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      Nikki Haley battles steep odds and Trump taunts in home state primary

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      Standing before a large crowd outside a waterfront hotel in Georgetown, Nikki Haley confronted the question that many Republicans in her “sweet” home state of South Carolina – and across the country – have asked: why is she still running for president?“I don’t care about a political future. If I did, I would have been out by now,” she said. “I’m doing this for my kids. I’m doing this for your kids and your grandkids.”Haley is the last candidate standing between Donald Trump and the Republican nomination he expects to wrap up within weeks.But her path forward is vanishingly thin, after successive losses to Trump in the Iowa caucuses and the New Hampshire primary, followed by a stinging defeat in Nevada’s non-binding Republican primary in which, despite being the only major candidate on the ballot, Haley finished a distant second to the option labeled “none of these”.On Saturday, she is bracing for another rebuke, this time at the hands of the very Republican voters who once elevated her to the governor’s mansion. A Suffolk University/USA Today poll released this week of likely South Carolina Republican primary voters showed Trump trouncing Haley by a margin of nearly 2 to 1, 63% to 35%.But Haley has made clear that she has no intention of conceding the nomination – not yet anyway.Arguing that Americans deserve better than a general election contest between the 77-year-old former president facing 91 criminal indictments and Joe Biden, the deeply unpopular 81-year-old incumbent cruising to his party’s nomination, Haley is asking supporters to stand behind her long-shot bid.“It’s not normal to pay campaign contributions towards personal court cases. It’s not normal to side with a thug over the allies who’ve worked to protect us,” Haley said in Georgetown, referencing Trump’s latest legal travails and his threat to Nato member states. “None of this is normal, and that’s what we need to have back. Our kids deserve to know what normal feels like again.”There is no precedent for the kind of come-from-behind victory Haley would have to pull off to win her party’s nod. But she has a history of surprising the political establishment.In her first run for public office, Haley, then an accountant, upset a nearly 30-year incumbent to win a seat in the state legislature. Years later, she bested a field of better-known Republicans to win the party’s gubernatorial primary and become the first woman and the first person of color elected governor of South Carolina. She was handily re-elected four years later.A year ago, Haley’s entrance into the presidential race was treated as an afterthought, with polls barely registering her support. But she outlasted Trump’s other rivals, leaving, as she likes to say, just “one fella left” to beat.“You never count Nikki Haley out. You just don’t,” said Dave Wilson, an unaffiliated Republican strategist in South Carolina. “There is always some sort of political trick or maneuver up her sleeve that makes you go, ‘I just never saw that one coming.’”View image in fullscreenHaley’s refusal to drop out and “kiss the ring” – and nearly all of Trump’s former Republican rivals have – has turned her once again into something of a political outsider in a party that once counted her among its brightest rising stars.The daughter of Indian immigrants, Haley rose to national prominence as a Tea Party conservative. But as Trump has sought to cast Haley as a “liberal”, Haley has found herself defending her track record of championing rightwing causes, including her support for voter ID laws, tough immigration measures and anti-abortion restrictions.But in the Trump era, loyalty to the former president often matters more than conservative policy positions and on the former, Haley’s record is more complicated.Haley insists she wants nothing from Trump, whose attacks on her have become uglier and more personal the longer she stays in the race. Though she was generally reluctant to criticize Trump for much of the early stages of the campaign, she has sharpened her rhetoric since it became a two-person race. Their intensifying rivalry has all-but quelled speculation that she was gunning for vice-president or a role in his cabinet.“I have no fear of Trump’s retribution. I’m not looking for anything from him,” Haley said in a speech from Greenville earlier this week, in which she outlined why she wasn’t departing the race.She hammered Trump for being “too chicken” to debate her and for spending “more time in courtrooms than on the campaign trail”. She now frequently criticizes his mental acuity, recalling an episode in which he confused her with the former Democratic House speaker Nancy Pelosi. At one event in South Carolina, her team handed out mental competency tests.Haley said Trump had gotten “meaner and more offensive by the day” accusing him of “trying to bully me and anyone who supports me”. Using his derisive nickname “birdbrain” to refer to her, Trump has claimed that he only selected Haley to be his United Nations ambassador as a political favor to Henry McMaster, a political ally and her second-in-command who became governor when she left the post to serve in his administration.He also questioned her husband’s absence on the campaign trail — “What happened to her husband? What happened to her husband? Where is he? He’s gone!” (Maj Michael Haley is serving a one-year deployment in Africa with the South Carolina national guard.)Trump’s web of legal cases, related to his role in the January 6 attack on Congress and his efforts to overturn the 2020 election, among other charges, has so far only soldered Republicans to his cause. But it remains unclear how voters would react if he is convicted. A judge last week handed him a crushing $355m-plus-interest legal penalty that threatens his personal finances and his business empire, while his campaign relies on donations to cover his mounting legal fees.