OPINION
KATHERINE
MILLER
Nikki Haley’s Republican Party of One
Feb. 24,
2024, 7:00 a.m. ET
Katherine
Miller
By
Katherine Miller
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/24/opinion/nikki-haley-wont-drop-out.html
In Rock
Hill, S.C., last weekend, the biggest boom of a reaction came when Nikki Haley
told the crowd, “Everybody’s telling me: Why don’t you just get out?” People
basically responded with one long “no,” with one woman’s “Don’t give up!”
sounding out above it. Ms. Haley responded instantly, “I will never give up,”
and a big cheer went up.
Ms. Haley’s
events last weekend in South Carolina ahead of Saturday’s Republican primary
were populated with people in Gamecocks hats and Clemson sweatshirts; older
blond women in quilted vests and jackets; dads in preppy eyeglasses with teen
daughters; old men in Army vet baseball caps, which took me a minute to clock
that they were most likely wearing because Donald Trump had mocked Ms. Haley’s
husband.
These
crowds tend to have — as a percentage, not in real numbers — more women and
more couples, especially in their 60s and 70s, than the crowds at Trump events.
And the most reliable response from any crowd Ms. Haley speaks to involves just
the prospect of her quitting the race.
“The truth
is like, people feel it. This is a real emotion,” she said in a brief interview
on Friday. “It’s a real fear. It’s a real concern that they have with Donald
Trump and Joe Biden.”
The Trump
era has scrambled voting patterns across any number of groups, but there are a
few voter demographics that have, arguably, mattered the most in the
battleground states: Black voters of all ages; under-30 voters; white voters in
rural areas; and suburban voters who often have college degrees and who are
Romney-to-Biden voters, or have opted out of voting for president.
That last
group — a persuasion group — has mattered in the suburbs of Atlanta and Phoenix
and in Michigan and Pennsylvania. The Republican Party has had huge problems
retaining or winning back those voters throughout the endless Trump era. And
those are the voters who seem to like to hear a candidate say, as Ms. Haley did
this week, that “we refuse to use the awesome power of big government to punish
those we dislike, and we recognize that America has done more good for more
people than any country in the world.”
Losing
campaigns often can be either quite influential or matter as a sign of deeper
problems. By continuing, even as the majority of the party can turn on them and
the media portrays them as romantic or humiliated figures, candidates end up
holding out and onto something that the rest of the party needs, or isolating
some existential unhappiness in the body politic.
There’s
this kaleidoscope crackup situation — look at Mr. Trump as a comeback
candidate, it’s all dominance of the field; look at Mr. Trump as an incumbent,
he is more fragile. In New Hampshire and in polling of South Carolina and some
other states, Ms. Haley is performing about commensurate with how Pat Buchanan
did in 1992 against George H.W. Bush — which as my colleague Jamelle Bouie
noted last month, many people treated like an embarrassing crisis for Mr. Bush
at the time. That also previewed future problems in the general election. Mr.
Buchanan’s reactionary, isolationist campaign tends to get mentioned as the
true precursor to Mr. Trump. Ms. Haley would be an ideological inverse,
committed to a globally involved America, free trade and a more restrained
posture about the role of government in people’s lives.
A few days
ago, Nick Catoggio speculated in The Dispatch that perhaps Ms. Haley had
concluded “she’s obliged as a matter of principle to go on trying to rally
conservatives as best she can, to show the new populist G.O.P. establishment
that the Reaganite bloc is stronger than they think.” When I put that to her,
she said, “Well, I think there’s something to that; that look, there’s a group
of Republicans that are begging to get everyone’s attention that Donald Trump,
you know, is chaos on so many levels.”
Throughout
her events last weekend, Ms. Haley emphasized that as Russian expansionism had
become more dangerous and doubts have grown in America about NATO’s value,
discipline in what’s said publicly mattered more — she pointed out, there was
some virtue in tone and restraint. “We got to stop where we are hating people
because they’re on the other side. We got to stop with all this anger and
division that’s happening around our country. It’s not normal,” she said in
Fort Mill, pointing out that it was least normal for young people. “They can’t
live like that. It’s not right.” She ticked off homeownership, jobs, debt,
fears of war. “And all they feel is anger and chaos.”
When the
Haley campaign tweeted out an iteration of the message, a Trump campaign
spokesman responded, “This is what weak babies say when they don’t have enough
fortitude to run INTO the fire to fight for what’s right.”
Thirty
percent is not a winning coalition. But it’s also not 2 percent, it’s not some
pretend donor AstroTurf thing, it’s not a half-dozen protesters at a Trump
event of thousands. And even if it were: Elections are close now.
Even more
than that, winning and losing don’t always negate underlying emotions.
Oftentimes, trying to persuade people who don’t think a candidate values their
vote or ignores their problem doesn’t work. As Wall Street Journal reporters
asked in a video breaking down the fractures for Mr. Trump in exit polling out
of Iowa and New Hampshire, “The campaign becomes about who can he pull in.”
In Fort
Mill, after a Haley event at an active-adult community at dusk, I watched an
older woman tell a man emphatically, “She is a strong conservative,” either
making the case for Ms. Haley to him or expressing some exasperation with the
wider world. People I talked to seemed to be oscillating between disbelief at
the way things have changed (is it no longer enough to bring a bicycle factory
to South Carolina?), skepticism about the path forward for Ms. Haley (maybe Mr.
Trump would be convicted and she could take over? one woman speculated to me),
and relief about someone, anyone staying in the race with Mr. Trump.
There’s
always a mix of emotions with this Haley campaign, from defiance and enthusiasm
to unease and skepticism, certainly in the discourse surrounding Ms. Haley’s
decision not to drop out. Why stay in if you’re losing? Why run if Mr. Trump’s
success is preordained? Why attack or not attack him?
Oddly, the
apex of wondering about Ms. Haley’s true intentions came before any of the
voting really began, back in January, when ahead of Iowa, where she and Ron
DeSantis pulled over 40 percent of the vote, and New Hampshire, where she
pulled 43 percent of the vote, all kinds of people spent days speculating about
whether she really wanted to be vice president. “And what did they say the day
of the election?” she said on Friday of New Hampshire. “She’s down by 30
points.”
But it’s
interesting how much Mr. Trump’s thinking seems to transfer to the broader
discourse at times — like his victory is so inevitable that there’s not even a
point in running against him in a Republican primary, unless it’s for some
other reason, moral or corrupt.
When I
mentioned the assumption of inevitability to Ms. Haley, she responded, “And you
know what, if he wins the primary, they better enjoy the moment because he will
not win a general election.”
Katherine
Miller is a staff writer and editor in Opinion.
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