PBS NewsHour | Tamara Keith and Amy Walter on South Carolina's primary | Season 2024 | KQED

WILLIAM BRANGHAM: The presidential primary season could come closer to an effective end later this week after voters in South Carolina finished casting their votes on Saturday.

Meanwhile, there is no end in sight for former President Trump’s legal troubles or for the debate on Capitol Hill over continuing funding for Ukraine’s defense.

For more on all of this, we turn to our Politics Monday analysts, Amy Walter of The Cook Political Report With Amy Walter and Tamara Keith of NPR.

Welcome to you both.

So nice to see you.

Thanks for being here on the holiday.

Tam, let’s talk about South Carolina.

Trump has a commanding 30-point lead, if you believe all the polls, over former U.N.

Ambassador and former Governor of South Carolina Nikki Haley.

If she gets totally blown out of the water in her home state, how does she go forward?

TAMARA KEITH, National Public Radio: She just proceeds forward without a mandate to proceed, which has been her entire time in this primary.

She says, we have got it down to the race I want.

It’s just me against Trump.

And guess what?

Republican primary voters seem to want Trump.

So she is saying that she’s going to keep competing through Super Tuesday at least.

She’s been out — and that’s in early March, March 5.

She’s been out to several of those states to hold events.

She’s also been holding a lot of events in South Carolina.

Trump has held very few, but he may not need to, it turns out.

So she can keep going as long as she has the money to keep going and as long as she’s willing to sort of take whatever political damage comes from losing a lot.

AMY WALTER: That’s the question.

Is it political damage, or is she positioning herself in a way that she can get something politically from doing this?

Everybody comes in… WILLIAM BRANGHAM: Something like what?

AMY WALTER: Well, is she going to be a — the voice — somebody wrote the other day — the voice of “I told you so” after the election?

She’s been saying over and over again on the campaign trail, he can’t win.

Every time Trump has been on the ballot, he’s lost.

Our candidates have lost.

And so, if he does lose in 2024, people look to her and say, oh, right, she was the one who told us all along, and we will now look to her for other political advice going forward.

That may not happen, but that’s certainly one pathway.

The other is, you’re hearing from folks from the wing of the party, some known as the anti-Trump wing, others in the former establishment wing, the sort of Reagan wing of the party, that she will continue to carry that torch going forward, that there will always be this element in the Republican Party of a strong, interventionist, culturally, but mostly fiscally conservative party, and that, even though Trump is ascendant now, she will be the one carrying that piece of the party and their agenda forward in whatever form that takes.

Theoretically, you could go forward and amass a bunch of delegates and then have some leverage going into a party convention.

But the way that the process works — South Carolina is one of these — it’s a winner-take-all system.

AMY WALTER: So, even getting 40 percent of the vote gets you zero.

TAMARA KEITH: Nothing.

WILLIAM BRANGHAM: Right.

AMY WALTER: It’s not like the Democrats.

WILLIAM BRANGHAM: Empty-handed.

WILLIAM BRANGHAM: Do you think that is her calculation here, that she — it just seems that — I understand the theory that you’re describing, but it seems that the GOP is not interested in having a principled, Republican-esque critic in its midst?

TAMARA KEITH: Certainly not.

And just look at who former President Trump wants to lead the Republican Party.

He wants to get rid of an RNC chairwoman who has been pretty darn loyal to him and replace him… WILLIAM BRANGHAM: This is Ronna McDaniel.

TAMARA KEITH: And replace Ronna McDaniel with… WILLIAM BRANGHAM: His daughter-in-law.

TAMARA KEITH: … his daughter-in-law… WILLIAM BRANGHAM: Right.

TAMARA KEITH: … with his own — with members of his own family.

WILLIAM BRANGHAM: Right, Lara Trump.

TAMARA KEITH: The longer Nikki Haley stays in this primary, it’s not that it helps her with the delegate math, but the longer she stays in, the more Trump’s challenges, legal challenges, financial challenges, all of these issues, the longer they have to come to light.

Now we know that there’s a trial that will start in New York on March 25, as long as it sticks.

He’s had this big ruling against him, huge fines and fees that he has to pay.

So she is able to more clearly make the argument she’s been making all along, which is like whoa, whoa, whoa, is this really who we want to nominate?

But then it still comes back to the same problem.

In the Republican primary, the answer is yes.

AMY WALTER: It’s still yes.

WILLIAM BRANGHAM: Right.

The primary voters have been crystal clear about that thus far.

AMY WALTER: Yes.

Yes.

WILLIAM BRANGHAM: Let’s talk about that, the — some of the legal troubles that Tam is bringing up, huge, multi — multi — hundreds of millions of dollars, which could be a potential dent on his ability to spend money going forward, but also the Stormy Daniels case, the January 6 case, potentially, maybe Georgia, maybe Mar-a-Lago in the classified documents.