“What if all of these legal issues take Trump out of contention?” Wilson said. “Or what if all of these legal issues make it clear to voters in later states that there needs to be an alternative?”All of the uncertainty fueled speculation that Haley may be looking ahead, either to the party’s summer convention where she would be an obvious stand-in in the extraordinary event Trump is no longer a viable nominee, or even further down the line to 2028, when she could mount another bid for the White House.View image in fullscreen“Since she became Governor Nikki Haley has always had ambitions to be president,” said Danielle Vinson, a political science professor at Furman University in Greenville, South Carolina, who has observed Haley’s political rise from scrappy outsider to UN ambassador.After spending nearly a year warning Republicans that Trump is an electoral loser for the party, Haley’s case for the nomination would be even stronger in 2024 if Biden defeats him, Vinson said. “She’s then the one who looks very smart, and can go, ‘uh-huh, I told you so,’ but in a nice, polite way with a smile on her face.”For now, Vinson said, Haley has little to lose by staying in the race. “As long as she has the money to keep going,” she said, “this is giving her a chance to meet voters in a lot of key states.”Though Haley is wanting in delegates – the coin of the realm in party nomination politics – she is flush with cash. Despite her long odds, well-heeled donors keep giving to her campaign and her allied Super Pac.In January, Haley outraised Trump for the first time, taking in more than $11m compared with his $8.8m. And though Haley insists she is no leader of the anti-Trump resistance, her team has capitalized on donors eager to see her take him on.When Trump threatened that Haley donors would be “permanently barred” from his world, her campaign slapped the phrase on T-shirts. Supporters snapped them up – she boasted earlier this month that her team had already sold 20,000 – while top donors continue to finance her long-shot bid. Her campaign also trolled Trump’s latest fundraising gambit – Trump-branded gold high tops – with an image of a pair of running shoes emblazoned with the Russian flag.Trump and his allies have dismissed Haley as a sideshow, steamrolling her campaign as he moves aggressively to assume control of the Republican National Committee, which is supposed to remain neutral in the presidential primary election.With the RNC chair, Ronna McDaniel, widely expected to step down after the South Carolina primary, Trump announced his plans to install his daughter-in-law Lara Trump and his campaign’s senior adviser Chris LaCivita in top leadership roles.View image in fullscreenIn a memo this week, LaCivita argued that the results of the first several contests “sent an unmistaken message: Nikki Haley doesn’t represent Republicans any more than Joe Biden does”. He then predicted that Trump will have accrued enough delegates to sew up the nomination by 19 March at the absolute latest, and probably even earlier.Even with its diminishing odds, Haley’s campaign has served as a welcome reminder for some that orthodox Republicans still exist despite Trump’s best efforts to purge them.The death this week of the Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny in an Arctic prison after being jailed by Russia’s autocratic leader, Vladimir Putin, was a stark reminder of that contrast between Haley’s faith in American alliances and Trump’s isolationism.Trump, whose conciliatory posture toward Putin has long rattled America’s allies, waited days to address Navalny’s death, which Biden and western leaders have blamed on the Kremlin leader. When he did, he compared his legal travails to the circumstances that led to Navany’s imprisonment.“It is a form of Navalny,” Trump said during a Fox News town hall in Greenville this week. “It is a form of communism, of fascism.”Haley by contrast has been unequivocal. “We have to remember Russia is not our friend,” Haley said days earlier, during her own Fox News-sponsored town hall in Columbia. “Donald Trump needs to answer whether he believes Putin is responsible for Navalny.”Haley has also been a strong supporter of Ukraine, unlike Trump, who has whipped his allies on Capitol Hill to oppose funding for the democratic nation as it seeks to repel Russian forces from its territory.But with the Republican base squarely behind the former president, Haley is left to scrounge for votes among a disparate coalition of independents, anti-Trump Republicans and, where permitted, even Democrats like Chris Richardson.Richardson voted against Haley when she ran for governor and when she ran for re-election. But on Saturday he will cast his ballot for the Republican he calls a “patriot” and views, alongside Biden, as a last line of defense for American democracy.“Nikki Haley and I disagree on virtually everything. But the one thing that we agree on is really the most important thing and that’s democracy,” said Richardson, a senior adviser for PrimaryPivot, a group urging Democrats and independents in states where they can participate in the Republican primary to vote for Haley as a way to stop Trump from winning the nomination.According to Richardson, there were 400,000 South Carolinians who voted in the state Democratic primary in 2020 who did not turn out for the party’s contest earlier this month and are therefore eligible to vote in the Republican primary. The group is also targeting voters in Colorado, Michigan and elsewhere.“The way I see it, we have two more votes to stand for democracy. Nikki Haley is one firewall and Joe Biden will be the other,” he said. “But if the firewall of Nikki Haley falls, then obviously it’s all on Joe Biden and I would rather it not come down to that because to me that feels very much like a gamble for democracy.”View image in fullscreenYet the fact remains that Haley cannot win the Republican nomination without winning Republican voters. History – and convention – provides little hope for presidential candidates who lose their home states.Asked in an interview what it would take for Haley to upset Trump in the South Carolina primary, her immediate predecessor, the former governor Mark Sanford, replied: “A meteor strike.”And so Haley will plod ahead. On Sunday, a day after the South Carolina vote, she plans to hold a campaign rally in Troy, Michigan, before beginning a sprint through several of the more than a dozen Super Tuesday states that will vote on 5 March.Hope remains among Haley’s most ardent supporters, who say they’re sticking with her until the end.“She seems like a voice for the future,” said Trish Mooney, a 60-year-old voter from Georgetown. “And it’s about time that we had a strong woman candidate that’s really smart and willing to have the courage to put themselves out there.”George Chidi contributed reporting from Atlanta More

