Nikki Haley keeps losing to Donald Trump by double digits in Republican primaries, with no hope of winning the nomination. Her supporters say she’s after something bigger.
To hear the remaining Republicans supporting Nikki Haley for president tell it, they are the Goldwater brigades of 1964; they are the foot soldiers of the Reagan revolution in 1976, when he took his battle against Gerald Ford all the way to the convention. They see themselves, in other words, as no longer just a campaign but a cause.
They are not winning primaries (except in D.C.) and do not expect to, but they are after something more — the soul of the Republican Party possessed by Donald Trump. Their mentality goes a great deal toward answering one of the biggest questions in American politics right now: Why is Haley still running when she keeps losing to Trump by double digits without any hope of wresting the nomination from him?
“We have been continually told by GOP leadership that we can’t lose the Trump voter, we can’t insult Donald Trump, and we can’t win without Donald Trump. Well, a funny thing happened: In trying to appease and massage the Trump voter, you have offended the Reagan voter,” said Eric Levine, a top donor to the Haley campaign. “The party was so concerned about Donald Trump voters, but Nikki Haley still running and still getting 30 to 40 percent of the primary vote is our way of saying, ‘Hey, don’t forget about us, either.’”
That Haley is still running after losing the first three contests has surprised many people who have watched her as a shrewd political climber calculating every move of her political career. Haley, after all, is someone who in 2016 vowed, referring to Trump, “I will not stop until we fight a man that chooses not to disavow the KKK.” That was before she worked in his administration, then became one of its rare senior figures to leave on good terms, then broke with Trump after January 6, then said she wouldn’t run against him, and then did run against him but declined to fight him head-on until the rest of the competition was eliminated.
Her run has been remarkable. After starting out the campaign polling within the margin of error of zero percent, she used energetic debate performances to vault ahead of the competition, which gradually flamed out. Haley seemed to have figured out something Ron DeSantis and Chris Christie in particular could not: how to implicitly attack Trump without attracting the full force of his ire, at least until recently.
The loss in her home state of South Carolina would have been the kind of thing this Nikki Haley would have wanted to avoid since such defeats have long been thought to sink political ambitions. Yet Haley is still going, sloughing off the 20-point defeat there, a 40-point shellacking in Michigan just a few days later, and heading into Super Tuesday as polls show her losing in all 15 states that will vote.
“Everyone is aware that the math is the math here,” said Jayme Stevenson, the former Republican mayor of Darien, Connecticut, who said that despite voting for Trump in both 2016 and 2020 she would not in 2024. “We are talking about a Republican primary that brings out the most conservative voters in the process, and still Donald Trump isn’t getting much beyond 60 percent.
