Unfortunately, Mike Huckabee was not able to take this one. Fred Thompson won just enough evangelical voes to give John McCain the victory.
Yet again, Rudy finished behind Ron Paul, as he has in every contest so far.
From TPM, with 93 percent of precincts reporting:
McCain 33
Huckabee 30
Thompson 16
Romney 15
Paul 4
Giuliani 2
Hunter 0
Hunter is dropping out of the race. Thompson will probably follow soon and endorse McCain.
UPDATE: Jonathan Singer observes at MyDD that SC Republicans seemed less enthusiastic about voting this time than they did eight years ago:
Another way of looking at it, this is kind of an underwhelming win for McCain. Well, perhaps even a really unimpressive win. In 2000, McCain received 237,888 votes in coming in second place to George W. Bush. This time? A mere 134,474 votes, or more than 100,000 votes short of what he received eight years ago.