Fox News and the South Carolina Republican Primary - Will Nikki Haley Go Rogue?
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The weekly podcast/newsletter will be published within the next 24 hours. The primary was on a Saturday which threw off my schedule. So no worries, it’s coming.
Fox News loves a Republican primary. The network turns primaries and caucuses into all day affairs with programming starting at 6:00 a.m. with the hosts of “Fox & Friends,” smiling in casual clothing as a marching band blasts songs after every commercial break.
Donald J. Trump’s victory in the South Carolina Republican primary was a foregone conclusion. Most polls predicted Trump would beat Nikki Haley by 30 points.
The fact that Trump only beat Haley by 20 points was never once mentioned during the two-hour primary night special. Twenty-points is an enormous win, but it was another recent example of pollsters predicting rosier outcomes for Trump and other Republican candidates.
Instead of solely focusing on the entirely predictable horse race between two candidates Fox News producers decided to weave in segments about a recent crime story and the border crisis to promote the xenophobic narrative of dangerous migrants invading the United States.
South Carolina Primary Special - 7 p.m. EST
Martha MacCallum - cohost - Fox News
Bret Baier - cohost - Fox News
Fox News Correspondents
Alexandria Hoff - Fox News (Trump HQ)
Mark Meredith - Fox News (Haley HQ)
Bill Hemmer - Fox News (election map)
The bulk of the primetime coverage was shot from Fox News headquarters in New York City while producers occasionally checked in with correspondents in South Carolina. Interestingly that morning “Fox & Friends Weekend” moved their entire team to a studio in the Palmetto State.
About thirty seconds into the broadcast Fox News declared Donald J. Trump as the winner then quickly cut to his victory speech. Trump blathered on for nearly 25 minutes.
Trump’s speech was a meandering mess of his usual lies about various topics and his record as president. He also thanked any number of politicians and was surprised with the crowd loudly booed Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) and chairman of the South Carolina Republican Party Drew McKissick.
Trump started out by saying how great things were happening the U.S. but it was accompanied by great horror as he went on about the border crisis at length.
“Something is going on in the country. Some really great things are going on. You look outside and you see all of the horror . . . You have terrorists coming in. You have people coming in that we just can't. We can't who could have could sustain what's happening to the United States of America? No. Ever. There's never been a spirit like this.”
Trump appeared completely delusional about the state of his party.
“And I just want to say that I have never seen the Republican Party so unified as it is right now.”
Later as he called up Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) and Drew McKissick the South Carolina chairman of the Republican Party they were both loudly booed by the crowd.
Trump also promoted lies about the 2020 presidential election.
“You know, that evening of 2020, with those votes coming in, we're leading in Pennsylvania. And all of a sudden something happened. It went boom and then were leading all over the place, Georgia, and then boom, and we're leading. But North Carolina, I said, when is North Carolina? Is that going to go one? Are they going to drop lots of ballots into that one?”
Then Trump jokingly encouraged the South Carolina governor to pull strings to change the date of the general election.
“I just wish we could do it quicker, Mr. Governor. I wish. Is there anything you can do with your vast powers to make that, you know, in certain countries you're allowed to call your election date? If I had the right to do it, I'd do it tomorrow.”
Trump then complained that the election process wasn’t quick enough while implying again that the 2020 election was stolen.
“We used to have election night. Now we have election period because some of these elections go on for 48 days, 61 days. Then they announce they get all this equipment and they announce they'll be announcing the vote in three weeks from now. Can you imagine?”
Sandra Smith and the Fox News Voter Analysis
After Trump’s speech MacCallum and Baier introduced Sandra Smith and the Fox News Voter Analysis. Smith stood before a large touch screen as she scrolled through the results of approx. 2000 likely Republican primary voters in South Carolina.
“Where Trump was strongest with voters on the ground there, the MAGA voters and Make America Great Again followers, 87% of them supported Donald Trump. The very conservatives, 84% support Trump among the rural residents there, they gave him 75%, 72% of white evangelical voters and 71% without college degrees went for Donald Trump . . . for the record, by the way. Nikki Haley does have lower support in each of those areas except for mental capacity.
Although Smith downplayed this section of the data it’s clear from the survey that only a slim majority or Republican voters in South Carolina think Trump did nothing wrong in regards to his attempts to overturn the election while only 44% of Republican voters thought that Trump did nothing wrong when handling classified documents.
Smith moved on to data that showed some warning signs for the Trump campaign.
“Haley does edge out Donald Trump by a couple of points there. She got 76% who believe she has the mental capacity to serve . . . One of our top findings does show a bit of weakness for Trump, though. And it was this question we put to voters about whether or not he is too extreme to win in the general election. More than one quarter of GOP primary voters say he is too extreme to win in November.
That's about twice as many as feel that way about Nikki Haley. And finally, you have to wonder if all those Nikki Haley voters will go on to support Donald Trump in November if he does indeed become the eventual nominee. So here's the findings when we asked. 39% say they'll stay with the GOP nominee. But look at that number, 59% who are supporting Nikki Haley say they will not go on to support Donald Trump in the general election. That's among Republican primary voters,” said Smith.
