South Carolina Republicans told me why they want Trump and why Haley lost her home state

Contributing sentiments towards policy:

63% : The momentum that Trump has has been huge, and I think that's really important.
60% : He noted her surprise appearance on "Saturday Night Live" as another thing working against her, despite the fact that Trump hosted during his first campaign.
60% : They want Trump.
57% : In their February 7 endorsement, the club said Trump "came down on the D.C. status quo with a sledgehammer," and that Haley was "bought, sold, and owned by deranged billionaires."
44% : Noah Lindler, the Vice President of University of South Carolina's College Republicans chapter, said the decision to endorse Trump was unanimous among the club's executive board.
44% : "Even Republicans at Haley's former university passed on herClemson University's chapter also endorsed Trump.
43% : Prior to Saturday's election, I spoke with two college students about the decision of their campus groups to back Trump over Haley in South Carolina.
42% : A Suffolk University/USA TODAY poll from earlier in the week found that 63% of likely voters in South Carolina are for Trump, compared to the 35% supporting Haley.
41% : "A lot of us like Trump, like what he did when he was president," Lindler said.
38% : Our conversations affirmed what I assumed: that a hometown advantage doesn't matter when you're running against Trump.
24% : South Carolina college students dislike Nikki Haley's track recordFor younger Republican voters, the hometown connections weren't enough to pull them away from Trump.
19% : Talking to Trump supporters in South Carolina made it clear Haley had no chanceLooking back on these conversations, it's hard to see a world where Haley would have won South Carolina.
17% : Mitchell, meanwhile, disliked that Haley had gone back on her word; in 2022, she said she would not run for president if Trump were to seek re-election.
16% : In their February 2 endorsement of Trump, the group said they "miss when our border was being secured, terrorism was being rooted out and destroyed, and gasoline did not cost an arm and a leg.""There's always gonna be controversies with Donald Trump," Lindler told me.
12% : Not only do these students remember what life was like while Trump was in office, they are contrasting it with the last four years of Biden and assume that Trump is the only one strong enough to defeat him come November.

*Our bias meter rating uses data science including sentiment analysis, machine learning and our proprietary algorithm for determining biases in news articles. Bias scores are on a scale of -100% to 100% with higher negative scores being more liberal and higher positive scores being more conservative, and 0% being neutral. The rating is an independent analysis and is not affiliated nor sponsored by the news source or any other organization.