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      Nikki Haley Again Calls for a TikTok Ban Over Privacy Concerns

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      The Republican Party might have challenges with outreach to Generation Z, but Nikki Haley, appearing in a Fox News town hall event on Sunday, said the answer was not TikTok, the Chinese-owned social media platform.In a conversation with the “America Reports” co-anchor John Roberts, Ms. Haley, the former governor of South Carolina and United Nations ambassador, criticized President Biden for posting a TikTok clip on the night of the Super Bowl, in an appeal to younger voters. She also hit former President Donald J. Trump, her G.O.P. primary rival, for failing to curtail its use while he was in the White House.“President Trump said he would ban TikTok, and when President Xi asked him not to, that fell to the wayside,” she said, referring to Xi Jinping, China’s leader. “We should have banned it from the beginning. It is incredibly dangerous.”The volleys against both men are part of a broader argument Ms. Haley has been making in recent media appearances and on the campaign trail that it is time for fresh leadership. Her attacks on Mr. Trump, whom she served under as ambassador, have become sharper in particular, as the two head into a primary showdown in South Carolina on Saturday.In the town hall event on Sunday, as she has before, Ms. Haley broke with the isolationist wing of her party on foreign policy and pummeled the former president for his friendly relationship with authoritarian leaders like Mr. Jinping and President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia. She argued that Mr. Putin “knows exactly what he did” with Aleksei A. Navalny, the outspoken Russian opposition leader who died last week in prison, and chastised Mr. Trump for suggesting he would encourage Russian aggression against U.S. allies in Europe.“I think that’s why it’s so damaging when Trump said that he would choose Putin and actually encouraged to invade NATO allies, instead of standing with our allies,” she said.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Haley Trails Trump by 36 Points in South Carolina, New Poll Shows

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      A Winthrop University poll released Wednesday shows Nikki Haley losing badly in South Carolina, her home state, with a little more than 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 only 29 percent said they supported Ms. Haley. Those numbers are very close to the average results of recent polls of South Carolina.After receiving 19 percent of the caucus vote in Iowa and 43 percent of the primary vote in New Hampshire, Ms. Haley has rested her argument for her campaign’s viability on the premise that she may not be beating Mr. Trump yet, but she is gaining ground. In an interview with NBC last month, she said of her performance in South Carolina, “I don’t think that necessarily has to be a win, but it certainly has to be better than what I did in New Hampshire, and it certainly 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, down from 59 percent in the last Winthrop poll in November. The drop was sharpest among Republicans, 56 percent of whom had a favorable opinion of her, down from 71 percent in November.Mr. Trump’s approval rating among all registered voters was about the same as Ms. Haley’s, 48 percent. But he benefits from a huge 81 percent favorability rating among Republicans, and unlike Ms. Haley, he is getting more popular over time. In November, 45 percent overall and 77 percent of Republicans viewed him favorably.The poll was conducted from Feb. 2 to 10 among 1,717 adults registered to vote in South Carolina, 749 of whom said they were likely or certain to vote in the Republican primary. The margin of sampling error for the full 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 predated Mr. Trump’s speech over the weekend, in which he suggested that he would encourage Russia to attack NATO members whom he considered financially delinquent and insinuated that Ms. Haley’s husband, a major in the National Guard who is deployed to Djibouti, had left the country to escape her.Ms. Haley is trying to recover from an embarrassing result last week in the Nevada primary, where Mr. Trump was not on the ballot but she nevertheless got fewer votes than a “None of These Candidates” option did. She has hammered Mr. Trump for those comments.“The most harm he’s ever come across is whether a golf ball hits him on a golf cart, and you’re going to go and mock our men and women in the military?” she said on Monday. More