First Panel
Dana Perino - former White House Press Secretary (George W. Bush). Fox News
Kellyanne Conway - former senior counsel for President Trump, Fox News
Jessica Tarlov - Fox News
Paul Mauro - former NYPD inspector
Trey Gowdy - former congressperson (R-SC), Fox News
Brit Hume - Fox News
Trey Gowdy started with some harsh words for Nikki Haley.
“As for Nikki Haley having a strategy where you wait for your opponent to catch a bad cold or a good conviction is not going to be a winning strategy. That was the only explanation for why she would stay in. Is some health calamity or hoping he gets convicted. And I don't think either going to happen,” said Gowdy.
Jessica Tarlov pointed out that Nikki Haley voters could remain a problem for Trump in the primary election.
“The big election is November 5th. And that's what Democrats are certainly focused on. Independents and 59% of Nikki Haley's voters say they won't support him in the general election if the Republican nominee. That mirrors what we have been seeing in Iowa and New Hampshire, and that's really what he needs to work on,” said Tarlov.
Tarlov also noted that if Nikki Haley was trying to woo any Democratic voters her strategy wasn’t working.
“The other thing was hearing from people who live in South Carolina, in blue epicenters and Charleston and talking about the Nikki Haley ads and the content, and they were all about how she's going to beat Joe Biden. And guess what? Democrats don't want to hear that if they are even open to conversion, if they are even disaffected Democrats, they want to be talking about beating Donald Trump at this moment. And then she would have, from the day that she becomes the nominee until Election Day to convert them,” said Tarlov.
Bill Hemmer went over data on the election board.
“In 2016 immigration checked in at 10% this year it’s at 50%. So all these stories we've been doing down on the border, Bill Melugin and Griff Jenkins and all our teams down there for the past three years. And you think about the story that broke in Athens, Georgia, over the past couple of days. Don't think that that's not on the minds of people in South Carolina as they were talking to us over the past week down there,” said Hemmer.
It struck me that Hemmer noted how heavily Fox News had pushed stories about the border crisis. In 2023 the border crisis was in the top five topics discussed on the shows I covered on Fox News.
I couldn’t help but wonder if Republican voters scared about immigration because of what they saw in their communities or what they saw on their favorite cable news channel?
Martha MacCallum picked up Hemmer’s talking points.
“And that was clearly something that the former president emphasized when he came out tonight. He knows that the concern that he expressed way back in 2015 when he came down the escalator about immigration is now an even more potent issue across this country. And we see it in all the polling,” said MacCallum.
After a brief visit to Haley headquarters Bret Baier shifted to a recent crime story involving the murder of a nursing student in Athens, Georgia. The main suspect in the case, Jose Antonio Ibarra, was identified as a recently arrived immigrant for Venezuela.
The producers spent two minutes on the story then cut to a brief segment with Bill Melugin reporting at some kind of drop off point for undocumented immigrants in San Diego, California.
Fox then cut back to the Fox News studio.
“You wonder why this is a big issue. You wonder why it really irks people about this. These stories we've been doing for years along the border . . .he's been covering this since the beginning and that's why people are so P.O.'d (pissed off).” said Baier.
Second Panel
Juan Williams - Fox News
Dana Perino - former White House Press Secretary (George W. Bush), Fox News
Kayleigh McEnany - former White House Press Secretary (Trump), Fox News
Paul Mauro - former NYPD inspector
Martha MacCallum transitioned to the story about the nursing student murder in Athens, Georgia.
“You know, this horrific crime that happened in Georgia, I believe we are going to be hearing about this case throughout the course of this election. This young woman could be anyone's daughter. She is dead at the hands of this person from Venezuela who's in the country illegally,” said MacCallum.
Paul Mauro made a number of assumptions about migrants from Venezuela but offered no evidence to back up his claims.
“Let's move beyond that to recognize that it does appear, particularly from Venezuela, That does seem to be an effort to empty out the prisons and the insane asylums just like we had in 1980 and bring them here. But what you also have is the Soros prosecutors, for lack of a better term, and all of these things are coming together in a place like New York, Chicago, San Francisco, etc., where there are mechanisms to prosecute this stuff to keep these people inside doesn't exist. And I don't have to speculate. We saw it here with those Venezuelan gang members who attacked the police in Times Square,” said Mauro.
Perino brought up Chris LaCivita, a Republican political consultant.
“Chris LaCivita works for President Trump. He's a great presidential campaign genius when it comes to ads. He did the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth ads in 2004, which really helped George W Bush become of in a very close election with John Kerry. And do you think that, Chris LaCivita will not be able to take all of the video that we have seen about these migrants and destroy Joe Biden's message making its own campaign ads every day for their team for sure,” said Perino.
The entire segment was dedicated to the border crisis. The moderators shifted the focus to President Biden’s border policies and the stalled bill in Congress.
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