February 21, 2016
COLUMBIA, S.C. — With his second decisive primary victory, Donald Trump is now the clear frontrunner for the Republican Party’s presidential nomination.
The most pressing question now, after Trump’s win in the South Carolina primary, is how long it will take for Marco Rubio or Ted Cruz to knock the other out and take Trump on directly.
The longer that Cruz and Rubio divide up the non-Trump vote, the more time the New York real estate developer will have to rack up delegates and win 50 percent of the primary electorate in popular vote totals.
A field that at its peak numbered 17 candidates has, to all intents and purposes, been winnowed down to three. Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush dropped out of the race a few minutes before 9 p.m. Saturday, after finishing in single digits in the Palmetto State. Ohio Gov. John Kasich looks determined to stay in the race for some time, but is regarded by many political observers as a sideshow who is merely angling to gather delegates and use them for his own purposes at the convention. Meanwhile, retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson has proved an afterthought at the polls, although he has enough money to stay in for some time and insists that he has plans to.
The results Saturday night were another splash of cold water in the face of a Republican Party that had closed its eyes and desperately hoped for Trump’s polling lead to evaporate, as it did in Iowa. Instead, the outlandish provocateur garnered his second commanding win in a row.
“South Carolina, we will never forget you,” Trump said in his victory speech in Spartanburg, S.C., Saturday night.
Republican U.S. presidential candidate Donald Trump greets supporters after speaking at his 2016 South Carolina presidential primary night victory rally in Spartanburg, S.C., on Feb. 20, 2016. (Photo: Jonathan Ernst/Reuters)
Now the GOP establishment looks fearfully forward to a new phase of the primary contest. It moves to Nevada in just three days, and then to a slate of a dozen states on March 1, 10 days from now. Of those March 1 states, seven are in the South or Midwest, and are likely to tilt strongly toward Trump.
Trump, with 33 percent in South Carolina, cleared the 30 percent bar that many had pegged as a barometer for showing whether or not he had lost momentum over the last few days. Rubio and Cruz were locked in a dead heat for second place, at 22 percent each, before Rubio was projected asthe second-place winner by less than two-tenths of one percentage point after midnight.
Trump won a majority of votes from veterans in this state, which has a strong military presence, despite the fact that he had explicitly blamed former President George W. Bush for the 9/11 attacks in a debate one week ago. Trump argued in that debate that the Bush administration “lied” about whether there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.
The South Carolina primary has been won by the eventual Republican nominee in every presidential primary since 1980, with the exception of the last one, in 2012, when former House Speaker Newt Gingrich of Georgia was the victor. And Trump’s method of winning the Palmetto State this week defied logic or historical comparison. “Trump won this week despite coming out for [a] health care mandate, defending planned parenthood, blaming Bush for 9/11, standing by impeachment,” wroteNBC’s Chuck Todd on Twitter.
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