Pablo PardoWashington Correspondent

Washington Correspondent

Updated Sunday, February 25, 2024-08:30

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Donald Trump

has easily won the South Carolina primary, but his rival for the Republican Party nomination for the US presidency,

Nikki Haley,

is not leaving.

Although the former president has obtained 60% of the votes, in line with what the polls predicted, compared to only 40% for his rival, Haley's persistently high level of support is a warning for Trump, since which indicates that a part of the Republican Party voters still does not support him.

Trump is on track to be an unofficial candidate in ten days

March 5 is

Super Tuesday

, with 15 states holding Republican primaries.

With the new party rules, imposed by Trump's team to avoid eternal primaries, the former president will obtain the 1,215 delegates necessary to secure the nomination at the Convention of his party.

Trump wins without leaving the bus

In the last three weeks, the former president has only held

three public events in South Carolina

(four if you add an event with donors that was closed to the public).

And yet he has won by 60% of the vote over a former governor of that state, born and raised in it.

There is nothing to add to such a display of strength.

Haley is not a threat to Trump in the primaries, but she will be in November

The former governor of

South Carolina

has only gotten 40% of the vote in her home state.

The problem for Trump is that this gives Haley the wings to at least continue until Super Tuesday.

There's another problem: Half of Haley's voters say they won't vote for Trump in the general election.

That is a threat to the president.

What's more, if Trump were

found guilty in any of the four criminal cases he has pending,

there would be a greater disbandment of his voters.

The former president has the 'MAGA' public fully in hand, as his followers are known in the US, due to the slogan of his 2016 campaign, "Make America Great Again."

But if 20% of Republicans (that is, half of those who voted for Haley) say they are not going to vote for him, he has a problem.

He helps him, yes, with the catastrophic image that his rival, Joe Biden, projects.

Haley and Trump are in open war

Haley knows she has no chance and that her political career is almost certainly as dead as that of Liz Cheney, another lifelong Republican who had the temerity to oppose Trump.

Now, the fact that she has nothing to lose is revealing her to be

much more dangerous

.

Last night he said "this is not a Soviet-style election, with a single candidate," in reference to Trump.

A week ago she dropped a deep charge: if she doesn't win the primaries (which she's not going to win), she might not support Donald Trump.

She didn't say it clearly, but she did say it indirectly: "The next president of the United States will be a woman."

That gives two names:

Kamala Harris or her.

Haley has promised actively and passively - even signing a document presented to her by the Republican National Committee - that she will support the winner of the primary, that is, Trump.

But, if he did not do so, all options would be open, including an independent candidacy or within the No Labels group, a strange 'thing' that began as a lobby in favor of political dialogue in a country with

civil war rhetoric

and that now wants to transform itself. in a party if he finds someone who wants to be a candidate.

Until now, No Labels had been considered a potential danger to Biden, but if Haley is running, it would be a potential danger to Trump.

Even in the Internet Age, Door-to-Door Policy Matters

Haley has started campaigning in South Carolina after having forgotten about the state of which she was governor until seven years ago, when Trump called her to be ambassador to the UN.

And now her countrymen have charged her a very harsh price for ignoring them.

The UN or Washington are very good but, in the end, as the historic Democratic leader of the House of Representatives of the eighties, Tip O'Neil, said, "politics is always local."