Donald Trump won the South Carolina Republican primary on Saturday, beating out opponent and former UN Ambassador Nikki Haley in her home state, by a sizeable margin, and further engaging himself into a third straight Republican party nomination, according to the Associated Press.
Nikki Haley, who was once the governor South Carolina between 2011 and 2017, still managed to fail at capturing her home state’s nomination. Despite growing pressure from the general public to have her close out her campaign, she states that she has no intentions of exiting the race despite repeated losses in other states, all of which have come from Donald Trump.
Donald Trump has swept through every single other Republican primary thus far, winning easily in states such as Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada, and the U.S. Virgin Islands.
The next round of primaries for the GOP come on March 5, dubbed “Super Tuesday,” where over a third of the GOP’s delegates in 16 states, including Texas, will be on the cards for the party’s nominee hopefuls. Nikki Haley, despite losing in her home state, has stated that she intends to see out the rest of the primaries despite the loss on Saturday.
She had hoped that her monumental amount of campaign events in South Carolina would slow down the growing momentum of Donald Trump’s campaign but has since failed as the likelihood of a 2020 presidential race rematch against Joe Biden, looks evermore imminent as the primaries go on.
If both were to be nominated again as their party’s respective presidential candidates, they would both be the oldest to ever receive the nomination in the country’s history, beating out a record they had already set 4 years prior to this year’s presidential race.
Trump exclaimed in a speech following his victory in South Carolina, that he had “never seen the Republican Party so unified as it is right now.”
Since 1980, only one winner of the Republican primary in South Carolina has failed to end up as the GOP’s presidential nominee, coming from Newt Gingrich in 2012. At this stage of proceedings, a rematch between Donald Trump and Joe Biden, looks increasingly likely.