I know you’re always reluctant to say that this will have an impact or not.

But do you think that any of those cases could meaningfully change this election?

AMY WALTER: Yes, so it is a question that is going to get asked a lot throughout the entirety of this campaign.

Right now, it feels like, for so many voters, this is white noise.

Even these judgments against Donald Trump have not gotten any sort of traction.

AMY WALTER: It hasn’t changed the math in the Republican primary and it certainly hasn’t changed it in the general election.

So the question becomes, if there is a criminal — if there’s criminal liability, he’s found guilty in one of these cases you mentioned, the documents case or January 6, is that going to change people’s mind?

I think what’s going to be fascinating to watch is, first of all, how this question gets asked voters.

Right now, it’s very hypothetical.

And then, if something does happen, do voters opinions of it change over time, that the immediate reaction may be different from, as Tam pointed out, are we really going to do this, once we get to October and November, where you could see voters rallying behind Trump maybe.

You could also see them saying, no, I’m not going to vote for him, but then rally around him at the end.

This is also going to take an effort, I think, on the Biden campaign’s part to make this part of the campaign, right?

It’s not just this event is going to happen, and then organically voters are going to end up where they end up.

The job of the opposition campaign is to make that certainly a centerpiece.

WILLIAM BRANGHAM: Is Biden going to do that?

Because he’s thus far been reluctant to touch Trump’s legal woes.

When they have been obvious targets to shoot at, he has not.

TAMARA KEITH: Biden has been reluctant personally.

His campaign has also been extremely reluctant.

They feel like the legal challenges that Trump has get a lot of attention.

Just think about he had — there were dueling court hearings last week, and he got to hold court outside of the courthouse both before the trial date was set and then afterwards.

He’s getting a lot of attention about this.

For now, at least, they think it’s getting enough attention.

They’d like voters to focus on what does this mean for them, rather than what does this mean for Donald Trump?

And they’re struggling to get voters to actually focus on that.

They’re struggling with that message, but they’re trying to figure out how to do it.

I think that, for Trump, these first cases on the calendar, if you look at it, the civil cases that — and penalties that he’s faced in New York, the next case being the Stormy Daniels hush money/campaign finance violation and cooking the books, or — that’s not the right phrase — but those cases are all in New York.

He’s done a fairly good job of convincing definitely Republican voters, but even people who are not Republican voters, that these… WILLIAM BRANGHAM: These are New York City liberals who hate me.

AMY WALTER: That’s right.

(CROSSTALK) TAMARA KEITH: Yes, these are New York City liberals who hate me.

These cases shouldn’t count against me.

This is a — this, this is particularly a witch-hunt.

You don’t necessarily get to a case where voters haven’t had — haven’t been convinced of this, you don’t get out of New York for quite some time in the calendar.

WILLIAM BRANGHAM: Let’s shift across the Atlantic for a second.

The Munich Security Conference just wrapped up this weekend.

We just saw Nick’s tremendous interview with the Polish foreign minister talking about this yearning for Europe to know where America stands.

Are we going to support Ukraine?

Are we not?

AMY WALTER: That’s right.

WILLIAM BRANGHAM: I mean, they just lost a city to the Russians, theoretically, reportedly, because they ran out of ammunition.

What do you think comes out of that conference?

We saw very dueling views.

AMY WALTER: They did get dueling visions, quite clear dueling visions.

You have the vice president there saying, we are standing with Ukraine.

We do see this as a Central America’s role here.

And then you saw somebody like J.D.

Vance, the senator from Ohio, who was there basically as a Trump surrogate, we could say, who said in his remarks that we — yes, we like Europe, we like NATO, but don’t see Putin as an existential threat to Europe, and that that is something, if you’re a European, you probably do not like to hear that.

And he basically said, we will stay part of NATO, but we don’t see that as important as we do other places in the world, especially the fight with China.

WILLIAM BRANGHAM: Lastly, Tam, do you see that the Republican move away from supporting Ukraine, which used to be they were in lockstep with the Democrats, and now they are not, does that hurt them in an election?

TAMARA KEITH: Generally speaking, foreign policy is not what decides elections.

Now, this could be the year where that changes, but it also could be the year where that doesn’t change, where you continue the pattern where people think about their own lives.

They look inward.

They look to the United States, and they’re not looking at foreign policy in that way.

AMY WALTER: And unless Putin, something really does happen in Europe, and then that’s a different calculation.

WILLIAM BRANGHAM: Amy Walter and Tamara Keith, so nice to see you both.

(CROSSTALK) TAMARA KEITH: Great to see you.