Nikki Haley Looks for a Narrow Path to Political Survival in South Carolina

Salem, N.H. — After she failed to score an upset win against former president Donald Trump in independent-friendly New Hampshire, Nikki Haley’s odds of clinching the GOP nomination look longer than ever. 

Haley, having finished eleven points behind Trump in the Granite State, will now shift her focus to South Carolina, where she hopes her home-field advantage can help her court enough voters to take on Trump’s loyal fan base in the state and remain competitive in the race.

It will be an uphill battle for sure, particularly with virtually all of the state’s most prominent Republicans now backing Trump. But maybe not quite impossible.

“Nikki Haley came just shy of that single-digit second-place win that she needed to solidly come back to South Carolina,” Palmetto state strategist Dave Wilson told NR. But he insisted there’s still time for the polls to shift in Haley’s favor over the next four weeks. 

Haley still has a path to the nomination — but it’s a narrow one, says GOP strategist Whit Ayres.

“The real question is whether she can raise sufficient money to sustain a monthlong, one-on-one campaign in South Carolina,” Ayres said. “Donald Trump has never had to endure a one-on-one sustained campaign in the primary. She’ll at least stay viable for the next month, but she’s got to be able to raise some money.” 

For Haley to prove she has the momentum to sustain a campaign after South Carolina, she’ll have to at least come within single digits of Trump, Wilson said. (Many said the same thing heading into New Hampshire, where Haley’s campaign is now moving goalposts and celebrating having defied some polls that showed her lagging 20 points behind.)

“Nikki has played in the political blood sport of South Carolina in several elections as a member of the South Carolina house of representatives and twice as governor,” Wilson said. “She understands what needs to be done in order to win. The question is, will there be enough funding to do the advertising and the groundwork that she needs to overcome a very strong cheering squad that Trump has in legislative and political leaders.”

He pointed to Haley’s gubernatorial win in 2010, when she went from fifth place to second place in a matter of five weeks, giving her enough momentum to make it into a runoff election that she ultimately won. 

“In South Carolina politics, four weeks is a lifetime,” he said.

Still, Trump’s loyalty among his base is unlike anything Haley has come up against before. It is unprecedented for a Republican candidate in a contested primary to win both Iowa and New Hampshire, evidence of Trump’s lasting hold on the party. And Trump has a loyal contingent of voters in the Palmetto State, along with a strong backing from the state’s congressional delegation and state lawmakers.

The loyalty of Trump’s base was on display in New Hampshire on Tuesday. NR found Salem resident Jodi Paris standing outside her polling place, Mary A. Fisk Elementary School, waving a Trump flag and vowing to stay all day if she had to in order to support the former president.

“I’ve never done anything like this before in my life,” said Paris, who arrived at the polling site at 9 a.m. after an early morning shift at work. “I am not a big politician person, but the stuff has hit the fan so badly that if people don’t stand up for their rights, they’re not going to have any rights. So I’m standing here all day if I have to.”

And Paris shared a harsh assessment of the former South Carolina governor: “I think she’s a flip flop, and I think she’s a paid Democrat, and I think she’s a liar.”

It’s this kind of Trump fan base that Haley is up against in her underdog bid for the GOP nomination, which appears to be shaping up to be a coronation for Trump after his two big wins so far.

In recent days, Haley has turned up the heat against Trump in the electability department, calling him too controversial to win against Biden in November. Trump offered evidence that supports her argument in his victory speech on Tuesday, when he delivered an angry tirade against Haley, whom he called an “impostor,” and Chris Sununu, the Granite State governor who endorsed her. Trump also repeated his false claims that he won the 2020 election.

It marked a dramatic about-face from the positive message he espoused in his Iowa victory speech just one week earlier.

Haley, for her part, falls on the other end of the spectrum. She can come across as very scripted on the stump, unlike Trump, who often ad-libs without a teleprompter for more than an hour during his rallies, feeding off the energy of the crowd. His supporters will wait in line for hours to see him on the trail, even braving subzero temperatures to get inside his events. When the venues are small, his supporters will stand on top of tables to snap photos of him.

This celebrity fan base presents serious challenges for Haley with Republican base voters, many of whom are either unfamiliar with her record or view her as a puppet of a bygone neoconservative establishment.

“She’s new to me,” said Republican voter Denise Gardener on Tuesday afternoon in Salem, after voting for Trump. “The only things I’ve heard and seen her say were contradictory to the first thing that she says.” 

