Opinion: Nikki Haley can still beat Trump. Just not by winning the nomination
Former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley reached a decision point after her loss in January’s New Hampshire Republican primary. She could travel the path of Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), the Democratic presidential candidate who congenially yielded to the eventual party nominee in 2020. Or she could follow the road of Sen. Bernie Sanders, the Democratic presidential candidate who dogged the party nominee for months in 2016, bruising her, draining her resources and damaging, fatefully, her standing with the party base. Which would Haley choose?
She had waffled in New Hampshire, offering a convoluted message in a race in which Donald Trump, and Trumpism, are the paramount issue. Her recent, sharp attacks on Trump, and her vow to stay in the race even after her 20-point defeat by Trump in the South Carolina primary Saturday, suggest that she has achieved greater clarity. For now, she’s opted to take the less hospitable road — more Bernie ’16 than ’20.
That could be very bad news for Trump.
She’s trailing Trump as the state’s primary approaches. A humiliating defeat on home turf can spell the end of a presidential bid (ask Marco Rubio or Al Gore).
In 2020, Joe Biden won about 87% of Sanders supporters in November, according to estimates by Vanderbilt University political scientist John Sides and two colleagues. In 2016, by contrast, only about 79% of Sanders supporters voted for Hillary Clinton in the general election. Worse, Sanders received a much larger share of votes in 2016 — more than 4 in 10 — than he did in 2020. So Clinton’s November shortfall was even more significant.
“We found in 2016 that Sanders supporters had a less favorable view of Clinton as the campaign went on,” Sides told me.
In the topsy-turvy world of conservative America, only this amoral figure can deliver the moral victory that the antiabortion movement craves.
Every race involving Trump is sui generis. (White nationalist demagogues under multiple federal and state indictments are tough on standard political models.) But it’s not hard to imagine that a miniature version of Bernie-mentum may be taking hold in the 2024 GOP presidential race. Haley is giving anti-Trump Republicans, many of them women, a place to go. The question is whether she will also give enough of them a place to stay — even after Trump is the party’s official nominee.
“She’s not going to win the nomination. But she’s going to pull in over 20% in most of the primaries that she’s involved in,” said Mike Madrid, a former political director of the California Republican Party who is an anti-Trump activist. If a sizable minority of those GOP voters refuse to support Trump in the general election, his path to victory is all but impossible. “He’s got a very hard ceiling,” Madrid said. “If Haley can move that ceiling three or four points downward, that’s devastating.”
By trying to cater to the New Hampshire GOP audience, she fed the perception she is just a politician, which has become a dirty word in the right wing.
Is that Haley’s goal? It’s hard to tell. Haley shuns the “Never Trump” label and casts herself only as a truth teller who has “no fear of Trump’s retribution” and no desire to “kiss the ring.” Squeezed between the mutually loathing camps of MAGA and Never Trump, however, she has found a path of her own. She is joined there by a consistent minority of the primary electorate, a community of exiles that translates into political leverage that no Trump supplicant can muster. It’s still possible that Haley could endorse Trump. But she would gain nothing, and lose much, by capitulating.
“She may be the first Republican politician of this era to realize that, with Trump in this arena, she has no future,” Madrid said. “If Trump wins, the next nominee is either going to be Trump himself or his son or his daughter. He’s putting his daughter-in-law in charge of the Republican National Committee.”
The longer Haley stays in, the more she becomes a rallying point for Republicans who do not wish to be ruled by a degenerate cult. And the more Republicans grow accustomed to opposing Trump, the more precarious his situation becomes. A wave of Democratic voters might be needed to swamp Trump. But only a trickle of Republicans, withholding their support, can achieve a similar result.
Trump has grown more authoritarian and vindictive, but he has not crushed the resistance — even within the GOP. Donors have ignored his threats and continued to fund Haley without genuine hope of victory. In Washington recently, while Haley was losing her home-state primary, pro-democracy conservatives gathered for the Principles First Summit, featuring a range of Never Trump luminaries. Last year, the conference drew about 400 attendees. This year, more than 700 registered. Former Republican Rep. Liz Cheney has given pro-democracy conservatives a backbone. Now Haley is giving them an electoral voice.
Faced with Haley’s intransigence, a Trump campaign official told Semafor’s David Weigel that MAGA’s march to victory would not be diverted by Haley’s “delusion.” It would indeed be delusional for Haley to believe she can seize the Republican nomination for president. If the goal, however, is to destroy Donald Trump, and repel the political pathologies that he embodies, Haley appears to be on the right road.
Francis Wilkinson is a columnist for Bloomberg Opinion. @fdwilkinson
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