Trump wins in South Carolina GOP primary; Rubio leads Cruz in battle for second place

COLUMBIA, S.C. —Donald Trump won the South Carolina primary on Saturday night, sustaining his position as the front-runner for the Republican presidential nomination.

Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida appeared to have very narrowly defeated Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas for second place.

Voters delivered a devastating verdict to former Florida governor Jeb Bush, scion of a political dynasty with deep roots in this state. Bush came in well behind the top three, not even passing 10 percent after he and his family made an impassioned last stand in South Carolina and his allied super PAC spent millions of dollars on advertising.

Bush announced he would suspend his campaign in remarks to supporters Saturday night, calling on Republican voters to nominate “someone who will serve with honor and with decency.”

Speaking to his supporters moments after Bush dropped out of the race, Trump mocked political pundits who have predicted that a winnowed field could prove fatal to his candidacy.

“They don’t understand: As people drop out, I’m going to get a lot of those votes also,” he said. “You don’t just add them together.”

Trump congratulated Cruz and Rubio on their showings; he did not mention Bush, whom he relentlessly mocked on the campaign trail as “low-energy.”

In his remarks, Trump did not show any sign of engaging in the high-minded campaign Bush discussed: “There’s nothing easy about running for president, I can tell you. It’s tough, it’s nasty, it’s mean, it’s vicious, it’s beautiful.”

Trump prevailed after a rocky week on the campaign trail by tapping into the frustrations and anxieties of voters here with his red-hot rhetoric about combating terrorism and ending illegal immigration, brushing aside what appeared to be a condemnation from Pope Francis.

Rubio gave triumphant remarks at around 9:15 p.m., when returns gave him a roughly 3,500 vote lead over Cruz -- who has staked his candidacy on a strong showing in southern states.

“After tonight, this has become a three-person race, and we will win the nomination,” Rubio said.

Falling roughly 900 votes behind Rubio with over 97 percent of precincts reporting, Cruz told supporters “we are effectively tied for second place” and said his campaign was again “defying expectations.”

But expectations were that Cruz, who has focused much of his messaging and turnout machine on evangelical voters, would do better among that group than the 27 percent he won, according to preliminary exit polls. Trump outperformed Cruz in that key group, and non-evangelical Christians who did not vote for Trump broke instead for Rubio and Ohio Gov. John Kasich.

Only South Carolina’s Republicans voted Saturday; Democrats will vote Feb. 27. Earlier Saturday, former secretary of state Hillary Clinton narrowly defeated Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders in the Democratic caucus vote in Nevada, a victory that boosts her going into the South Carolina primary next week.

According to Edison Media Research, the estimated turnout in South Carolina was about 20 percent of all eligible voters in the state. That roughly ties the record of 19.9 percent in 2000 and is higher than 17.6 percent in 2012 and 13.8 percent in 2008, according to the U.S. Elections Project.

South Carolina’s primary has a history of identifying the eventual nominee and often embracing the establishment’s choice of candidates. The pattern was broken four years ago when former House speaker Newt Gingrich handily defeated Mitt Romney, the eventual nominee.

Establishment Republicans have yet to fully coalesce around an alternative to Trump, although Rubio, who stumbled in New Hampshire, hopes to rebound in Saturday’s balloting in South Carolina and cement himself in that role.

Regardless of how sweeping Trump’s victory is, he will likely jump well ahead of his rivals in the race for convention delegates. South Carolina’s 50 delegates are awarded on a modified winner-take-all basis. By winning the state, he wins 29 delegates, with the rest awarded based on the individual winners in South Carolina’s seven congressional districts.

Going into Saturday’s primary, Cruz had 11 delegates, Rubio had 10, and Trump had 17. More than 1,200 delegates are needed to secure the nomination, with more than 600 delegates at stake in the March 1 primaries and caucuses.

Exit polling found that more than seven in 10 South Carolina voters Saturday identified themselves as a born-again or evangelical Christian -- a group that has been a key source of support for Cruz, and one that helped power Gingrich’s win in the state four years ago. But the exit polls found that Trump narrowly edged Cruz among evangelical voters, while leading by a double-digit margin among non-evangelical voters.

A vast majority of voters -- roughly eight in 10 -- consider themselves conservative, according to preliminary, up from 68 percent who said the same in the 2012 South Carolina Republican contest.

Significant numbers of voters accused Trump and Cruz of running unfair campaigns, and about four in 10 voters said they had made their decision in just the past few days. Roughly 60 percent of those late-deciding voters picked Cruz or Rubio; less than one-fifth chose Trump.

In Greenville, S.C., Stephanie Thorn went into a small room early Saturday at the West End Community Center to cast her ballot for Rubio while her husband waited outside with their young son. She said she likes Rubio’s conservative values and believes he’s the candidate best suited to carry the GOP to victory in November.

“I think he has just a really good chance of winning because he’s very well liked, especially with the Hispanic community,” Thorn, 30, said, calling Cruz and Trump “too divisive” to prevail in a general election. “He just seems like a really good guy.”

Her husband, Coben, 30, also voted Saturday but cast his vote for Cruz.

“I thought he had the best chance to beat Trump in this state. I’m not as socially conservative as he is, but I like his tax plan,” he said.

They both cited Trump’s dominance in the campaign thus far as reasons for casting their ballots for his opponents.

“I get why people like him. He says how things are a lot of times, but I feel like he’s too much of a loose cannon,” Stephanie said. “I feel like if you put nuclear codes in a guy’s hands like that and he was having a bad day, or — I don’t know, I feel like he could mess up relations with a lot of people.”

Trump has tapped anti-immigration sentiment, in particular, and has drawn energy from working-class white voters, putting establishment candidates on the defensive in a state where they have traditionally done well.

“There is a shift in the establishment and thinking of Republicans in South Carolina from mainstream, center-right Republicans to angry, hard-right Republicans,” said Kaeton Dawson, a former South Carolina Republican Party chairman who is not aligned with any candidate. “It’s a monumental shift against the pillars of our society: our government and our elected officials.”

No establishment candidate was more threatened than Jeb Bush, once the nominal front-runner for the GOP nomination.

In brief remarks Saturday night, Bush acknowledged that “the people of Iowa and New Hampshire and South Carolina have spoken” but said he hoped the candidate “left on the island” would pursue a more high-minded course through campaign.

“Despite what you may have heard,” he said, “ideas matter, policy matters.”

Ohio Gov. John Kasich, meanwhile, was hoping for a finish just strong enough to justify his focus on the March 8 Michigan primary as his best hope for a victory.

The tone of the South Carolina campaign has been overwhelmingly negative, and not only because of the millions of dollars in attack ads that flooded television stations in the final week. The candidates themselves have carried on an acrid dialogue in which the words “liar” and “lying” have been injected into campaign rhetoric at a volume rarely seen even in a state known for brutal intra­party contests.

In the last hours before the primary, Trump sought to brush off two recent controversies — one involving former president George W. Bush, whom Trump accused of lying about the existence of weapons of mass destruction in the run-up to the Iraq War in 2003, and the other with Pope Francis, who criticized Trump’s proposal of building a wall along the Mexican border as being “not Christian.”

During a town hall meeting hosted by CNN on Thursday night, Trump softened his tone toward the pontiff and equivocated when pressed by a voter about whether he truly believed that Bush had lied before launching the invasion.

Costa reported from Charleston, S.C., and DeBonis reported from Washington. Jenna Johnson in North Charleston, S.C.; Jose A. DelReal, Sean Sullivan and Ed O’Keefe in Greenville, S.C.; Dan Balz in Charleston, S.C., and Scott Clement in Washington contributed to this report.