By Terry Hunsicker
On Jan. 21, following the Iowa republican caucus, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis announced that he would be dropping out of the race for the republican primaries, shifting the race to a battle between former president Donald Trump and former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley.
The two candidates are expected to focus their campaigns on the South Carolina Republican primary, which will be held on Feb. 24.
The republican primaries, held before the United States presidential election, decide through a series of state-based votes who will be the Republican nominee for the presidency. The winner of this cycle of primaries will face incumbent President Joe Biden in the 2024 presidential election.
According to a recent study from the Pew Research Center published on Jan. 25, Biden currently holds a 65% job disapproval rating to a performance approval rating of 33%. The same study estimates that 55% of Americans believe Biden will be remembered as an unsuccessful president.
538, a site managed by ABC News that collects and automatically tracks the latest approval and disapproval rating for presidents, estimates that Biden currently holds a 55.5% disapproval rating to an approval rating of 39.1%.
The republican primaries centered around the Iowa caucus, where notable candidates Ron DeSantis, Nikki Haley, and entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy contended as alternatives to Donald Trump for republican voters in the upcoming 2024 elections.
By the end of the Iowa Caucus, the Associated Press reported the election results as Donald Trump having won the caucus with 51% of the vote. In comparison, DeSantis trailed behind at 21.2%, followed by Nikki Haley at 19.1% and Vivek Ramaswamy at 7.7% of the total vote.
Ron DeSantis announced his dropping out of the primaries race through a video posted on the social media site X.
DeSantis endorses Trump’s campaign in the video: “It’s clear to me that a majority of Republican primary voters want to give Donald Trump another chance.”
Following the Iowa Caucus, Vivek Ramaswamy left the race and, like DeSantis, endorsed the Trump campaign.
Meeting with Trump at a campaign event in New Hampshire, crowds chanted “VP” during a moment captured by X user @BehizyTweets to support the young former candidate as a potential choice for vice president under Donald Trump.
The next battleground in the primaries was the New Hampshire primary between Donald Trump and Nikki Haley. New Hampshire, which allows independent voters to choose a primary to vote in without registering for a specific party, became a focus for Nikki Haley’s campaign, as reported by AP news, to perform well in the New Hampshire Republican primary.
Held on Jan. 23, AP reported that Donald Trump had won again with 54.3% of the vote while Nikki Haley received 43.2% of the New Hampshire votes.
Nikki Haley, in conceding New Hampshire, announced her intention to remain in the race until at least the South Carolina primaries, held in her home state where she served as governor from 2011 to as late as 2017 before becoming an ambassador to the United Nations during Trump’s presidency in 2018.