Former president Donald Trump is projected to win the South Carolina Republican Party, the Associated Press and other media outlets predicted shortly after polls closed Saturday evening.

News outlets declared Trump the projected winner before any votes had been counted, basing their predictions on exit surveys and polls.

The victory extends Trump’s lead for the Republican presidential nomination, on the heels of decisive victories in lowa, New Hampshire and Nevada. The next contests are the Michigan primary on February 27 and then Super Tuesday on March 5, when 16 states and territories will hold primaries or caucuses. Unless Haley manages to win in several of these states, the Republican presidential nomination will be all but decided.

A record 208,000 voters cast early ballots, participating in South Carolina’s nearly two-week early voting period. The record for turnout in the South Carolina Republican primary is 750,000; by mid-day Saturday, after monitoring crowded polling locations across the state, South Carolina GOP chairman Drew McKissick predicted that the party would surpass the record on Saturday.

No Republican presidential candidate since 1980 has lost the South Carolina primary and gone on to win the party’s nomination. “We are the graveyard of presidential campaigns,” McKissick said. “I expect that that tradition will continue.”

Haley, who served as the governor of South Carolina from 2011 to 2017, declared earlier this week that she would continue her campaign through Super Tuesday regardless of Saturday’s outcome. During a call with reporters on Thursday, Haley’s campaign manager Betsy Ankney reiterated that message. “We know the odds,” Ankney said. “But we also know the stakes.”