Ritu Jha-
“I said earlier this week that no matter what happens in South Carolina, I would continue to run for president. I’m a woman of my word…”
Nikki Haley may have lost the South Carolina Republican primary held Feb 24, to former president Donald Trump, but was planning for the long haul.
Haley, 52, had to settle for 39.2 percent of the votes; Trump, 71, got over 60 percent. This, despite facing several criminal changes.
“We need to beat Joe Biden in November,” she said after the loss. “Every day Trump drives people away. Today we got a 40 percent vote. That is what I got in New Hampshire. I know that is not 50 percent, but 40 percent is not a small number.”
She posted on X (formerly called Twitter), “I’m the proud daughter of legal immigrants from a small rural town in South Carolina. My mother was a lawyer in India and one of the first women to be selected to sit on the court. But because of the times, she never had the opportunity. Today, I got to stand by her as she cast her vote for her child to be president of the United States. And her grandchild got to vote for his mom. We are blessed to live in America.”
The next Republican primary is in Michigan on February 27. The most primaries will be held on Super Tuesday – March 5 – where 14 states will hold Republican primaries, including California, Colorado, Maine, Massachusetts, Minnesota, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Vermont, Virginia, Alabama, Alaska, and Arkansas.
Utkarsh Jain, a Republican, is running for California State Assembly from District 14.
Jain, 21, a student of economics at the University of California, Berkeley told indica that young people like him are not with Haley because her arguments are a legacy of the old GOP. He said Trump is against wars and that Haley has the support of Democrats who hate Trump and hope to divide the votes, and then vote for President Joe Biden in the presidential election.
Jain, who also supports and works with the national College Republican of America, an organization that is active in South Carolina told indica, “We work with them indirectly.”
He said the economy was doing badly, affecting young people trying to find a job or buying a house. Jain said the Democrats had destroyed the economy, especially in states like California.
He said that while Haley is a Republican, her donors, from the era of President George Bush, were pro-war.
“We don’t want to send billions and billions of dollars to some country we don’t know where it is on the map,” he said.
Asked if young voters were worried about criminal charges Trump faces, Jain said they had no merit, being politically motivated and orchestrated by Biden and his administration.
Meanwhile, South Carolina Democratic Rep. Jim Clyburn, a key advocate of President Joe Biden, told CNN on Saturday that former Gov. Nikki Haley’s projected loss in her home state was “not surprising” but said the former governor should stay in the race.
Clyburn said that Haley is “prepared to offer herself as an off-ramp” to Republicans “that they may need between now and the convention.”
In New Hampshire, Trump won with 54.6 percent of the vote, while Haley got 43.2 percent. In the Iowa caucuses, Haley stood third with 19.1 percent of the vote, whereas Trump won 51 percent. DeSantis received 21.2 percent and Vivek Ramaswamy garnered fewer than 8 percent of the vote.
