Donald Trump’s strong victory over challenger Nikki Haley in the South Carolina Republican presidential primary continues voters’ absolute defiance of the highly politicised legal charges the former US president is facing.
Trump won pretty big, with more than 60 per cent support, but Haley did perhaps a little better than expectations.
Nonetheless, Trump has convincingly won four out of four Republican primaries so far. If, as expected, he wins Michigan in a few days’ time, he could then wrap up the nomination altogether on Super Tuesday next week.
The Republicans will win South Carolina in the presidential election, but the intriguing primary results give Trump, Haley, President Joe Biden and everyone else a lot to ponder.
Haley is determined, for the moment anyway, to stay in the contest. She understands that you don’t win a two-candidate contest with 40 per cent of the vote, but she also makes the point that her vote share is not trivial.
This could be troublesome for Trump in November, because a majority of Haley voters, though they believe Trump could win in November, are very unhappy with the idea of Trump as their candidate.
To win the presidency, Trump will need all Republicans plus a chunk of others. Haley is showing quite a lot of grit. She has sharpened her criticisms of Trump, but still not gone nuclear. There’s still a reasonable path for her to support Trump in November as less awful than Biden.
She has also achieved national name recognition and a lot of respect. Similarly, Trump didn’t repeat the angry denunciation of Haley he came out with after the New Hampshire primary. Haley has substantially deepened the fame of her name and brand. In contemporary America, fame is money and power (just ask Trump).
However, if Trump is finally forced out of the race by some combination of his legal troubles, it’s fairly unlikely the party would turn to Haley, who has opposed some of Trump’s signature positions, such as his reluctance to provide continued military aid to Ukraine.
Haley can keep going for the moment because there are donors still backing her. But in truth a proportion of those donors are Democrats, who want Biden to win and believe Haley is damaging Trump among some Republican and centrist voters.
Impressive African-American senator Tim Scott, also from South Carolina, was again a prominent presence on Trump’s victory stage. It’s early days, but Scott is firming as a frontrunner to be Trump’s vice-presidential running mate.
Although he is the Republican frontrunner, Trump actually spent less money campaigning in South Carolina than Haley did. Trump was wildly outspent by Hillary Clinton in 2016 but still won. He commands so much free media, and has such a strong instinct for getting attention on social media, that he’s competitive politically even if he’s behind financially.
The civil cases that Trump has so far lost look highly politicised, and absurd in the size of the penalties imposed. A real estate mogul who overstates his financial position to secure a loan, which he then repays in full, is not the kind of sinister crime wave that generally leads to fines of hundreds of millions of dollars.
Nonetheless, the legal persecution of Trump remains one of the best dynamics going for Biden.
Biden’s presidential record is poor and the Democrats wanted to face Trump. Trump divides Republicans but unites Democrats. The legal persecution of Trump, much of it frankly preposterous, was designed both to make sure Trump became the Republican candidate but also to cripple his presidential bid by taking up his time, consuming his money and damaging him with centrist voters.
To some extent that strategy is working. Trump raises a lot of money just to pay his gigantic legal fees.
But Biden’s underlying position is so weak that Trump, notwithstanding his legal troubles, is still ahead or level with Biden in national polls.
Nonetheless, if Trump were to be convicted of a criminal offence that might all change.
Biden’s fondest hope would be that Trump does sustain politically fatal legal damage, but at a point when it’s too late for the Republicans to switch to a new candidate.
It is surely the oddest dynamic in presidential politics in a century or more.
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