Nikki Haley quite likely will lose her home state of South Carolina to Donald Trump in the Republican primary race, but she has one advantage over him besides not currently being under criminal indictment.
The state's former governor and Trump's former UN ambassador has vowed to remain in the race to provide an alternative to the quadruple-indicted, twice-impeached ex-president who's on the hook for more than a half billion dollars in penalties for fraud and defaming his sex abuse victim, and MSNBC's Jonathan Lemire said Haley's got plenty of cash on hand.
"Haley has impressed in the final stretch," Lemire said. "She's vowing to stay in, has the money to do so. Maybe she hangs around in case one of the criminal cases does something to Trump that none of us can expect. She is almost certainly going to get trounced [Saturday] night."
"Let's talk about the guy who is going to win, which is Donald Trump," Lemire added. "As you say, he's not been much of a presence in South Carolina. He hasn't needed to be. How does -- when you talk to his aides, how do they feel the campaign is going, not just because they're going to beat Nikki Haley, but going forward? Some red alarms are starting to flash here about some fundraising issues the former president is having, at least to this point. He is not the draw of the small-dollar donors that he was in previous campaigns."
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National affairs analyst John Heilemann, who's reporting from Charleston, agreed that Trump was not generating the same grassroots enthusiasm he did in his two previous races, and his staggering legal bills were cutting into his campaign funds.
"Yeah, that's a concern," Heilemann said. "He's not the draw he once was, and he's got a new kind of draw on the funds that he hadn't had before. Donald Trump has various precarious finances for some time, but these legal challenges, both in terms of having to pay the attorneys and in terms of what he is getting hit with in some case, in terms of the damages he has to pay is really extraordinary. It's another way in which Trump is an unprecedented candidate. Look, I mean, you know, the weird thing about this race down here, and we've seen this in other states, but it's really evident here, right?"
"You know, that down here, that perfectly captures the attitude, which is people like Nikki Haley [but] people love Donald Trump," Heilemann added. "The love for Donald Trump, though, which we're used to seeing in state after state, which is, he comes into town and he has a giant rally and there's 30,000 people, 40,000 people, they're all out here. You know, the Trump event, not only has he not been here very much this week. He has a couple events [Friday], but the rest of the week, other than the Fox town hall, he hasn't been here. When he's been around, and I made this point up in New Hampshire and some people on the Trump-loving right got mad, but he was not filling up arenas with the kind of energy like the events we remember from 2016, where 50,000 people were in the heat in Georgia and would show up for him. The enthusiasm for him is real, but it's diminished."
About 75 percent of Americans have told pollsters they don't want a rematch between Trump and President Joe Biden, and Heilemann said that feeling was palpable in South Carolina.
"Trump will win by north of 20 points probably tomorrow – he's not been behind," he said. "He's not been ahead by less than 20 in a year, he's been ahead of the field here by between 20 and 35 points for a year straight, so it's not one poll, yesterday's poll or last week's poll. He's had a huge lead here but, man, you do not have Trump signs in the yards here. You don't have the sense of the fervor he once commanded. He has a hammerlock on the party, but people are kind of like, 'Okay, I guess we have Trump and Biden.' That's true on the Republican Party and on the Democratic side. There's just this sort of like, 'Okay, well, the fall is going to be, I guess, where the action is at.' There's not a lot of energy here. That's unusual for a South Carolina Republican primary."
"The Trump show has gotten old," concluded co-host Mika Brzezinski.
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