POLITICAL
MEMO
Why Nikki Haley Isn’t Dropping Out
She dismissed speculation about her motives behind
staying in the race, and has encouraged supporters to stick with her until the
end, whenever that may be.
Jonathan
Swan Jazmine Ulloa Maggie Haberman
By Jonathan
Swan, Jazmine Ulloa and Maggie Haberman
Feb. 21,
2024, 1:43 p.m. ET
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/21/us/politics/haley-trump-race.html
When Nikki
Haley summoned the national media to Greenville, S.C., on Tuesday, she did
something that was strikingly unusual even in this most bizarre of campaigns.
She devoted an entire speech to explaining why she was not dropping out of the
presidential race.
Hungry for
attention, and fed up with fielding questions about why she wasn’t reading the
room and the polls, her team had billed the event, tantalizingly, as a “State
of the Race” speech. Speculation abounded among Republican strategists that she
might finally be coming to terms with reality. Maybe, the theories went, Ms.
Haley now understood that without some unforeseen act of God, there was no
mathematical path for her to win enough delegates to wrench the Republican
nomination from Donald J. Trump.
“Some of
you — perhaps a few of you in the media — came here today to see if I’m
dropping out of the race,” Ms. Haley said. “Well, I’m not. Far from it.”
Her smile
said it all. Ms. Haley was enjoying herself, finally able to say what she has
long thought about Mr. Trump and seemingly delighted that she had focused
national attention on her message. She looked like a woman without much to
lose, which people close to her said was about right.
Ms. Haley
says she wants nothing from Mr. Trump. After serving as the ambassador to the
United Nations, she would not be lured by any cabinet role into cutting a deal
with him to end her quixotic campaign.
“Some
people used to say I was running because I really wanted to be vice president,”
she said in her Tuesday speech. “I think I’ve pretty well settled that
question.”
It’s hard
to find a Republican lawmaker or operative who isn’t privately speculating
about Ms. Haley’s ulterior motives. Is she hanging on as a Plan B candidate in
case Mr. Trump dies or goes to prison? Is she positioning herself as the woman
to lead a post-Trump Republican Party — the soothsayer who warned that Mr.
Trump would lose again, so she can return in 2028 and say “I told you so”?
Ms. Haley
dismissed such speculation on Tuesday: “If I was running for a bogus reason, I
would have dropped out a long time ago.”
She said
that she was “used to people questioning my intentions” and that she was
“fighting for what I know is right.”
Her friends
and allies say that the doomsayers have unusually little effect on her. Her
history of winning long-shot races means she’s used to being counted out and
proving people wrong. Ms. Haley sometimes campaigns in a T-shirt emblazoned
with the slogan “Underestimate me. That’ll be fun.”
She was a
young, first-time candidate lagging far behind in the polls and in fund-raising
when she beat a nearly 30-year incumbent for a South Carolina State House seat
in a come-from-behind victory that shocked her state’s political establishment.
Years later, in 2010, she beat a slate of the state’s political heavyweights in
her race for governor: Henry McMaster, a former state attorney general who is
now governor; Gresham Barrett, then a popular congressman; and André Bauer,
then the state’s lieutenant governor. That same establishment is now, almost to
a person, lined up against her in support of Mr. Trump.
One of
those vanquished former rivals, Mr. Barrett, said in an interview on Tuesday
that Ms. Haley appeared before many of the “movers and shakers” in the
Spartanburg, S.C., area this week at a fund-raiser and “made no qualms” that
she was in the race for the long haul.
“I don’t
think any supporter left there last night thinking this was a short-term
thing,” Mr. Barrett said, adding that her donors expressed a willingness to
stick with her through Super Tuesday — and until the end, whenever that may be.
Ms. Haley
has told donors and friends that the personal attacks she has received from Mr.
Trump and his allies have only hardened her resolve. The far-right activist
Laura Loomer, who joined Mr. Trump on his plane for a recent trip to South
Carolina, has viciously attacked Ms. Haley’s 22-year-old son, Nalin, even
questioning his parentage.
At a recent
rally, Mr. Trump wondered aloud why Ms. Haley’s husband, Michael, wasn’t with
her on the campaign trail. Ms. Haley snapped back that her husband was serving
overseas in the military — an act of service that Mr. Trump had never performed
and could never understand. The emotional aftershocks came through in her
speech on Tuesday. Ms. Haley choked up as she said how much she wished she and
her children could be with him.
