Haley trails Trump by 36 points in South Carolina, new polls show
a Winthrop University Survey Wednesday's release shows Nikki Haley losing badly in South Carolina, her home state, with just over a week before the state's Republican primaries.
Nearly two-thirds of likely Republican primary voters, 65 percent, said they supported former President Donald J. Trump, and just 29 percent said they supported Ms. Haley. Those numbers are very close the average results of recent polls in South Carolina.
After receiving 19 percent of the caucus vote in Iowa and 43 percent of the primary vote in New Hampshire, Ms. Haley has based her argument for the viability of her campaign on the premise that she may not yet defeat Mr. Trump, but she is winning. ground. In an interview with NBC last month, she said of her performance in South Carolina: “I don't think this necessarily has to be a win, but it certainly has to be better than what I did in New Hampshire, and it certainly is. be close.”
The poll's fine print was also bad for Ms. Haley: Only 49 percent of registered voters, including Republicans and Democrats, said they had a favorable opinion of her, compared with 59 percent the last Winthrop poll in November. The decline was sharpest among Republicans, 56 percent of whom had a favorable opinion of her, down from 71 percent in November.
Trump's approval rating among all registered voters was about the same as Ms. Haley's: 48 percent. But he enjoys a huge 81 percent favorability among Republicans, and unlike Ms. Haley, he is growing in popularity over time. In November, 45 percent of Republicans and 77 percent of Republicans rated him favorably.
The survey was conducted Feb. 2-10 among 1,717 adults registered to vote in South Carolina, 749 of whom said they would probably or definitely vote in the Republican primary. The margin of sampling error for the full poll is plus or minus 2.4 percentage points, and the margin of sampling error for likely primary voters is plus or minus 3.6 percentage points.
The timing of the poll means it predates Trump's speech last weekend, in which he suggested he would encourage Russia to attack NATO members he deemed financially delinquent and insinuated that Ms. Haley's husband, a major in the National Guard deployed to Djibouti, had left the country to escape her.
Ms. Haley is trying to recover from an embarrassing result last week in the Nevada primary, where Trump was not on the ballot but still received fewer votes than a “None of these candidates” option. She has hammered Mr Trump for these comments.
“The greatest evil he's ever faced is when a golf ball hits him on a golf cart and you start mocking our men and women in the military?” she said Monday.