UPDATE (Feb. 24, 2024 7:13 p.m. E.T.): Donald Trump has won the South Carolina primary, NBC News projects, beating Nikki Haley and further cementing his status as the presumptive GOP presidential nominee.
Polls indicate that President Donald Trump is very likely to win South Carolina’s Republican presidential primary over his challenger, former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, by a wide margin — possibly 30 percentage points or more. On the Democratic side earlier this month, President Joe Biden won a whopping 96% of the vote in his party’s first official primary. The ways Trump and Biden have maintained their strong positions in the state suggest the Southern strategies each will deploy in the general election.
In their insightful book “The Long Southern Strategy,” Angie Maxwell and Todd Shields trace the roots of Republicans’ “Southern Strategy” back to Richard Nixon’s 1968 pushback against the Civil Rights Movement. But Maxwell and Shields also conclude GOP candidates made a “series of decisions” — not just appeals to “white racial angst” — to spur a realignment and ensure the Deep South moved firmly into the Republican electoral column.
Biden feels he owes Black voters a debt for reviving his initially flagging 2020 primary bid
True, the GOP capitalized on race — with its stoking of white racial anxieties over affirmative action and challenges to other civil rights measures. But religion and anti-feminism were also core parts of its strategy. Inversely, Democratic candidates had their own strategy — they tried to counterbalance Republicans’ growing dominance in the region by attempting (among other strategies) to mobilize women of color, especially Black women, in significant numbers.
Issues of race and immigration are foremost on the minds of South Carolinians, as they are for Americans overall. Trump has never strayed far from the anti-immigrant, dog whistle rhetoric he used in his first presidential bid announcement in…
Read the full article here
