A Winthrop University poll released Wednesday shows Nikki Haley losing badly in South Carolina, her home state, just over a week before the state’s Republican primary.
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. These numbers are very close to the average results of recent South Carolina polls.
After receiving 19 percent of the Iowa caucus vote and 43 percent of the New Hampshire primary, Ms. Haley based her argument for the viability of her campaign on the premise that she may not yet defeat Mr. Trump, but she is gaining ground. In an interview with NBC last month, she said of her performance in South Carolina: “I don’t think it necessarily has to be a win, but it definitely has to be better than what I did in New Hampshire, and that It definitely has to 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 to 59 percent in the last Winthrop poll in November. The decline was greatest among Republicans, 56 percent of whom had a favorable opinion of her, compared to 71 percent in November.
Mr. Trump’s approval rating among all registered voters was about the same as Ms. Haley’s, at 48 percent. But he benefits from a huge 81 percent approval rating among Republicans and, unlike Ms. Haley, is becoming increasingly popular over time. In November, 45 percent overall and 77 percent of Republicans viewed him positively.
The survey was conducted Feb. 2-10 among 1,717 adults who were eligible to vote in South Carolina. 749 of them said they would probably or definitely vote in the Republican primary. The margin of sampling error for the entire 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 came before Mr. Trump’s speech over the weekend in which he suggested that he would encourage Russia to attack NATO members he considered to be financially delinquent and insinuated that the husband of Ms. Haley, a major in the National Guard, was deployed to Djibouti and had left the country to escape her.
Ms. Haley is trying to recover from an embarrassing result in the Nevada primary last week, in which Mr. Trump was not on the ballot but she still received fewer votes than the “none of these candidates” option. She sharply criticized Mr. Trump for those comments.
“The worst thing that’s ever happened to him is when a golf ball hits him on a golf cart and you want to taunt our men and women in the military?” she said Monday.
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2024-02-14 15:16:40
www.nytimes.com