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      Nikki Haley’s son calls Tim Scott ‘senator Judas’ over Trump support

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      The son of longshot Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley referred US senator Tim Scott – their fellow South Carolinan – as “senator Judas” while criticizing Scott’s endorsement of Donald Trump.“Senator Judas – excuse me, senator Scott,” Nalin Haley said during a campaign rally in Gilbert, South Carolina.Haley herself reportedly joked later on stage at the event, “Nalin, I will deal with you later.”According to Washington Post reporter Dylan Wells, a spokesperson for Scott responded by issuing a statement which referred to the senator’s mother and said: “You’d never hear Ms Frances or anyone from the Scott family talk like that.”Haley when she was governor of South Carolina appointed Scott to the US Senate in 2012 to fill the seat of Jim DeMint, who retired.Scott dropped out of the Republican presidential primary in November and in January announced his official endorsement of Trump, who is seeking to defeat Democratic incumbent Joe Biden to return to the White House.Haley said in an interview with Fox News on the endorsement: “South Carolina is a bloodsport. Everyone has a decision to make, and they have to live with their decision. He’ll have to live with his.”She added in response to Scott being floated as a possible running mate for Trump: “He’s going to be disappointed when Trump doesn’t win.”South Carolina is set to hold its Republican presidential preference primary on 24 February, where Haley is currently trailing in polls by double digits behind Trump in her home state.She was behind by 37 points in a recent Morning Consult poll and 26 points in a Washington Post-Monmouth survey.During an interview on CBS News’s Face the Nation on Sunday, Haley sought to make up some of the ground between her and Trump by criticizing comments the former president made about her husband, who is serving overseas with South Carolina’s national guard.Trump, at his own campaign rally Saturday, asked where Michael Haley was. Trump – who has often been seen without wife Melania by his side as he grapples with a litany of legal problems – also said Michael Haley was “gone”.Haley on Sunday said: “We can’t have someone who sits there and mocks our men and women who are trying to protect America.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionShe also said Trump’s disparaging remarks of military members was “a pattern”, which was possibly a reference to a report that the former president once referred to Americans who died in war as “losers” and “suckers”.Haley served as governor for nearly two terms before resigning in 2017 to serve as the US ambassador to the United Nations for the Trump White House.She has affirmed plans to remain in the Republican presidential primary through Super Tuesday on 5 March – when 16 state primary races are run – regardless of the result Haley’s campaign receives in South Carolina.Trump is enjoying his status as the Republicans’ presumptive 2024 White House nominee despite facing more than 90 pending criminal charges.Those charges allege that he tried to illegally subvert the results of the 2020 election that he lost to Biden, improperly retained government secrets after his presidency and made illicit hush-money payments to an adult film actor who has alleged an extramarital sexual encounter with Trump. More

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      Nikki Haley: Trump spends more time ‘ranting’ than fighting for American people

