The race for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination remains a two-person race, but former President Donald Trump defeated former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley by 59.8% in the state on Saturday. Haley, the question remains how long this will last. 39.5%.

Trump has won all five primaries and caucuses held so far, and there will be nominating contests in 20 more states and territories between now and March 5. That includes delegate-heavy states like California and Texas, making it possible, even likely, for Trump to have an almost insurmountable lead by the end of the first week next month.

However, Haley said she intends to stay in the race at least through next Tuesday’s race and continued her attacks on the former president, who currently faces 91 separate counts in four different jurisdictions even as he attempts to claw back his white victory. Criminal charges. November house.

“I’m a woman of my word,” Haley told the crowd after casting her vote in Charleston, South Carolina. “I will not give up this fight when the majority of Americans disapprove of Donald Trump and Trump. [President] Joe Biden. “

The remaining countries, she said, “have the right to have a real choice and not have Soviet-style elections with just one candidate. It’s my responsibility to give them that choice.”

money is important

“What determines whether she can continue to run is basically whether people continue to give her money so that she can afford to run,” University of Chicago political science professor John Mark Hansen told VOA.

However, after losing in South Carolina, Haley lost at least one important financial supporter. Americans for Prosperity, a political advocacy group funded by conservative billionaire Charles Koch, announced Sunday it would no longer fund her campaign.

In a public statement announcing the withdrawal of support, AFP president Emily Seidel wrote: “Nikki Haley has made it clear to us time and time again that we made the right decision by supporting her candidacy, and she will continue to have our strong support. Support.” “But given the challenges ahead in key states, we don’t believe any outside group can make substantive changes that would broaden her path to victory.”

hidden weakness

While Trump won all five Republican nominating contests by wide margins, when looking ahead to the general election, experts tell VOA it’s important to consider the context in which those votes took place.

The 2024 Republican presidential nomination race is unlike any nominating race held by a major U.S. party in more than 100 years because it has a former president on the ballot. Not since Grover Cleveland ran as the Democratic nominee in 1892 has a president been voted out of office at the end of his term—as Cleveland was in 1888—to run again for the Democratic nomination.

As the party’s most recent president and presidential candidate, Trump campaigned as if he were the actual sitting president. For example, he refused to debate any of the other candidates for the nomination, including Haley, insisting that they should step aside and allow him to secure the nomination.

However, the former president’s vote totals in the nominating contest so far have been far lower than expected for the sitting president. His 60% support in South Carolina was enough to beat Haley, but it was still a far cry from the 96% of votes Joe Biden received from Democratic voters in the state that night.

Republican dissatisfaction

Grant Reh, director of the Campbell Institute of Public Affairs and professor of political science at Syracuse University, told VOA that Trump’s data shows there is a huge gap in his support among Republican voters.

“Even among Republican primary voters, 40 percent of the state preferred Haley to Trump,” he said. “So given that Trump is a former president with a four-year presidential record who lost a close election in 2020 — despite all that — there is a large segment of the Republican Party that is not happy with him .

“That could be an indication that his support is a little bit weak, and it’s certainly going to have some impact on how he does in the general election,” Leal said. “He won the nomination handily, but there are clear signs that when we think about his performance in the general election As he performed, cracks appeared in his armor.”

Will voters come?

The University of Chicago’s Hansen agrees that Trump’s performance in the primaries was not impressive by the standards of a current president. However, he added that when the election comes, he expects many Republicans currently expressing preferences for different candidates to end up voting for the party’s nominee.

“I would say most people would change their minds,” Hansen said. “That’s the nature of partisanship. Once the nominee is decided, the question is no longer ‘Who would I rather see as president among those who more or less share my views?’ “The question is ‘Do I want the guy from my party? Or do I want the guy from the other side?’

Still, he said, given the closeness of the past two presidential elections, even a small loss of support within the party could become a major problem for Trump in November.

“There is a significant portion of the party that will not reconcile with Trump,” he said. “We’re in a situation now where the parties are evenly matched at the national level, and that’s important. It could be important if they decide to sit back. Or if they decide, as many did in 2020, If the alternative is Trump, they’re going to vote Democratic for the first time in their lives, and that could be significant.”