Ms. Haley
presented her decision to stay in the race as a matter of principle. She
pointed out that most Americans are unsatisfied with both of their likely
choices in the fall. She said that the country deserved better than these two
old men and that she was determined to give voters that choice. To quit so
early in the process, she said, would consign Americans to the longest
general-election period in history — one that would result in a chaotic future
for the country, no matter the outcome.
A spokesman
for Mr. Trump, Steven Cheung, said in a statement to The New York Times that
“Nikki ‘Birdbrain’ Haley still can’t name one state they think they can win.”
He said Ms. Haley had become “the candidate of choice for Democrats and Never
Trumpers still afflicted with Trump Derangement Syndrome.”
During the
Trump era, Ms. Haley was not exactly known for taking principled stands against
the former president. She had made clear in the 2016 campaign what she thought
of the man. She considered him morally unfit for the presidency — “everything
we teach our kids not to do in kindergarten.” But then she voted for him,
served under him and praised him extravagantly. She even went so far as to
claim that his childish insults of Kim Jong-un of North Korea — Mr. Trump
called him “little rocket man” — were effective.
After the
Jan. 6 riot, Ms. Haley flirted with abandoning Mr. Trump again. “He went down a
path he shouldn’t have, and we shouldn’t have followed him, and we shouldn’t
have listened to him,” she told Politico. “And we can’t let that ever happen
again.”
Two months
later, she said she would stand down and support Mr. Trump if he ran again in
2024. People close to Ms. Haley said she simply didn’t believe he would run
again. Soon after he announced his candidacy, she went back on her word, saying
that the country had only slid downward and that its survival was “bigger than
just one person.”
For much of
this campaign, Ms. Haley has gone easy on Mr. Trump. So easy that until early
in the new year, Mr. Trump was seriously considering her as a potential running
mate, according to three people with direct knowledge of his deliberations. Ms.
Haley and her allies spent nearly all their energy and money destroying Gov.
Ron DeSantis of Florida and clearing the rest of the field for a two-person
race against Mr. Trump.
In recent
weeks, Ms. Haley has finally let loose on Mr. Trump.
She has
portrayed him as a sycophant to President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia and
challenged him to say that Mr. Putin was responsible for the death of the
dissident Aleksei Navalny in a remote prison. She has criticized Mr. Trump for
spending more time and money in court than on the campaign trail and has
assailed him for tightening his grip on the Republican National Committee,
claiming he intended to use it as “his piggy bank for his personal cases.”
Each day,
her campaign sounds more and more like the stridently anti-Trump campaign run
by Chris Christie, the former governor of New Jersey, who bashed and taunted
the front-runner at every opportunity. After Mr. Trump released his latest
moneymaker — Trump-branded gold sneakers — Ms. Haley’s campaign trolled the
announcement, posting an image on social media of a white sneaker adorned with
the Russian flag.
Whatever
her motivations, there are other, more prosaic justifications for keeping the
fight going a little longer, through Super Tuesday on March 5.
Kevin
Madden, a former Republican strategist who worked on Mitt Romney’s 2012 and
2008 presidential campaigns, said this campaign helped Ms. Haley elevate her
national profile and build transferable infrastructure, relationships and
“muscle memory” should she decide to try again. He argued that not even a Haley
endorsement of Mr. Trump would “completely undo her” because voters have short
memories.
There is
one final factor. Ms. Haley has benefited from a self-replenishing assembly
line of rich anti-Trump donors who are happy to continue financing what some
privately concede is a futile effort.
“Candidates
don’t run out of reasons to run,” Mr. Madden said. “They run out of resources.”
Ms. Haley
has plenty of those.
Jonathan
Swan is a political reporter covering the 2024 presidential election and Donald
Trump’s campaign. More about Jonathan Swan
Jazmine
Ulloa is a national politics reporter for The Times, covering the 2024
presidential campaign. She is based in Washington. More about Jazmine Ulloa
Maggie
Haberman is a senior political correspondent reporting on the 2024 presidential
campaign, down ballot races across the country and the investigations into
former President Donald J. Trump. More about Maggie
Haberman
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