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      Nikki Haley pressed her case on Sunday to become the Republican presidential nominee by launching a sharp attack on her rival Donald Trump as a candidate who is set to spend more time in court than on the campaign trail this year and is intent on ranting about his own supposed victimhood rather than fighting for the American people.With less than three weeks to go before the Republican primary in her home state of South Carolina, which many observers see as the former governor and UN ambassador’s last stand, Haley attacked Trump for being more concerned with himself than with the future of the country. She told CNN’s State of the Union Sunday morning TV show that his multiple court cases, in which he faces 91 charges across four criminal cases, amounted to a “real issue”.Turning Trump’s own words against him, Haley said that the former president is “going to be spending more time in a courtroom than he’s going to be spending on the campaign trail”. At a time when the US is “in disarray and the world is on fire, we need a president that’s going to give us eight years of focus and discipline, not one that’s going to be sitting there ranting about how he’s a victim.”.She added that Trump, in recent days, “hasn’t once talked about the American people. And that’s a problem.”She went on to accuse him of having a “temper tantrum” after she garnered 43% of the vote in New Hampshire last month. “Why? Because he wasn’t controlling the situation.”Haley’s caustic attack on Trump came as he continues to command a seemingly unassailable lead in the Republican nomination contest. He comfortably won elections in Iowa and New Hampshire, and is now showing a double digit lead in opinion polls in South Carolina, where the Republican primary contest is on 24 February.In the latest Washington Post-Monmouth University poll of potential Republican primary voters in South Carolina, Trump was 26 points ahead on 58% to Haley’s 32%.As part of her increasingly direct assault on the standing and reputation of Trump, Haley has also taken to comparing him to Joe Biden. She pointedly predicted that if Trump became the Republican nominee, there would be a woman in the White House.In that circumstance, “Joe Biden will win and Kamala Harris will become president,” she said.She said that America deserved better than either Trump or Biden as leader. “Why are we doing this? We are allowing ourselves to have two 80-year-olds, who can’t serve eight years, who are both diminished whether it’s in their character or in their mental capacity.”For his part, Biden surprised no one by taking more than 95% of the primary vote in South Carolina on Saturday. His two competitors, Dean Phillips, a congressman from Minnesota, and self-help author Marianne Williamson, lagged far behind.South Carolina has been promoted by the Democratic party as its first official primary election, partly out of recognition that it was the state in which African American voters gifted Biden a huge win in 2020 that lifted him to the Democratic nomination. Jim Clyburn, the Democratic congressman from South Carolina who was seminal in turning that vote to Biden, was asked by CNN whether was retaining the support of Black voters in this election cycle.“Joe Biden has not lost any support among African Americans. You can go out and talk to 10 people, purposely find one who maybe gives off a different thought, but he has not lost any support among African Americans,” Clyburn said.Congressman Hakeem Jeffries of New York, the Democratic party leader in the House of Representatives, hinted at better things to come for Biden as he struggles to best Trump in many opinion polls.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“It was a tremendous victory in South Carolina, a decisive one and I think it demonstrates that as we enter into the campaign season that the American people are beginning to focus on President Biden’s incredible track record of results,” he said.Jeffries cited economic and health measures executed by the Biden administration as the US worked its way out from the Covid-19 pandemic, “allowing the American economy to emerge as the most advanced in the world”.He added: “Yes, more needs to be done in addressing affordability and the inflationary pressures and President Biden has a vision to do that.”Biden was scheduled to travel to Las Vegas on Sunday for a campaign event in the Historic Westside neighborhood ahead of Nevada’s Democratic primary on Tuesday.Nevada is a key swing state for Biden to win again this year. He beat Trump by less than three points there in 2020, relying heavily on support from Hispanic and working class union member voters in the Las Vegas area.Biden needs a good showing in the Democratic primary, while the nominating race for the Republicans in Nevada is a confusing and messy one with two contests two days apart and Trump having a clear advantage over Haley.Meanwhile, Haley made a cameo appearance on the US comedy staple Saturday Night Live. More

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      South Carolina Democratic Primary Results 2024: Biden Wins

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      Polls close at 7 p.m. Eastern time. In 2020, results began to come in soon after, and about 98 percent of votes had been reported by midnight. South Carolina does not have voter registration by party, but those who participate in the Democratic election may not vote in the Republican election on Feb. 24. Voter […] More

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      ‘The weirdest campaign’: South Carolina delivers a win, but Biden still faces an uphill path

