Haley campaign acknowledges ‘uphill battle’, argues Trump would be weaker against Biden – live

Illinois’ Democratic governor JB Pritzker criticized anti-abortion Republicans after Alabama’s supreme court ruled that frozen embryos are “children.”

In a tweet on Friday, Pritzker wrote:

“It has never been clearer that MAGA extremists will not stop at banning abortion. They are coming for contraception. They are coming for IVF. They are coming for women. And they will lose when voters have their say.”

Earlier this week, Pritzker announced that he is proposing the elimination of medical debt across Illinois and said he intends to “break down bureaucratic barriers in state government” by increasing coordination across agencies to improve reproductive healthcare services.

The day so far

Joe Biden is marking the second anniversary of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine with a barrage of new sanctions aimed at Moscow’s revenues. Here’s more:

Joe Biden on Friday announced that Washington would issue more than 500 new sanctions targeting Russia as the US seeks to increase pressure on Moscow to mark the second anniversary of its war in Ukraine.

The US will also impose new export restrictions on nearly 100 entities for providing support to Russia, and take action to further reduce Russia’s energy revenues, the president said in a statement.

Biden has said the measures seek to hold Russia to account over the war and the death of the opposition leader Alexei Navalny. Washington expects to continue to support Ukraine even as that country faces shortages of ammunition and US military aid has been delayed for months in Congress.

“They will ensure Putin pays an even steeper price for his aggression abroad and repression at home,” Biden said of the new sanctions.

Biden attacks Republican House speaker Johnson for waffling on Ukraine aid ahead of invasion’s second anniversary

The big question facing Nikki Haley is whether she will stay in the race through Super Tuesday on 5 March, when 15 states vote.

Should Donald Trump win those states, he’ll have a major lead in the delegates needed to win the Republican nomination. Asked about this on the press call, campaign manager Betsy Ankney again insisted Haley planned to continue competing:

We know the odds, we know the stakes. We have a full schedule through Super Tuesday, we have plans in place and those key states in March after that. And so, once again, this is about who can be successful in a general election. This is about taking our case to the American people, letting them have their voice. After South Carolina we’ll have just a handful of states who have voted – after Super Tuesday there will be a whole lot more. So, we are going to continue to fight as long as we see that there is an appetite for our message and so far, we’re seeing that there is.

A reporter asked campaign manager Betsy Ankney whether Nikki Haley would consider dropping out if she failed to reach a certain percentage of support in South Carolina, her home state.

Haley earlier in the week had given a speech where she refused to exit the race, despite Donald Trump’s victory in three consecutive states.

Ankney replied:

We have never gotten those benchmarks. We won’t start now. Once again, she made very clear in her speech on Tuesday that we are marching on and that’s what we intend to do.

Haley campaign acknowledges ‘uphill battle’, argues Trump would be weaker against Biden

Tomorrow is the two-year anniversary of the start of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and Nikki Haley this morning released a statement accusing Donald Trump of “appeasing Vladimir Putin”.

The former South Carolina governor cited comments from Trump where he encouraged Russia to attack Nato members, and compared his legal troubles to those of Alexei Navalny, the Russia opposition figure who died in prison last week.

“When it comes to Russia, Joe Biden has been five steps behind, and Donald Trump is openly appeasing Vladimir Putin,” Haley said. “From praising the Russian dictator to encouraging Putin to invade NATO countries, Americans and our allies have real concerns about Trump. That makes us less safe.”

Donald Trump stepped up his attempts to appeal to rightwing Christians ahead of South Carolina’s primary, the Guardian’s Alice Herman reports:

Donald Trump told a warmly receptive gathering of religious broadcasters on Thursday that “it’s the people from within our country that are more dangerous than the people outside”, in his latest effort to mobilize Christian fundamentalists who have swung dramatically behind him in recent years.

Trump’s speech in Nashville, Tennessee, to the National Religious Broadcasters presidential forum gala offered him a chance to pitch himself to hundreds of Christian media figures whose approval – and willingness to carry his message on air – could drive huge turnout in November.

“The greatest threat is not from the outside of our country – I really believe it is from within,” said Trump, whose fire-and-brimstone speech focused largely on his political enemies. “It’s the people from within our country that are more dangerous than the people outside.”

The former president’s relationship with the religious right has shifted since his unlikely bid for the presidency in 2016, when his campaign was met with deep skepticism from conservative Christian leaders who had initially thrown their support behind Ted Cruz.

The Guardian’s George Chidi is here to answer all your questions about tomorrow’s Republican presidential primary in South Carolina:

South Carolina Republicans will pick their candidate for president Saturday in the “first in the South” primary. Former president Donald Trump faces his former UN ambassador, Nikki Haley, on her home turf in a state that makes or breaks Republican candidacies. Haley has outlasted Trump’s other primary competitors and will make a stand in the state she served as governor for six years, but polling suggests she’s likely to be blown out.

South Carolina’s Democrats voted two weeks ago, giving president Joe Biden 96% of their votes in what increasingly appears to be a coronation parade to the nomination.

Here is everything you need to know about the South Carolina primary:

South Carolina is her home state, but on the campaign trail, the Guardian’s Lauren Gambino and Joan E Greve report that skepticism about her continued presence in the race is common:

Standing before a large crowd outside a waterfront hotel in Georgetown, Nikki Haley confronted the question that many Republicans in her “sweet” home state of South Carolina – and across the country – have asked: why is she still running for president?

“I don’t care about a political future. If I did, I would have been out by now,” she said. “I’m doing this for my kids. I’m doing this for your kids and your grandkids.”

Haley is the last candidate standing between Donald Trump and the Republican nomination he expects to wrap up within weeks.

But her path forward is vanishingly thin, after successive losses to Trump in the Iowa caucuses and the New Hampshire primary, followed by a stinging defeat in Nevada’s non-binding Republican primary in which, despite being the only major candidate on the ballot, Haley finished a distant second to the option labeled “none of these”.

On Saturday, she is bracing for another rebuke, this time at the hands of the very Republican voters who once elevated her to the governor’s mansion. A Suffolk University/USA Today poll released this week of likely South Carolina Republican primary voters showed Trump trouncing Haley by a margin of nearly 2 to 1, 63% to 35%.

But Haley has made clear that she has no intention of conceding the nomination – not yet anyway.

Polls indicate Trump maintains about 30-point polling average over Haley in South Carolina

Trump and Haley in final sprint before key South Carolina primary