Former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley has yet to win a presidential primary, but she has refused to suspend her campaign.
Haley maintains that she’s trending up. She performed better in each successive race from Iowa to New Hampshire, and she’s boasting home-field advantage ahead of South Carolina’s primary on Saturday.
“We wanted to be strong in Iowa. We wanted to be stronger than that in New Hampshire. We’re going to be even stronger than that in South Carolina,” Haley said during New Hampshire’s primary last month.
But even after this upswing, Haley’s campaign is headed for a sizable defeat in South Carolina, according to a dramatic new poll.
Pollsters at Emerson College asked 1,000 registered voters within two weeks of the primary, and the poll found Haley polling at only 35 percent support in her home state. They found only 70 undecided voters, out of 1,000.
By contrast, former President Donald Trump was polling at 58 percent. Plus, he was polling at 61 percent when the undecided voters were asked to pick a candidate.
This poll isn’t an outlier. The poll average in The Hill showed Trump winning the Palmetto State by 32 points.
Another poll — USA Today‘s landline survey of 500 “very likely” voters — shows Trump polling at 63 percent to Haley’s 35 percent.
That margin is almost two to one, and it’s greater than Trump’s margin of victory over Florida Sen. Marco Rubio in the Sunshine State’s 2016 primary.
Still, Haley described herself as “OK being the underdog now.” She’s continuing to collect donor money, and she’s supercharged her strategy of appealing to swing voters. In fact, her campaign aides expect her to remain in the race through Super Tuesday next month.
South Carolina has an open primary. Voters don’t need to register with a party to vote in a primary election. They only need to register with the secretary of state.
At a campaign event Sunday, Haley pointed out that anyone who didn’t vote in the Democrats’ Feb. 3 primary — which attracted under 5 percent of eligible voters statewide — can vote in this one.
Haley is trying to correct her downward trajectory by recruiting swing voters… but if these polls are any indication, she would need a miracle-sized turnout to right the ship.
Read more: Nikki Haley just made a bold Super Tuesday promise
The Horn editorial team and the Associated Press contributed to this article.