New Poll Shows Haley Closing Gap With Trump in South Carolina

CHARLESTON, S.C. — Former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley is slowly closing the gap with former President Donald Trump in the Palmetto State with five days to go before the GOP primary here.

The latest Emerson College/The Hill poll still shows Trump with a commanding 58% to 35% lead over Haley with decided voters, but the numbers suggest she’s gained 10 percentage points since she began a multi-stop bus tour in the state earlier this month.

Haley addressed the “state of the race” during an appearance at Clemson University in Greenville, South Carolina, early Tuesday afternoon, noting that “South Carolina will vote on Saturday. But on Sunday, I’ll still be running for president.”

“I’m not going anywhere,” she said, vowing to “campaign every day until the last person votes.”

Haley said her remarks were intended, in part, to be a “quick reminder” for all South Carolinians.

“In a general election, you are given a choice; in a primary, you make your choice. Make sure you make the right choice.”

The former governor and U.N. ambassador addressed those in attendance or who tuned in on the livestream, “wanting to know if I was going to cave today.”

“We’ve all heard the calls for me to drop out, and all know where they’re coming from: the political elite, the party bosses, the cheerleaders in the commentator world,” she said. “And the argument is familiar.

“They say I haven’t got a chance … that my path to victory is slim. … And they point to the poll numbers and say I’m ‘only delaying the inevitable.’ They say, ‘Why keep fighting when the battle was apparently over after Iowa?’

“Look, I get it. In politics, the herd mentality is enormously strong. A lot of Republican politicians have surrendered to it,” Haley said. “The pressure on them was way too much. They didn’t want to be left out of the club.

“Of course, many of the same politicians who now publicly fully embrace Trump, privately dread him,” she continued. “They know what a disaster he has been and will continue to be for our party. They are just too afraid to say it out loud. Well, I’m not afraid to say the hard truth out loud. I feel no need to kiss the ring. That’s why I refuse to quit.”

In addition to today’s appearance, Haley has also announced plans to rally voters in a number of communities along the South Carolina coast, including Georgetown, Myrtle Beach, Moncks Corner and Mount Pleasant through Friday.

Trump, meanwhile, has appearances slated for Greenville on Wednesday and Winthrop Coliseum in Rock Hill on Friday.

A number of Trump surrogates are also visiting the state this week, including his daughter-in-law, Lara Trump, and former presidential hopeful Vivek Ramaswamy.

On Saturday, primary day, Trump will be in Maryland to serve as the keynote speaker at the CPAC conference at the Gaylord National Resort & Convention Center in National Harbor, and then he’s going to fly to Columbia, South Carolina, for an election night watch party at the South Carolina State Fairgrounds.

But the big news in recent days is the push to get voters who didn’t vote in the low turnout Feb. 3 Democratic primary to vote in the Republican contest.

As previously reported by The Well News, only 131,000 participated in South Carolina’s First in the Nation Democratic Primary on Feb. 3 out of the state’s 3.2 million registered voters.

As of Saturday, about 104,000 people have voted early in person or returned an absentee ballot for the upcoming Republican primary, according to the S.C. Election Commission.

A number of independent groups, including the left-leaning PrimaryPivot, have been urging nonRepublicans in South Carolina — which has nonpartisan voter registration — to cross over and keep Haley in the race.

In an interview with The Well News, PrimaryPivot co-founder Robert Schwartz said the effort to get independents and Democrats, where possible, to vote against Trump in Republican contests actually began in mid-November of last year.

It was then that he decided to take a year off from his job in the foreign policy space to devote every minute he could to defeating the former president.

“Having spent 20 years working in foreign policy, mostly in Latin America, I’ve seen how democracies die and how hard it is to get them back,” Schwartz said.

“And after what happened at the end of Trump’s first term, I felt very strongly that the biggest threat to our democracy isn’t a foreign threat from overseas, but a domestic threat,” he said.

It was Schwartz’s friend and PrimaryPivot co-founder Kenneth Scheffler who came up with the idea of mobilizing nonRepublicans to vote against Trump in the primaries.

“And I thought, ‘Yes, that’s probably the most effective way to help,’” he said.

By the end of November, Schwartz found himself in New Hampshire, where he stayed for the next two months, working on getting undeclared or independent voters to turn out and participate in the Republican primary.

“And by the time the primary was held, on Jan. 23, we’d already hired a couple of people to work in South Carolina,” he said.

PrimaryPivot had mostly stayed under the radar at this point, but then on Feb. 2, the night before the South Carolina Democratic primary, it texted 207,000 registered voters, encouraging them, in Schwartz’s words, “to think about where their vote would matter most.”

“It got interpreted as us kind of pushing people to vote in the Republican primary instead of the Democratic primary and a lot of the South Carolina Democratic Party got upset with [us] … but that only goes to show that we’re shaking things up here. Our goal is to protect our democracy by doing what we can to narrow the margins,” he said.

Other groups undertaking similar efforts include Independents Moving the Needle and Stand For America, Inc., the Haley-affiliated super PAC, but PrimaryPivot seems to be unique in taking a multi-pronged approach to getting its voters out.

In addition to another text message blast targeting as many as 100,000 voters, the group has had Tiffany James, a veteran of the 2020 Pete Buttigieg presidential campaign, reaching out to Black churches and local chapters of the NAACP, while other members reach out to political leaders throughout the state.

“And we’re actually in the process of getting some radio ads up,” Schwartz said. “As long as she’s still in it, we are going to do everything we can to spread the word, making sure people realize they have this option.”

Despite all he’s personally invested in the cause in terms of time and effort, Schwartz acknowledged his plea isn’t something to which most independent and Democratic voters are accustomed.

“On the one hand, most people vote for the candidate who is their first choice, right? I get that. The other thing we have to overcome is people’s concerns about Nikki Haley doing better against Biden  in some polls than Trump does,” he said.

“To be totally honest, I’m not personally bothered by a race in the fall with Haley running against Biden. In fact, I would sleep fine at night because both of them respect our democracy,” he said.

And if she won?

“Then I get to vote again in 2028,” he said.

“I could live with that. What I can’t live with is the prospect of another Trump presidency,” he added.

In the here and now, Schwartz said, the reality is Haley has had a very narrow path to the presidency since the start of her candidacy, and it has gotten narrower ever since.

“At this point it would probably take Trump going to prison, but even then you don’t know,” he said.

“At the same time, there’s something to be said in seeing someone take 43% in a Republican primary against Trump. Every single person who voted that way in New Hampshire was saying, ‘We don’t want to see Donald Trump again.’ And 30% to 40% in South Carolina, that’s another sizable chunk of the vote that’s dead set against him.

“Then, you have Trump and his supporters who are all denigrating Haley and her supporters. That just opens up a huge opportunity for Biden and hopefully his campaign will target those people in November,” he said.

“The bottom line is I didn’t take a year off to help Nikki Haley become president. I took a year off to get as many voters as possible to vote against Trump. The longer she stays in, the better it is for her, but also the better it is for people who support our effort to defend democracy,” Schwartz said.

Among those taking a decidedly dim view of these activities is the leadership of South Carolina’s Republican Party, who called the effort nothing less than “outrageous.”

“The South Carolina Republican presidential preference primary has the best track record in the country for picking presidents, and I’m not going to sit back and allow Democrats to tarnish our reputation,” said SCGOP Chairman Drew McKissick in a written statement. 

“The South Carolina Republican Party has raised this issue for years now, but the only way to truly protect our primaries is for our General Assembly to pass H. 3695, the ‘Voter Registration and Party Affiliation Act,’” he said.

Dan can be reached at [email protected] and @DanMcCue