Nikki Haley charges into South Carolina showdown lagging far behind Trump

The South Carolina primary is Donald Trump’s contest to win.

Votes will be cast in the state’s primary election this Saturday; the fourth major state contest (not counting the US Virgin Islands which were unsurprisingly won by Mr Trump). And unless something downright crazy happens in the next 48 hours, there’s pretty much only one way this thing is going to go.

This, to be clear, is not New Hampshire. There’s no army of independents and Democrat crossovers hiding in the woods, ready to swamp Republican voting precincts with waves of anti-Trump votes. There’s no friendly, centrist Republican governor in the state cheering Ms Haley on, appearing with her at campaign events, and delivering the tough criticism of Mr Trump when his top rival declines to go for the throat.

It’s just South Carolina.

The electorate here is well-known, thanks to the state’s tendency towards relevance for both parties’ primaries. The Republican electorate is conservative, intensely so, and is consequently largely already backing Mr Trump’s campaign.

“Conservative Republicans already have their nominee and they've had him now since 2016,” Ashley Koning, an associate professor at Rutgers’s Eagleton polling centre told The Independent of the South Carolina GOP electorate.

The share of unaffiliated voters, meanwhile, is simply much smaller. Just about 10 per cent of the total electorate, compared to nearly 40 per cent of the voting population in New Hampshire. Yes, that’s very significant: South Carolina is a party state, regardless of whether one is a Democrat or a Republican. New Hampshire is not. And the most politically-active voters in the state are hardcore partisans, not undecideds who are looking to give either candidate a shot.

“Even though