Can South Carolina save Nikki Haley’s bid for the White House?

New Hampshire has voted. Donald Trump has won, again.

Tuesday’s contest — the second of the 2024 Republican nominating contest, is over. Donald Trump was the clear winner, and remains firmly atop both polls of GOP voters nationally as well as the delegate count necessary for securing his party’s nomination.

And after throwing it all against the wall in the Granite State, Nikki Haley has lost her first head-to-head matchup versus Mr Trump. Despite endorsements from the state’s governor, largest newspaper and even the conservative opinion board at the Wall Street Journal, Ms Haley could not pull out ahead of the former president, who in many of his supporters’ minds should still be considered an incumbent.

So where do we go from here? Why isn’t Nikki Haley dropping out, as did Ron DeSantis and Vivek Ramaswamy after their respective failures to “shock the media”, in Mr Ramaswamy’s words, in Iowa?

There are a few reasons:

1. South Carolina

The first southern state to test presidential nominees, South Carolina has played a recurring role as a reaper of presidential campaigns; it ended the bid of John Edwards in 2008 before a repeat appearance dealt a body blow to the Bernie Sanders campaign in 2020.

For Nikki Haley, however, it represents an opportunity. The state is where she served as governor for eight years, winning national acclaim for her work to address racial tensions in the wake of a racist massacre inside a historic Black church. She has deep local ties in the Palmetto State, and sees it as she does New Hampshire — another state where the conditions are near-perfect for a competitive showing against the frontrunner.

“The people of South Carolina KNOW Nikki’s strong conservative record because they lived it,”