DALLAS — One week before the Republican presidential primary in South Carolina, where polls suggest she trails by an insurmountable margin, Nikki Haley was in Texas, promising to go national, as most primary candidates, even in the most dire circumstances, usually do.
Despite big losses in Iowa, New Hampshire, and Nevada, and the steep odds facing her in South Carolina, her home state, Haley is showing no signs of relenting. She is still raking in donations and building out her national footprint, as she pledges to move her party past former president Trump.
“He said he’s going to spend more time in a courtroom than he is going to be on the campaign trail,” she said of Trump on Friday in San Antonio, referring to the hours he spent in New York last week facing criminal and civil cases. “But let me tell you what we are going to be doing. We are going to be on the campaign trail.”
Haley, a former governor of South Carolina and a United Nations ambassador under Trump, is projecting confidence even as her path to victory looks stark. In many South Carolina polls, she trails Trump by roughly 30 points — and the picture beyond Saturday’s contest does not look much brighter.
The Haley campaign is concentrating on a handful of states and issues to sustain her campaign. She has announced teams of elected officials, business leaders, and prominent community members to help lead its efforts in Alaska, California, Georgia, Idaho, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Utah, and Washington. Her “National Women for Nikki Coalition,” which counts chapters in all 50 states and Puerto Rico, has kicked into full gear, with a mission to court suburban women turned off by Trump.
On the day after the South Carolina primary, regardless of the outcome, Haley has said she will head to Michigan, which holds its own contest Feb. 27. From there, she has plans to crisscross the country before Super Tuesday, the largest single day of the primary season, and the last real chance she will have to prove she can change the course of the nomination. The expected stops include Colorado, Minnesota, Utah, and Virginia.
Haley is betting her candidacy on courting independents and new Republicans in Michigan and in 11 Super Tuesday states where Republican primaries are not limited to voters affiliated with her own party. But that strategy did not succeed in New Hampshire, and she has shown weaknesses with her own base: She received support from only 29 percent of college-educated Republicans nationally, according to a CNN poll, while Trump had 55 percent of the same demographic. Another Morning Consult tracking poll showed Haley trailing Trump by big margins in every Super Tuesday state.
Trump has undertaken his own push in Super Tuesday states, announcing nearly 80 endorsements from state party and elected officials in 14 states. And his team has left little to chance: He and his allies have engaged in a backroom campaign to twist delegate rules in his favor, and he has said Haley’s donors would be “permanently barred from the MAGA camp."
Haley and her allies have kept up a steady drumbeat of criticism on Trump in national media appearances and in television and digital ads. Her message has largely remained consistent: that it is time for a new generational leader who can move her party beyond the “chaos” that is Trump. But her attack lines to underscore that most recently have become sharper-edged and more numerous. She has criticized him for disparaging her husband, Major Michael Haley; for suggesting he would encourage Russian aggression against allies in Europe; for skewing the delegate count; and for tightening his grip over party institutions, including the Republican National Committee.
She has continued to blast Trump for spending time and campaign donations on his legal troubles. She has sought to brand him and President Biden as “grumpy, old men.”
In interviews, some of Haley’s high-dollar donors in Texas and California echoed her focus on Trump’s and Biden’s advanced ages and cited Trump’s legal cases as signs that anything remains possible in the race.
“A lot can happen in politics and in our legal system,” said Timothy Draper, a Silicon Valley entrepreneur and Haley donor. “And the American people usually come to their senses when they come to the polls.”
NEW YORK TIMES
Tenn. House resolutions on Grammy winners spark controversy
Tennessee state Representative Justin Jones, a Democrat, brought two resolutions to the floor of the lower chamber last week, both congratulating Nashville-area musicians on winning their first Grammy awards the week before.
One was for Paramore, a Tennessee-based emo-pop band that had won Grammys for best rock album and best alternative music performance. The other was for Allison Russell, a folk musician who had won the Grammy for best American roots performance.
The resolutions were so perfunctory that they were placed on the chamber’s consent calendar, a grouping of noncontroversial bills that representatives pass en masse.
But Republican Representative Jeremy Faison had a problem with one of them. With an objection, he removed the resolution honoring Russell from the consent calendar, while not doing the same for the one honoring Paramore. Jones responded that singling out Russell, who is Black, is a “shameful” example of “Jim Crow thinking.” Paramore, whose members are White, rebuked Faison’s objection as “blatant racism.”
In a statement sent by the Tennessee House Republican Caucus, Faison said that, as a member of the Republican leadership, he had been approached by several members with questions about Russell, “which made it appropriate for us to press pause on that particular resolution.”
Faison and Jennifer Easton, a spokeswoman for House Republicans, did not respond to requests for comment about the questions raised by the caucus.
Although the resolution focused on Russell’s Grammy win, her music is tied into her political activism, Russell said in an interview. In recent years, she has been an outspoken critic of Tennessee’s Republican lawmakers, including their efforts to enact legislation targeting LGBTQ+ rights and banning drag shows. When such laws passed, Russell in March organized the Love Rising benefit concert in Nashville, which featured more than a dozen artists, including Sheryl Crow, Jason Isbell, Hozier, and Mya Byrne.
Russell, who moved to Nashville seven years ago, didn’t know about Jones’s resolution until after the controversy erupted.
Hardly anyone would have noticed Russell’s legislative honor if it sailed through. By blocking it, Faison shone a light on Russell and her music, Russell said.
“They only succeeded in vastly amplifying our voices,” she said.
Other artists have rallied around Russell. On Friday, Paramore rejected “any acknowledgment or honor” from the Tennessee House until Russell is given the same honor. In a statement, Paramore singer Hayley Williams praised Russell as an “incredibly talented musician and songwriter” whose music is deeply rooted in folk and Americana but nevertheless spans genres.
Russell is also “a brilliant Black woman,” she added.
WASHINGTON POST
Politicizing of transgender issues called ‘dehumanizing’
COLUMBIA, S.C. — Thousands of people in one of South Carolina’s most conservative counties roared when Donald Trump promised to cut federal funding on “Day 1″ for schools pushing what he called “transgender insanity” onto children.
“And I can’t even believe I have to say it, but I do have to say it,” Trump told the crowd this month. “I will keep men out of women’s sports.”
The former president has repeatedly mocked transgender people during his campaign, using language about gender identity that LGBTQ+ advocates say is wrong and harmful. Others in the GOP field have attacked transgender participation in athletics and proposed nationwide bans on affirming care for transgender minors.
Transgender-related issues have become perhaps the biggest rallying call to Christian conservatives, more than abortion rights or same-sex marriage. That shift worries advocates who note transgender people are already disproportionately prone to stress, depression, and suicidal behavior when forced to live as the sex they were assigned at birth.
“Republicans might be overplaying their hand as a political matter. As an ethical matter, I think it’s gross,” said Tim Miller, a former Republican political operative who worked as communications director for former Florida governor Jeb Bush’s 2016 presidential campaign.
The Alliance for Full Acceptance’s executive director, Chase Glenn, a transgender man, called it “dehumanizing” to have his existence politicized.
“It’s really disgusting that these politicians think they can use trans people, and more specifically trans youth, as a political tool to win points,” he said.
ASSOCIATED PRESS