South Carolina 2024 Republican Primary LIVE: Updates, news and results as Donald Trump hopes to crush Nikki Haley in her home state

South Carolina is the fourth and final early contest state in the 2024 Republican presidential primary, and voters in the state will have a chance to weigh in on their preferred candidate on Saturday.

Former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley was hoping for a boost in her home state as she remains the latest serious contender trying to thwart former President Donald Trump’s chances at a third consecutive Republican nomination.

But polls leading up to Election Day show Haley trailing the former president by an average of 30 points.

DailyMail.com breaks down what to watch on primary election day in South Carolina.

Nikki Haley has stepped up her personal attacks on Donald Trump in her latest pleas to voters in her home state of South Carolina.

On Friday at Monkc Corner, he said: “In a general election, you have a choice.” In a primary election you make your choice. This is the time for us to make our choice.’

A man in the crowd shouted ‘where is your wife?’ referring to Melania Trump.

The crowd laughed, but she didn’t respond.

Former President Donald Trump criticized Nikki Haley and Joe Biden at his final rally before the South Carolina primary.

During the hour-and-a-half remarks, Trump promoted MAGA-nomics to fix the failing economy and criticized the multiple accusations against him while also going after Haley, who remains in the primary against him.

Before thousands of enthusiastic South Carolina supporters at the Winthrop Coliseum in Rock Hill, Trump predicted the greatest stock Exchange He will crash into American history if he loses to President Biden in November.

“We’re not very worried about tomorrow,” Trump said of the South Carolina primary on Saturday. “We want to aim for November 5.”

Haley hoped to gain support in her home state after losing. Iowa, New Hampshire and Snowfallbut all polls show Trump is still about 30 percentage points behind the former South Carolina governor.

If political advertising won the election, Republican presidential hopeful Nikki Haley would completely crush it in South Carolina against Donald Trump. But it’s not like that.

Haley and groups supporting him have outspent the former GOP chairman nearly 15 to 1 ahead of the first southern primary contest on Saturday. They have spent about $15 million on ad buys, while the Trump campaign and support groups have spent a fraction of that amount, just over $1 million.

But in the days before the primary, the former president was leading Haley in the polls by double digits.

The USA Today/Suffolk poll of likely Republican primary voters gave Trump 63 percent, while Haley had 35 percent in her home state.

On Friday, Haley argued that the goal of the contest is to be “competitive.” She has been crisscrossing the state campaigning much more intensely than Trump while making his closing argument: America can’t have more of the same with President Biden and Trump. She has also stepped up her attacks on the former Republican president, and the final ads promoting Haley reflect that.

In a 30-second Haley campaign ad airing in South Carolina television markets, footage of Trump and Biden is shown while a narrator says “when your country is divided, your president must unite us.” Cut to images of Haley. The narrator continues: “she ran to revive our state and she succeeded.” He ends with Haley saying that she is running for a “strong” and “proud” America.

The pro-Haley Super PAC SFA Fund Inc has also been running ads in the state using clips from Haley’s recent “state of the race” speech in which she attacked Trump by calling him “unhinged.”

Watching just one hour of prime-time television in South Carolina, viewers would likely be subjected to a barrage of frequently repeated Haley ads.

In Nikki Haley’s birthplace of Bamberg, those who know her are with her “all the way” in Saturday’s Republican primary in South Carolina, but former President Donald Trump will likely still win a majority in his home county.

DailyMail.com ventured to the country town on Thursday, for the final day of early voting before Saturday’s crucial race, where Trump is expected to defeat the former South Carolina governor in his home state.

A slow stream of voters showed up in the afternoon at an annex of the Bamberg County courthouse, with a majority saying they backed Trump, but not those who knew Haley personally.

“I love Nikki like a daughter,” said 79-year-old Joyce McMillan. “She’s the most honest, intelligent, quick-learning person I think I’ve ever met,” she said of the Republican presidential hopeful.

McMillan was an accountant for Haley’s parents when they had a shop in the center of Bamberg and taught the former UN ambassador the trade when she was a child.

“I ended up teaching him all the spreadsheets and financial aspects of the workshop when he was only 13,” McMillan told DailyMail.com. “When I left the business, she took over, she was barely 13, and she’s super smart.”

McMillan said her daughter and Haley are close friends and share a room at Clemson.

“And he spent as much time at my house as he did at Nikki’s house,” McMillan recalled.

Nikki Haley has vowed to stay in the race regardless of the results of the South Carolina Republican presidential primary on Saturday.

But history is not on their side. In most cases, losing the home state primary has been considered a fatal blow to the campaign.

It has been more than 50 years since a Republican presidential candidate failed to win his home state and still managed to clinch the Republican presidential nomination.

The year was 1968 and Richard Nixon did not win California, the state he once represented in Congress, but he still won the nomination.

The winner of California in that Republican presidential primary season was the state’s governor, Ronald Reagan. Nixon won California in November.

donald trump will use an important speech to conservatives Saturday to underscore the choice they face in the November elections, warning that four more years of President Joe Biden will unleash extremist forces in the country.

Polls suggest he is on track for a landslide primary victory. nikki haleyhis last remaining rival for the Republican nomination, in his home territory of South Carolina later that day.

And his advisers say he will all but ignore his challenge for the rest of the race and attack Biden instead.

That begins at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) held outside Washington DC, where it will offer a nightmarish vision of dangerous streets and campuses patrolled by protesters under another Biden term.

‘Imagine it… With four more years of Biden…Hamas and Antifa will terrorize our streets, while their brutal ideology takes over our schools,” he will say, according to exclusive excerpts shared with DailyMail.com.