Charleston, S.C.
With all precincts reporting, Donald Trump won the South Carolina GOP primary with 32.5 percent of the vote. Marco Rubio came in second at 22.5 percent and Ted Cruz was right behind him at 22.3 percent.
It was a good night for Trump, but it could have been better. After his 20-point win in the New Hampshire primary on February 8, Trump was sitting at 38 percent in the RealClearPolitics average of South Carolina polls, with Cruz at 20.5 percent and Rubio at 13.5 percent. But instead of increasing his lead, Trump dropped six points following the debate in which he alleged that George W. Bush knowingly lied about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq in order to launch the war.
In this campaign, it’s become popular among pundits to say that nothing Trump does matters, and that his supporters will stick with him no matter what. Trump himself has said he could kill someone and not lose any support. But Trump’s debate performance mattered, and it hurt him. A CNN poll found that Trump actually dropped from 40 percent to 31 percent after the debate. Losing one out of four supporters was no small thing, but it wasn’t enough to deny him a victory.
Rubio’s South Carolina debate performance mattered a great deal too. A week earlier, many wondered if Rubio had been left for dead following Chris Christie’s New Hampshire debate assault, in which Christie accused Rubio of being a do-nothing talker who simply delivers canned 25-second speeches, and Rubio responded by repeating canned 25-second speeches.
But Rubio bounced back with a strong debate performance on February 13 and the endorsement of South Carolina governor Nikki Haley a few days later. On the trail this week, Rubio pushed back against the “robot” meme by showing the press that Christie’s attack hadn’t gotten in his head. His thoughtful and compassionate discussion of race relations with one South Carolina voter was anything but robotic. Rubio was relaxed on the trail, but he didn’t stray much from his stump speech, which tends to be repetitive as all stump speeches are. After telling one joke on Wednesday, which got a good reaction from the crowd, Rubio smiled and looked to the back of the room where the press was seated. “If a joke is funny, you keep telling it,” he said.
Saturday’s result was important to Rubio for a few reasons: First, it indicates that he can clear the 20 percent threshold necessary to get delegates in several states of the March 1 Super Tuesday primaries. Second, Jeb Bush suspended his campaign after taking 8 percent of the vote in South Carolina. Bush’s exit from the race will give Rubio an opportunity to consolidate support among voters and elected officials. Third, Ted Cruz may have a tougher time in future contests that don’t have as many evangelical Christians. In South Carolina, evangelicals made up a whopping 72 percent of the electorate, and Cruz won 27 percent of them, but he won just 13 percent of non-evangelicals. Rubio performed equally well among both groups.
Of course, Rubio faces plenty of challenges. He needs to be competitive during the next few weeks when delegates are awarded on a proportional basis, and then he needs to win the lion’s share of delegates in the March 15 contests, which features a few winner-take-all primaries. Beating Trump doesn’t look easy. Although Rubio has taken a few swipes at Trump, he hasn’t faced the full fury of the media’s favorite candidate yet. Defeating Trump will be even more difficult if John Kasich remains in the race. The Ohio governor won just 1.9 percent of the vote in Iowa, 15.8 percent in New Hampshire, and 7.6 percent in South Carolina. With results like that, it does not appear that Kasich has a path to the nomination. But it seems as if Kasich believes his campaign is actually a religious mission and he has no intention of dropping out of the race. Kasich’s presence will likely siphon away votes from Rubio and help Trump.
Trump remains the frontrunner, but as the last month has shown, debates matter, campaigns matter, endorsements matter, and events matter. Whether they’ll matter enough for Ted Cruz or Marco Rubio to steal the nomination from Trump remains to be seen.