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      Surprise! Joe Biden won the Democratic presidential primary in South Carolina with a high-90s percentage that would make even Vladimir Putin or Kim Jong-un blush.But despite the low energy and low turnout, there was a wider narrative on Saturday about representation, the changing face of the US and a rebuke to the white identity politics of Donald Trump.Biden, 81, may be a stick-in-the-mud but it was he who last year tore up the tradition, which took hold in earnest with Jimmy Carter in 1976, of Iowa and New Hampshire going first in picking the Democratic candidate for president.At his behest, the Democratic National Committee (DNC) rearranged the electoral calendar so that South Carolina would have first say in shaping the race this time. That South Carolina is also that state that revived Biden’s ailing 2020 campaign probably didn’t do its cause any harm.Still, anyone who spent parts of last month freezing in Iowa and New Hampshire after the Republican primary was reminded how demographically unrepresentative those states are. Both are about 90% white. At Trump’s campaign rallies, unsurprisingly, the whiteness appeared even more monolithic.In South Carolina, however, one in four residents is Black. The state is more in keeping with a rainbow nation where Republicans appear to be in denial that white Christians are no longer the majority. Biden’s decision to put it first was more important than any worries about enthusiasm or turnout on Saturday.“For South Carolina to go first is now a badge of honour and pride for so many folks,” Jaime Harrison, chair of the DNC and himself a Black South Carolinian, told reporters in Columbia on Saturday night. “I had one woman who was just teary-eyed with me when I was on the trail and just talking about the importance and the significance of going first.“Hearing the stories about people who could not vote and having those memories yourself and now hearing us talk about ‘the hands that picked cotton are now the hands that are picking presidents’ – that is impactful, it’s powerful, and that is the imagery that is important for the nation to see and understand.”Still, the final days before the historic vote felt somewhat anticlimactic thanks to a combination of Biden’s dominance as incumbent, feeble opposition from Dean Phillips and Marianne Williamson, and the lack of a Republican primary on the same day (which will take place later in the month).It was all a far cry from the blockbuster 2016 primary season, when Trump was knocking out Republican stiffs while Bernie Sanders was giving Hillary Clinton a run for her money. On Friday Kamala Harris, the vice-president, drew only a modest crowd at a university in Orangeburg.On Saturday, Democrats threw a watch party at the South Carolina state fairgrounds in Columbia, serving a buffet of meatballs, chicken, pasta, deviled eggs, fruit and vegetables. Red, white and blue flags were hung from the roof, tall blue curtains lined the walls, and the floor was carpeted blue and red. Two TV screens proclaimed “F1rst in the nati♥n”, the heart doubling as a map of South Carolina. There was a giant American flag behind the stage.The president was not present but Congressman James Clyburn, whose endorsement transformed Biden’s fortunes here four years ago, did get him on the phone and put him on loudspeaker, prompting whoops and cheers from the crowd.Biden said: “I hope you can hear me. So what happened?” Everyone laughed but then there was feedback on the mic.Harrison replied: “I think a lot of stuff happened here in South Carolina today for you, sir.” Biden asked: “What kind of turnout you got?”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionHarrison said: “Mr President, we’re waiting to get the final numbers but from what I’m told by some folks. I think you got it.” More laughter in the room.None of it said much about Biden’s chances in November. He has already moved into general election mode, unleashing on Trump in a series of speeches. A common sentiment among his supporters in South Carolina was puzzlement – and frustration – that his booming economy is not getting the credit it deserves. Polls show that many voters, including some Black voters, agree with his likely opponent’s slogan: “Better off under Trump.”There are other headaches too. As record numbers of migrants arrive at the southern border, Biden is criticised as too soft by the right and, as he now threatens draconian measures, too Trumpian by the left. Republicans say Biden botched the withdrawal from Afghanistan and displayed a weakness that emboldened Russia, Iran and Hamas, but progressives and Arab Americans are dismayed by his apparent lack of compassion for thousands of Palestinian dead.Finally, of course, there is the age question. At 81, Biden is the oldest president in American history. Would-be rivals such as Phillips and Nikki Haley are pushing the cause of a new generation. All these variables could matter in an election likely to be decided by gossamer-thin margins in a handful of swing states.Visiting his campaign headquarters in Wilmington, Delaware, on Saturday, Biden acknowledged: “It’s the weirdest campaign I’ve ever been engaged in.”But interviews with voters during primary season in Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina have offered a reminder of an undeniable fact: Trump remains toxic to huge swaths of the American population. They will do anything to stop him. A criminal conviction between now and November may make them redouble their efforts.America’s racial divisions will be at the heart of it again. Christale Spain, the first Black woman elected as chair of South Carolina’s Democratic party, recalled in an interview that her state’s primary following the Iowa and New Hampshire contests in past cycles meant “we were correcting the course, correcting the ship every time”.And in a speech to supporters, Harrison suggested that part of Biden’s legacy is that future Democratic candidates will have to earn, not take for granted, African American support. “We proved that the days of folks parachuting in on election day asking for our votes – those days are over,” he said. “We have an electorate that looks like today’s Democratic party and tomorrow’s America.” More