The paradox of Nikki Haley’s presidential campaign, launched a year ago Thursday, is that the further she gets from the 2024 Republican nomination, the more she ratchets up attacks on former President Donald Trump.
The Republican front-runner looks poised to win Haley’s home state of South Carolina, where she was twice elected governor, by a landslide on Feb. 24.
A recent CBS News poll shows Trump beating his former ambassador to the United Nations 65% to 30%. This was followed by a Winthrop University poll that found Trump topping Haley in South Carolina 65% to 29%. The RealClearPolitics polling average for the state has Trump up 33.5 points, which is a smaller lead than in the last three polls.
That would be a pretty big trouncing for the favorite daughter. Haley could exceed expectations, as she did in New Hampshire. But at this point, a 60-40 loss in South Carolina might be as good as she can realistically hope for. (She won 43% in the Granite State, finishing 11 points behind Trump.)
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From there, it could only get worse. Recent polling shows Trump with leads of 41 to 77 points in Michigan and most of the Super Tuesday states. And yet instead of plotting a gracious exit, as Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) did following the Iowa caucuses, Haley seems to be going full steam ahead.
Haley has only upped her criticisms of Trump’s electability and fitness to serve, approaching former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie territory. She has gone after Trump’s lack of military service and embraced the Atlantic’s reporting, attributed to anonymous sources, that he disparaged fallen soldiers.
“Donald ‘Bone Spurs’ Trump has a bad habit of insulting our troops and mocking disabled veterans and fallen soldiers,” Haley communications director Nachama Soloveichik said in a statement “welcoming” Trump to South Carolina. “He can’t fathom their service and sacrifice because Donald Trump is all about himself. How can he be commander in chief when he can’t muster an ounce of respect for the men and women who keep our country safe?”
The Haley campaign dispatched retired Gen. Don Bolduc to rail against Trump’s avoidance of military service in Vietnam. “Donald Trump sought deferments for bone spurs. Well, I went through Ranger School with bone spurs,” he said. “The men and women that I serve with, the men and women that I know, and the family members that I know serve their country and will do it whether they are hurt, whether they are hurting. … It does not matter because they place service, freedom, and liberty above anything else.”
Some of this was a natural reaction to Trump’s comments about Haley’s husband’s absence from the campaign trail. Michael Haley is a major in the Army National Guard deployed overseas, and Trump’s innuendo about his whereabouts justifiably angered Nikki Haley as much as Vivek Ramaswamy ever did.
“I’ll say this: Donald, if you have something to say, don’t say it behind my back. Get on a debate stage and say it to my face,” Nikki Haley said. “If you mock the service of a combat veteran, you don’t deserve a driver’s license, let alone being president of the United States.”
But this is still a political campaign. A pro-Haley super PAC has dropped a $2 million ad blitz about Trump’s “sick” comments about veterans. Her own team did another ad asserting that Trump “doesn’t understand” about military service.
The strategy seems to be to build a coalition of crossover voters and veterans in this military-heavy state to muster at least a respectable showing. “I ask the Republicans, the independents, and the Democrats that are eligible to vote in the primary coming up here in South Carolina that they do a lot of soul searching,” Bolduc said after declaring, “Biden is not an option and Trump is not an option.”
It’s possible the polls are understating Nikki Haley’s support from independents and Democrats who did not vote in their own party’s presidential primary earlier this month. But this has the feeling of the last-ditch effort by Jeb Bush to stop Trump in South Carolina in 2016.
Jeb Bush brought his brother, former President George W. Bush, to the Palmetto State after Trump condemned the Iraq War from the debate stage. At the same time, Nikki Haley and Sen. Tim Scott (R-SC) were rallying around Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL).
Trump defeated Rubio by 10 points, sweeping all the delegates. Jeb Bush finished a distant fourth with 7.8% of the vote, ending his campaign. This time around, the state’s Republican governor and both senators are for Trump.
If Nikki Haley’s gambit does not succeed, it is only a matter of time before she joins them. But she has been a cautious candidate up to this point, not one given to desperate swings. “It’s hard to imagine this consummately ambitious pol with a history of displaying exceptional instincts just throwing away her political career at the age of 52, so she must have some kind of strategy,” Democratic operative and analyst Ed Kilgore wrote. “Right?”
Unlike Christie and other Never Trumpers, Nikki Haley aspires to be president, not just to stop or damage Trump. She endorsed him twice, took a job in his administration that burnished her foreign policy credentials, and spoke on his behalf at the 2020 Republican National Convention. She equivocated on whether she would even get into this race if he also ran. Her current tactics could work against her in 2028 and make it unlikely Trump will tap her for vice president.
Trump’s “fixation on fealty appears to be growing, and some people who have spent time close to the former president say they believe it will be the singular criterion for potential appointees if voters give him what he wants,” NBC News’s Katherine Doyle and Jonathan Allen reported. Nikki Haley is also not doing well enough in the primaries to make a unity ticket attractive to the front-runner.
Nikki Haley could be playing for a backup role if Trump’s legal situation takes him off the board. But Pat Buchanan amassed just 78 delegates to the 1992 Republican National Convention after a primary challenge to President George H.W. Bush that highlighted discontent with the incumbent but yielded no primary victories. Nikki Haley would have to pick up the pace to show up in Milwaukee with a large tranche of delegates.
It is also possible that Nikki Haley is so convinced that Trump’s 2024 campaign will be a general election disaster that there will finally be a major course correction within the party when, not if, he loses his November rematch with Biden.
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DeSantis bet that it would be better for his future political viability to cut his losses after what figured to be his strongest early-state showing in the Republican contest and fall in line behind Trump while returning to Florida to repair his brand. Nikki Haley has chosen a different course.
Time will tell which choice was the better one for an aspiring Trump successor.
