The only excitement of the South Carolina primary elections, held this Saturday, was seeing how many points former President Donald Trump won over Nikki Haley, the only rival standing in the race to obtain the Republican nomination.
Added to the curiosity was that Haley was playing at home;
She was born here and was governor of the State between 2011 and 2017, but not even because of that she could aspire to anything more than a humiliating defeat.
It took less than a minute after the polls closed for the American media to grant victory to the former president, according to the first count, with more than 60% of the votes.
The winner gave his victory speech when it was five minutes past 7:00 p.m., the time at which the polling stations closed.
He did it in the capital, Columbia, and the parliament was pure Trump.
He began with a racist broadside against immigrants arriving at the southern border with Mexico: “They come from everywhere, straight from prisons, asylums and other mental institutions,” he said.
Afterward, he threatened President Joe Biden with his immediate firing, in a nod to his past in the world of reality television.
And then he gave way to some of the men who have shown him blind loyalty, one of the attributes he most admires in others: the governor of the State, Henry McMaster, and the two senators from South Carolina, Lindsey Graham and Tim Scott, who aspired to take Trump's place in the Republican nomination and since he abandoned that intention, seems determined to gain his favor so that he will be chosen as the vice presidential candidate.
Trump already won the Iowa caucuses, the New Hampshire primary, and the Nevada caucus/primary hybrid vote.
South Carolina closes the quartet of early elections of the long presidential campaign, which culminates with the vote on November 5 in which everything indicates that the Republican candidate will face President Joe Biden, the bet of the Democratic Party .
There is no record of a victory for any candidate so resounding in those first four appointments with the polls.
It also happens that this Saturday's primaries are not only the “first in the South,” they also function as a sensational predictor for the Republican Party.
Since they began to be held in 1980, the one chosen here has ended up being the candidate for the general elections, except on one occasion.
It was when in 2012 they opted for Newt Gingrich instead of Mitt Romney, the man who was finally chosen to face (and lose) then-president Barack Obama.
Last Tuesday, Haley called the press, also in Columbia, for one of the most unusual appearances in recent American politics.
She wanted to announce that she was not planning to “go anywhere” no matter how hard the fall in South Carolina was, and that she would hold out at least until Super Tuesday.
That includes next week's primaries in Michigan.
Super Tuesday falls this leap year on March 5.
It is the day in which a flurry of voting coincides throughout the country (15 states decide 874 of 2,429 Republican delegates).
Also the date that usually resolves the ballots of both parties.
In that, this 2024, the year of the great electoral déjà vu in the United States, everything indicates that it will not be necessary until then to start preparing for a repeat of the Trump-Biden duel.
[Breaking news.
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