NBC’s Steve Kornacki provided some updated exit polling which illustrates the stark partisan divide between Haley and Trump. Nikki Haley beat Donald Trump among independent voters with over 60 percent of self-identified Democrats backing her. But Trump destroyed Haley with Republicans. Seventy-five percent of self-described Republicans supported Trump while just one-quarter of GOP voters backed Haley. “That is a swing of 73 points,” he marveled.
I‘m not a fan of the punditry saying that Haley can stay in if the margin is in single digits and has to get out if it is double digits. It doesn’t make a difference. She’s not winning the nomination, either way. And, of course, the margin has steadily bumped up to double digits.
If the money is there, whether Haley stays in after this depends entirely upon what Haley intends to accomplish by running. If, like DeSantis, she went into tonight still running to win, she won’t stay through South Carolina. But there are incentives for her to run a longer protest race and set herself above DeSantis as the next-in-line and avatar of not accepting Trump as the sole voice of the party. Which path she chooses will determine whether she drops out soon or stays in for months.
Last Monday night, after Ron DeSantis was crushed in the Iowa Caucuses despite staking everything on it, I predicted he would be out of the race by week’s end. (He quit one day after that, on Sunday, presumably to personally spite me.)
So I would be very surprised if Haley made it to South Carolina or anywhere close. While I can see her lasting the week or perhaps a bit beyond — and a bit more money might be there for her than would have been for DeSantis, for bitter-ender reasons — eventually I assume she will yield to the logic of the situation and leave before a crushing loss in her home state.
Them’s the breaks.
The South Carolina primary is weeks away – plenty of time to perform a face-saving exit from the race without gratuitously crushing Haley’s supporters at her election night event.
John Kasich stayed in way too long in 2016, but he did at least win his home state of Ohio, as he promised. Haley seems, at this point, unlikely to even come close to winning South Carolina.
New Hampshire was Haley’s strongest state, and she lost it comfortably. I guess the theory is to stay in for her home state of South Carolina, but she’s set to get crushed there. There’s a big gap between now and then, with South Carolina not voting until February 24. Maybe she’s hoping something could happen to Trump in that interval to weaken his support. But if there has been one overriding truth of this primary campaign, it’s that Trump’s support remains strong no matter what happens to him.
As of now, this looks like a very respectable face-saving outcome for Haley, but not one that offers her any path to the nomination other than Trump becoming unable to continue. Which is not such an implausible outcome that it should be disregarded, if you have the money to keep running and no day job.
If Haley was looking to secure her immediate future in Republican politics in a party dominated by Trump, she might not spend her speech following her loss in New Hampshire talking about Trump’s abysmal electoral record, questioning his mental fitness, and challenging him to a debate.
Haley is vowing to fight on in South Carolina and beyond. But we’ll see how long this posture lasts. But hard to win a Republican nomination if you’re losing Republicans by 50 points.