Washington: Republican presidential frontrunner Donald Trump convincingly won the South Carolina primary on Saturday night, while Senator Ted Cruz of Texas and Flroida Senator Marco Rubio were locked in a dead heat for second place.

South Carolina voters also delivered a highly disappointing verdict to former Florida governor Jeb Bush, who dropped out of the GOP race on Saturday after dismal results on Saturday. Bush finished at fourth place, failing to bag even 10% of the mandate. Bush did not succeed in impressing the voters despite the fact that his family came out seeking votes for him in South Carolina and his allied super PAC spent millions of dollars on advertising.

"The people of Iowa and New Hampshire and South Carolina have spoken, and I really respect their decision," Bush told a Columbia ballroom of teary-eyed supporters.

Cruz lost evangelical voters to Trump and failed to end at the second place by a wide margin. On the other hand, Rubio managed to rebound from the mauling he had received in New Hampshire stumble to galvanize the support of South Carolina's new-guard Republican leaders and rally mainstream voters. On Saturday night, Rubio wasted no time in moving to fuse the party's establishment forces behind his candidacy. "This has become a three-person race," Rubio said, "and we will win the nomination."

But the margin in vote share between Trump and Rubio showed the limits of the senator's uplifting message about generational change amid profound GOP unrest. Trump deserves full credit for overcoming a tumultuous week in which he slammed Pope Francis and also tried to tap into frustrations and economic anxieties of voters of the state.

In his victory speech, Trump said: "When you win, it's beautiful, and we are going to start winning for our country because our country doesn't win anymore." The billionaire businessman vowed to continue his victories from coast to coast. He congratulated Rubio and Cruz for "a really good job" but did not acknowledge Bush's departure from the race.

For his part, Cruz said in his remarks to supporters Saturday night that his candidacy has put "the Washington cartel in full terror." "If you are a conservative, this is where you belong because only one strong conservative is in a position to win this race," Cruz said.