South Carolina Republican primary 2016: updates and results

Donald Trump won the Republican primary in South Carolina, which is clearly bad news for GOP elites. But zoom out on the night, and the picture looks a little bit better for them.

Specifically, Marco Rubio now seems increasingly likely to be the last candidate standing against Trump — especially now that Jeb Bush has quit the race.

Donald Trump took the stage for his South Carolina primary victory speech in true Trump fashion Saturday, with a jab at Marco Rubio, a jab at the media, and a crowd cheering for Mexico to pay for a $10 billion border wall.

Trump cemented his place as the GOP frontrunner with a more than 10-point lead over second-place tied finishers Rubio and Ted Cruz at the first Southern state primary, gaining momentum for the Republican caucuses in Nevada next week.

Jeb Bush launched his presidential campaign’s exploratory committee on December 16, 2014, the presumptive Republican nominee. He ended his campaign on February 20, 2016, a broken man.

Bush’s campaign (and the pro-Jeb super PAC Right to Rise) spent more than $100 million on his run. He won no states. And for the past several months, he’s been in the news mostly for all the wrong reasons: desperate donors, misspent money, jokes that aren’t really jokes. He’s been a loser for almost as long as he was a presumptive winner.

A big multi-candidate primary field allows for more than one winner alongside plenty of losers, and the South Carolina Republican primary was no exception.

Donald Trump took first place, of course. And delegates were handed out. But these are still early days. The real prize in South Carolina — like Iowa and New Hampshire before it — is momentum in the media and with donors and other supporters. It’s a war of position, as candidates try to set themselves up for the real delegate prizes that are coming in March. And for local, national, and global figures who aren’t currently running for president, it’s about how the race helps them advance their own agendas.

Donald Trump just won today’s South Carolina Republican primary, according to calls by NBC News, Fox News, and the Associated Press. This is the billionaire’s most important win yet, and it firmly establishes him as the Republican presidential frontrunner.

The votes are still being counted, so the final margin isn’t known. But the media outlets’ quick calls of the race indicate that things weren’t all that close.

Jeb Bush has finally admitted what’s been obvious for months: Republican voters don’t want him to be their presidential nominee.

So after an embarrassing finish behind the top three candidates in the South Carolina primary, Bush announced that he was withdrawing from the race.

Today, South Carolina will become the third state to cast its ballots in the Republican nomination contest. Polls in the state will be open until 7 pm Eastern. Democrats in the state, however, won’t vote today — instead, they’ll do so one week later, on Saturday, February 27.

South Carolina is the first state from the South to weigh in and the most delegate-rich state to vote so far. But, like its fellow early-voting states of Iowa and New Hampshire, South Carolina is more important for how it can reshape the political world’s perceptions of the race than it is for its delegates.

Update: On March 13, 2016 I realized I was wrong about this.

When not delighting in the epic meltdown of establishment Republican Party politics, many people I know — my wife, my boss, etc. — are expressing terror at the notion that Donald Trump might actually become president of the United States.

The headlines were everywhere Thursday: Pope Francis said that Donald Trump is “not Christian” because of his views on immigration. That’s how NPR, Yahoo News, and many other outlets, including Vox, reported it.

But there was quickly was some pushback. Some commentators argued the pope’s comments had been taken out of context by the media, and that if you looked closely at what he said, Francis didn’t intend to impugn Trump personally.