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Nikki Haley has vowed to fight on in her bid to become the Republican party’s nominee for president even as polls suggest she is on course to lose to Donald Trump by double digits in her home state of South Carolina on Saturday.
Haley, who cut short her second term as governor of South Carolina in 2017 to serve as Trump’s ambassador to the UN, has outlasted a dozen fellow Republicans in her bid to become the party’s nominee.
But she faces increasingly slim odds as the last person standing against the former president — and is bracing for defeat in her home state.
Trump comfortably won last month’s Iowa caucuses, New Hampshire primary and Nevada caucuses. The latest FiveThirtyEight average of opinion polls in South Carolina show him ahead by a margin of more than 30 points, with almost 64 per cent of likely primary voters saying they back Trump, compared with about 33 per cent who say they support Haley.
Still, Haley, whose campaign has been propped up by millions of dollars in donations from Wall Street and other deep-pocketed donors, has insisted she will stay in the race until at least Super Tuesday on March 5, when more than a dozen states will hold primaries.
“South Carolina will vote on Saturday. But on Sunday, I’ll still be running for president,” Haley said in a speech this week on the campus of her alma mater, Clemson University, in Greenville, South Carolina. “I’m not going anywhere.”
Betsy Ankney, Haley’s campaign manager, reiterated the former South Carolina governor’s message in a call with reporters on Friday.
“We know that the math is challenging. But this has never just been about who can win a Republican primary. This battle is about who can win in November,” Ankney said.
Haley has made electability a core tenet of her stump speech, pointing this week to a new Marquette Law School poll finding Trump and President Joe Biden virtually tied with voters nationwide, while Haley led Biden in a hypothetical general election match-up by 16 points.
Yet Haley is increasingly unlikely to stop Trump, who continues to win nominating contests and collect the delegates required to be officially selected as the Republican nominee at the party’s convention this summer in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.
Trump, who has done relatively little in-person campaigning in South Carolina, is scheduled to speak at the CPAC conference in Washington on Saturday afternoon before flying to Columbia, the state capital, for an election night party with supporters.
Chris LaCivita and Susie Wiles, senior advisers to Trump’s 2024 campaign, issued a memo on Tuesday insisting “the end is near” for Haley. Citing public and private polling data, LaCivita and Wiles said Trump was on course to rack up enough delegates to win the Republican nomination by mid-March.
Ankney, however, announced a “seven-figure” investment for the Haley campaign on Friday, with advertisements to run across the Super Tuesday states in the coming days. She also said Haley had published a full travel schedule through Super Tuesday and hired staffers in states that will hold primaries “through the end of March”.
Republican campaign veterans, nevertheless, are increasingly sceptical of Haley’s staying power.
Doug Heye, a former spokesperson for the Republican National Committee and a Trump critic, said it was “valuable that somebody is out there telling the truths that need to be told”.
“She’s telling the truth with an eye on potentially being able to say: ‘I told you so’ in November,” Heye added. “Maybe people listen, maybe they don’t, either today or the day after the election, but that is a big part of it.”
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