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 have their chance to weigh-in on 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 try and foil former President Donald Trump’s chances of a third straight GOP nomination.

But polling leading up to Election Day show Haley trailing the former president by an average of 30 points.

DailyMail.com breaks down what to watch on primary Election Day in South Carolina.

Trump Jr. was campaigning for his father Friday in South Carolina, a day before the state’s Republican primary, where the ex-president is nearly 30 points ahead of his final GOP rival, former U.N. ambassador and South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley.

At the Trump campaign’s South Carolina headquarters located in North Charleston, the former first son smacked around Republicans willing to fund Ukraine’s war effort against Russia.

‘I called out Mitch the Glitch,’ Trump Jr. said. ‘Can we find someone who doesn’t freeze up? It’s like Windows 92. Buffering, buffering, buffering.’

He later told DailyMail.com in a gaggle that he had someone in mind for McConnell’s replacement.

Nikki Haley has ramped up her perosnal attacks on Donald Trump in her final pleas to voters in her home state of South Carolina.

In Monkc Corner on Friday, she said: ‘In a general election, you’re given a choice. In a primary election you make your choice. This is the time for us to make our choice.’

A man in the crowd shouted to her ‘where is his wife?’ referring to Melania Trump.

The crowd laughed, but she didn’t respond.

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

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

Speaking to thousands of fired-up South Carolinian supporters at Winthrop Coliseum in Rock Hill, Trump predicted the largest stock market crash in U.S. history if he loses to President Biden in November.

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

Haley was hoping to garner support in her home state after losing Iowa, New Hampshire and Nevada, but all polls show Trump is still around 30 percentage points against the former governor of South Carolina.

If political advertising won elections, Republican presidential hopeful Nikki Haley would be completely crushing it in South Carolina against Donald Trump. But it doesn’t.

Haley and supporting groups have outspent the former GOP president nearly 15-to-1 ahead of the first in the south primary contest on Saturday. They have put about $15 million into ad buys while Trump’s campaign and supporting groups have spent a fraction of that at just over $1 million.

But in the days before the primary, the former president was leading Haley in polling by double-digits.

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

On Friday, Haley argued the goal in the contest is for it to be ‘competitive.’ She has been crisscrossing the state campaigning much more intensely than Trump while making her closing argument: the United States cannot have more of the same with President Biden and Trump. She has also sharpened her attacks on the former Republican president, and the closing ads promoting Haley reflect that.

In a 30-second Haley campaign spot playing across 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 cuts to images of Haley. The narrator continues ‘she ran to revive our state, she got it done.’  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 calling him ‘unhinged.’

Watching just an hour of primetime television in South Carolina, viewers were likely to be subjected to a barrage of Haley ads that often repeated.

In Nikki Haley’s birthplace of Bamberg, those who know her are with her ‘all the way’ in Saturday’s South Carolina Republican primary, but former President Donald Trump will still likely capture a majority in her home county.

DailyMail.com ventured to the rural town Thursday, for the last day of early voting ahead of Saturday’s pivotal race, where Trump is expected to trounce the former South Carolina governor in her home state.

A slow stream of voters showed up through the afternoon to an annex of the Bamberg County Courthouse – with a majority saying they were backing Trump – but not those who knew Haley personally.

‘I love Nikki like she’s a daughter,’ said 79-year-old Joyce McMillan. ‘She is the most honest, intelligent, fast-learning person I think I have ever met,’ she said of the Republican presidential hopeful.’

McMillan was an accountant for Haley’s parents when they ran a store in downtown Bamberg and taught the former U.N. ambassador the craft as a young girl.

‘I ended up teaching her all the spreadsheets and the financial stuff of the shop when she was only 13 years old,’ McMillan told DailyMail.com. ‘When I left the business she took over, just at 13, and she’s just super smart.’

McMillan said her daughter and Haley are close friends – and roomed together at 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 no matter what the results of the South Carolina Republican presidential primary on Saturday.

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

It has been more than 50 years since a Republican presidential candidate has not carried their home state and still gone on to clinch the GOP presidential nomination.

The year was 1968, and Richard Nixon did not win California, the state he once represented in Congress, but he still won the nomination.

The winner of California that Republican presidential primary season was the state’s governor, Ronald Reagan. Nixon did go on to win California in November.

Donald Trump will use a major speech to conservatives Saturday to underline the choice facing them in November’s election, warning that four more years of President Joe Biden will unleash extremist forces on the country.

Polls suggest he is on course for a landslide primary win over Nikki Haley, his last remaining rival for the Republican nomination, on her home turf of South Carolina later in the day.

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

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

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