campaign believes the former president will have enough delegates to secure the GOP nomination – the magic number is 1,215 of 2,429 delegates – before the end of March. Heading into South Carolina, Trump had 63 delegates and Haley had 17.

Haley has mentioned Super Tuesday, March 5, as a key date. In 15 contests, more than 850 delegates, 35% of the Republican total, will be up for grabs on that date. But it still isn’t halfway through the primaries.

It’s also before any of Trump’s four criminal trials get under way, although news coverage of those trials do not seem likely to hurt him in Republican primaries.

Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley lost in Iowa and New Hampshire. She placed second to “none of these candidates” in a Nevada primary for which there were no delegates at stake and where Donald Trump was not on the ballot. Now she has lost the primary in her home state of South Carolina, where she was a two-term governor.

Her insistence on staying in the race puts her in a rarefied position: the losing candidate who won’t quit.

No other major, modern candidate has refused to drop out of the race after so many losses.

• Sen. Marco Rubio, the Florida Republican who ran in the crowded 2016 field that produced Trump as the GOP nominee, dropped out after he lost his home state of Florida.
• Fellow Floridian Jeb Bush, a former governor, dropped out earlier, after a disappointing finish in nearby South Carolina.
• On the Democratic side, Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts quit the Democratic race in 2020 shortly after Super Tuesday, which that year featured the Massachusetts primary. Finishing third was enough to convince Warren things were over.

Most candidates reading the writing on the wall drop out after Iowa or New Hampshire, or at least early enough to avoid the embarrassment of a home-state loss. That’s what Sen. Amy Klobuchar did in 2020, suspending her campaign days before Warren and before she was set to lose the primary in her home state of Minnesota.

Democratic National Committee chair Jaime Harrison said Saturday that the results of the South Carolina GOP primary "all but confirm that MAGA extremism has taken over the Republican Party — and that Donald Trump will once again be the Republican nominee for president."

“The American people rejected MAGA extremism in 2018, 2020, 2022, 2023, and will reject it again at the ballot box this November," Harrison said in a statement.

Donald Trump has won the South Carolina Republican presidential primary, defeating Nikki Haley on her home turf as he completed his sweep of the early voting states.

The race accelerates now: The slow march through the early voting states is over, and the primary is now a national one. By March 12, 56% of the delegates to the Republican National Convention will have been awarded. And in most states, Republicans’ delegates are winner-take-all — which means Haley gets no credit for strong second-place showings. With Haley winless so far, the finish line — 1,215 delegates necessary to clinch the nomination — could be in sight for Trump within weeks.

Trump dominates the GOP establishment — again: In case it wasn’t clear when he won the nomination in 2016, became president, ran all but a select few Republican critics out of office or the party, then stormed into the 2024 race despite facing multiple indictments: The GOP belongs to Donald Trump. Trump's success in Haley’s home state underscores how much has changed in less than a decade. Nor has it been a hostile takeover, no matter how hostile Trump can be toward his rivals: Most Republican voters are all in on Trump, and the parts of his personality that make establishment Republicans cringe are — as we’ve seen — actually a large part of his appeal to a majority of voters.

Where does Haley go from here? There was once a narrow, but tantalizing, path for Haley to seriously challenge Trump for the Republican nomination. It started with winning in New Hampshire and her home state. But that potentially game-changing stretch of the Republican primary race is over. Following Saturday's projected loss, Haley's campaign announced a swing through Michigan, Minnesota, Colorado and Utah starting Sunday, and she’s also spending money on advertising targeting Super Tuesday states. Whether she’ll actually notch any wins and begin to seriously challenge Trump in the delegate race, though, is a tougher question.

A big enough pro-Haley coalition doesn't exist in GOP primaries: Haley’s campaign has long touted general election polls that show her in a much stronger position than Trump in a hypothetical matchup against Biden. But she can’t skip the step of defeating Trump in a primary first. There’s long been a theoretical coalition for Haley that includes moderate Republicans, independents allowed to vote in Republican primaries in some states and those turned off by Trump — particularly suburban, college-educated voters who have fled the party since Trump’s ascension in 2016. But that coalition isn’t showing up for Haley in the primary — at least not in enough force.

Tim Scott's veepstakes audition: The most important result of South Carolina’s primary might be the cozy relationship Trump seemed to develop with his onetime 2024 GOP primary rival, Sen. Tim Scott. The last few weeks may have served as Scott’s audition for the vice presidential nomination. He campaigned with Trump, appeared alongside him in a Fox News town hall and other interviews, and urged Haley — who appointed him to his Senate seat when she was governor — to get out of the race.

CNN can project that Nikki Haley will win South Carolina’s 1st Congressional District, and the district’s three delegates.  

Donald Trump has so far won 44 delegates in the Palmetto State. The last three delegates will be awarded to the winner of the 6th Congressional District. 

Here are the total delegates both candidates have won to date:

• Trump: 107
• Haley: 20

Remember: 1,215 delegates are required to win the Republican nomination. 

Nikki Haley aggressively went after former President Donald Trump over the last few weeks after he said he would encourage Russia to do “whatever the hell they want” to any NATO member country that doesn’t meet spending guidelines on defense.

Haley accused Trump of siding with a “dictator who kills his political opponents,” at many events, and sometimes went even further.

“Trump is siding with a tyrant who arrests political journalists and holds them hostage. Trump is siding with Putin, who's made no bones about wanting to destroy America,” Haley told supporters in South Carolina two days before the primary. 

Her message hit home for many of her supporters who spoke with CNN at her events, and indeed, CNN exit polls showed that for 73% of Haley voters, foreign policy was the most important issue.

But only 13% of voters overall in the exit polls named it their top issue. Foreign policy ranked far behind immigration and the economy for the majority of voters, which means Haley's message didn’t resonate with a wide swath of South Carolinians.