COLUMBIA, South Carolina--Donald Trump's campaign plans to treat Nikki Haley as irrelevant after he won the Republican primary in her home state of South Carolina on Saturday, skipping attacks on her to focus instead on a rematch with Democratic President Joe Biden, advisers said.
The former president has easily swept all five Republican nominating contests thus far, winning states in the Midwest, Northeast, South and West and knocking out every challenger save Haley, a former South Carolina governor, along the way. Saturday's win in South Carolina makes Trump's march towards the Republican presidential nomination appear inevitable, and leaves Haley, despite her vow to battle on, no clear path to beating him. Trump advisers said they plan to ignore Haley in an effort to render her campaign an afterthought. That would mark a change in tactics by a campaign that has trained intense fire on her in recent weeks, with a barrage of vitriolic online attacks, pressure on her donors to switch to Trump and public mocking by the former president. On the sidelines of a Trump event on Friday, campaign co-manager Chris LaCivita outlined the blueprint succinctly when asked about Haley. "Nikki who?" LaCivita told Reuters. Yet despite Trump's victory in South Carolina, there were some red flags for him in his likely general election rematch with Biden in November, when independent and moderate voters will play a crucial role in determining the winner. Among self-described independent South Carolina voters, 6 out of 10 chose Haley, according to an exit poll conducted by Edison Research, which also showed her securing a slim majority of the white college-educated vote. Republican strategist Chip Felkel, who has been critical of Trump, pointed to the fact that Haley garnered 40% of the votes on Saturday, to Trump's 60%, a narrower margin of victory for Trump than many had predicted. Referring to November's presidential election, Felkel said he still expected Trump to be the nominee, but said there were warning signs for the general election. "If the basis of the vote was mostly Republican, or independent, and he's not getting four out of 10 of those, I'd say Biden could use that," Felkel said. For her part, Haley defiantly vowed to press on to Super Tuesday on March 5, when voters in 15 states and one U.S. territory will deliver one-third of delegates to the Republican National Convention, which will choose a nominee in July. "They have the right to a real choice, not a Soviet-style election with only one candidate," Haley told supporters on Saturday night after her defeat. "I have a duty to give them that choice." Haley's campaign said on Sunday it had raised $1 million since her South Carolina loss. But Haley suffered a significant blow when AFP Action, an arm of the influential conservative Koch network that had been backing her candidacy, said on Sunday that it would no longer commit resources to her bid. "Given the challenges in the primary states ahead, we don’t believe any outside group can make a material difference to widen her path to victory," a senior advisor to the group, Emily Seidel, wrote in a memo obtained by Reuters.
