What’s the one thing that CNN, MSNBC, Fox, and even the RNC can agree on? That the race is over for Nikki Haley. But based on my inbox, the Haley campaign hasn’t gotten the memo.
Email after email and newsletter after newsletter have been announcing new state leadership teams across the country. Most of these teams are in Super Tuesday states like Massachusetts and Minnesota, but she’s also setting up shop in places like Georgia and Washington, which vote on March 12, and Idaho, which votes May 21. Haley has ramped up her media appearances too, poking fun at Donald Trump in a Saturday Night Live cold open and poking fun at herself in a spoof of Jimmy Kimmel’s “Mean Tweets” (an admittedly cringe-worthy calculation that likely backfired). After a chock-full retail sprint in New Hampshire, she hasn’t slowed down, rallying and fundraising between Texas and South Carolina last week.
This would all suggest that maybe she has a secret master plan to rack up delegates. Her surrogates certainly seem to think so, telling me that Haley is giving America the race it deserves. Jennifer Nassour, former leader of the MassGOP and chair of Haley’s Mass leadership team and “Women for Nikki” chapter, told me that this is a “race for delegates, this isn’t a race for polls,” calling the campaign a “state by state game.” State Representative Kristin Robbins, chair of the Minnesota state leadership team, told me that the race is “a marathon, not a sprint.”
Nassour believes that Haley can gain serious traction thanks to the rules of the Super Tuesday primaries, 11 of which are open or semi-open affairs where independents and/or Democrats can vote.
But that strategy relies on lots of “ifs.” In Massachusetts, for example, Republican primary candidates who clear a 5 percent threshold take home a proportional number of delegates — unless one candidate wins over half the vote, giving them the whole pot. Amy Carnevale, the MassGOP chair, told me that Haley could benefit if candidates who have dropped out of the race but remain on the ballot — such as Chris Christie, Vivek Ramaswamy, and Ron DeSantis — take some of the vote from Trump. “If it means keeping Trump to under 50 percent, then it surely helps Haley.”
Even if Haley manages to get some delegates in Massachusetts, she faces seven other states on March 5 where Trump could win it all if he clears 50 percent, like Texas where Haley may not reach the state’s 20 percent threshold. And even in states that allocate delegates proportionally without a winner-take-all threshold, Trump seems to be leading. In Virginia, for example, Haley is trailing Trump by more than 60 percent. “I don’t see a mathematical possibility to victory,” said Rick Tyler, a Republican strategist, in an interview.
The truth is that Haley’s path to victory via a state-by-state showdown is narrow. But there are a few reasons to believe Haley is looking beyond 2024. (Though she denied this in a “state of the presidential race speech” she delivered on Tuesday in South Carolina, asking the crowd “How does that even work?”) Haley’s current effort to consolidate donors and national campaign infrastructure could help her launch another campaign in 2028 when, presumably, Trump would be out of the picture.
For that reason, Haley’s decision to stay in this race could make sense. And not only for the reasons her surrogates may give — that her common sense policies could win voters over as more Americans tune in deeper into the primaries. If she drops out now, she noted Tuesday, it would be the “longest general election in history.” But her path in this primary is still steep: just look at New Hampshire where even with an open primary and a relatively heterodox electorate, Haley lost by 11 points.
Moreover, while President Biden might be taking all the flack for his increasingly frequent senior moments, Trump is no spring chicken. Besides the possibility of a health event, the man’s got 91 criminal charges pending against him. Will he be a viable candidate if he is convicted in one of those cases before November?
One way or another, it’s not going to look pretty for Republicans, Haley’s supporters assert. If Trump wins, Republicans can expect more of the same: a gridlocked Congress that could have been a Republican majority (Republican slippage in the House is already happening — look at Long Island); a Democratic Party ready to prosecute Trump for sneezing into the wrong elbow; disaffected traditional conservatives; and an even more polarized America.
“Republicans lost in 2018 with [Trump’s] leadership, Republicans lost in 2020 with his leadership, Republicans lost in 2022. And but for Donald Trump losing the 2020 election, we would not have Joe Biden as president, and so I blame Donald Trump for the downfall of the Republican Party,” said Nassour.
Haley on the other hand has proven herself to be a unifier, despite the fact that she is more conservative than Trump on many of the issues Republicans say they care about. She’s tough on the border, cares about keeping a budget, advocates for strong foreign policy, clearly calls out the thuggery of autocrats like Russian President Vladimir Putin, and acknowledges that, yes, entitlements are about to go broke (remember when cutting entitlements was just an assumption for Republican candidates?). And even with this much of a conservative agenda, she was able to create a broad-based coalition of independents, Biden-weary democrats, and Trump-weary conservatives. Many of the anti-Trump Republicans I met in New Hampshire described themselves as traditional conservatives and as fed up with Trump’s antics as they were with his big spending.
In another universe, where the GOP primary wasn’t in a MAGA chokehold, Haley might have already succeeded by building a winning coalition. Haley’s supporters often point to her strong performance against Biden as proof of her chance at the nomination. Yet in a Trump-controlled establishment that doesn’t seem to care about prioritizing electability, Haley’s general election appeal is doing little for her primary odds.
But what happens after another exhausting four years? What about another midterm flop? Will Republicans wake up from the orange-tinged fever dream and put the MAGA years to rest? If all of these “ifs” come together, there’s going to need to be someone who can light the path back to reason without the audacity of having been a Never Trumper or the stain of bending the knee when there were other options. Sounds an awful lot like Trump’s former ambassador to the United Nations, Nikki Haley.
This column first appeared in The Primary Source, Globe Opinion’s free weekly newsletter about local and national politics. If you’d like to receive it in your inbox every Wednesday, sign up here.
Carine Hajjar is a Globe Opinion columnist. She can be reached at carine.hajjar@globe.com.