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 get a chance to assess their preferred candidate on Saturday.

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

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

DailyMail.com explains what to watch on South Carolina primary election day.

Former President Donald Trump railed against Nikki Haley and Joe Biden at his final rally before the South Carolina primaries.

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

In his speech to thousands of excited South Carolina supporters at the Winthrop Coliseum in Rock Hill, Trump predicted the biggest scholarship crash into American history if he loses to President Biden in November.

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

Haley hoped to gain support in her home state after the defeat Iowa, New Hampshire And Nevadabut all polls show that Trump is still around 30 percentage points ahead of the former governor of South Carolina.

If political advertising were to win the election, Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley would completely crush Donald Trump in South Carolina. But that’s not true.

Haley and supporting groups have outscored the former GOP president nearly 15 to 1 ahead of the first in the Southern primaries on Saturday. They have poured about $15 million into ad buys, while Trump’s campaign and supporting groups have spent a fraction of that, just over $1 million.

But in the days before the primaries, former President Haley led in the polls by double digits.

In the USA Today/Suffolk poll of likely Republican primary voters, Trump was at 63 percent, while Haley was at 35 percent in her home state.

On Friday, Haley argued that the purpose of the contest is for it to be “competitive.” She has scoured the state campaigns far more intensely than Trump, while making her closing argument: The United States cannot have more of the same with Presidents Biden and Trump. She has also stepped up her attacks on the former Republican president, and the closing ads promoting Haley reflect that.

In a 30-second Haley campaign spot showing in South Carolina television markets, images of Trump and Biden are shown as a narrator says, “When your country is divided, your president must unite us.” It’s about images of Haley. The narrator continues, “She ran to revive our state, she did it.” It ends with Haley saying she’s 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 went after Trump and called him “unhinged.”

If South Carolina viewers watched just an hour of primetime television, they were likely to be exposed to a barrage of Haley ads that repeated often.

In Nikki Haley’s hometown of Bamberg, those who know her are “all the way” with her during Saturday’s Republican primaries in South Carolina, but former President Donald Trump is still likely to win a majority in her home state.

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

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

“I love Nikki like she is a daughter,” said 79-year-old Joyce McMillan. “She is the most honest, intelligent and quick-witted person I have ever met,” she said of the Republican presidential candidate.”

McMillan was an accountant for Haley’s parents when they ran a shop in central Bamberg and he taught the former UN ambassador the trade as a young girl.

“I ended up teaching her all the spreadsheets and the financials of the store when she was just 13 years old,” McMillan told DailyMail.com. “When I left the company, she took over, just at the age of 13, and she’s just super smart.”

McMillan said her daughter and Haley are good friends and stay together in Clemson.

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

Nikki Haley has vowed to stay in the race regardless of the outcome of Saturday’s Republican presidential primary in South Carolina.

But history is not on her side. In most cases, losing a primary in the home state is considered a death blow to the campaign.

It has been more than fifty years since a Republican presidential candidate failed to carry his home state and still won the Republican presidential nomination.

It was 1968 and Richard Nixon didn’t win California, the state he once represented in Congress, but he still won the nomination.

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

Donald Trump will use an important speech conservatives Saturday to underscore the choice they face in the November election and warn of four more years as president Joe Biden will unleash extremist forces on the country.

Polls show him on track for a landslide victory in the primaries Nikki Haleyhis last remaining rival for the Republican nomination later in the day on her home turf of South Carolina.

And aides say he will all but ignore her challenge for the rest of the race, focusing his fire on Biden instead.

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

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