After casting a vote for Trump, Salem resident Aidan Costa told NR that Haley’s debate performances left him with a sour taste in his mouth and that she came across as “rude” when interacting with her former rivals onstage. He’s supporting the former president because, in his view, Trump “did a lot for blue-collar workers” during his first term.

RNC chair Ronna McDaniel said Tuesday that the party should now unite around Trump, after voters in Iowa and New Hampshire sent a “very clear” message.

“I’m looking at the math and the path going forward and I don’t see it for Nikki Haley,” she said during an appearance on Fox News. “I think she’s run a great campaign, but I do think there is a message that’s coming out from the voters, which is very clear.”

That unity quickly came together on Tuesday evening, as Senator John Cornyn, one of the last prominent Republican holdouts, endorsed Trump. 

Yet the results in New Hampshire offered some warning signals for what may be to come if Trump is the nominee in November. Haley won independents by 22 points, while Trump won the Republican vote by 49 points — an unprecedented swing of 71 points.

Trump won just 34 percent of the independent vote on Tuesday evening. In 2016, he won 46 percent of independents nationally, and in 2020, he earned 41 percent of the independent vote nationally.

“So there are a lot of question marks hanging out there,” said Ayres, the GOP strategist. “And I think it would be a mistake to assume that the New Hampshire results are somehow unalloyed positive for Donald Trump because there are a bunch of warning signs in there.”

If Haley can hang on through South Carolina, the race could become more of a national contest, Wilson says. Nationally, Trump is up in the polls by a whopping 54.6 percent, though candidates who have since dropped out of the race have drawn a combined 19 percent of the vote.

After South Carolina, the focus shifts to Michigan on February 27, followed by Idaho, Missouri, Washington, D.C., North Dakota, and then finally, Super Tuesday on March 5.

Around NR

• Trump’s New Hampshire win comes with warning signs, NR’s editors say.

The Democrats want Trump as their opponent in the belief that they can salvage Joe Biden’s prospects by making the race all about Trump, and last night showed, once again, that they are making a sensible, if cynical, calculation. That independents turned out in such large numbers to cast votes in the Republican primary simply to protest Trump was an early indication of how he could lose the middle in November. Republican voters could have avoided giving Democrats what they wanted, but instead are putting all their chips on their riskiest electoral bet.

• As Trump heads from New Hampshire to the witness stand, Andrew C. McCarthy offers an explainer on the state of Trump’s second trial, in which he is the defendant in a suit brought by journalist E. Jean Carroll.

When the headstrong former president does finally take the stand, he is surely going to try to maintain his innocence; when that happens, he will find a headstrong judge sustaining objections and admonishing Trump that the issue of his liability has already been settled. Then the sparks will fly.

• Jim Geraghty questions whether Republicans do in fact want “pure, uncut Trumpism” as several media outlets have reported.

At this point, Trump is likely to win every contest from now until the convention. But the MAGA fanbase, by itself, is not going to be enough to win statewide elections in most places — otherwise, we would be talking about Georgia senator Herschel Walker, Arizona senator Blake Masters, Arizona governor Kari Lake, Pennsylvania governor Doug Mastriano, and Maryland governor Dan Cox. There is a pro-Trump half, or majority, in the GOP. But there is an anti-Trump, or Trump-exhausted, minority in the GOP. And a big question for the Trump campaign in the general election is whether that anti-Trump or Trump-exhausted minority in the GOP comes around and decides to vote for Trump, chooses to vote for four more years of Biden, votes for some other candidate, or stays home.

• NR’s editors recap Ron DeSantis’s “failed experiment.”

It may be that Trump wasn’t beatable this year, especially after the indictments. Republican voters obviously still haven’t quit on him and consider him more electable and more likely to deliver on results than any other Republican. The DeSantis calling card of his standout performance during the pandemic had also become less relevant to voters. Then, there were the campaign’s serial mistakes.

• Dan McLaughlin argues that we don’t have to pretend the voters are always right.

If you argue that Republican primary voters are making a terrible mistake in renominating Donald Trump for president, you are immediately met with two arguments. One is that any criticism of the choice of Trump is somehow condescending, patronizing, an insult to Trump’s supporters, or a sign that you “don’t get it.” A slightly more sophisticated version of this argument is that the primary voters are right by definition, because anybody who would lose the primary could not win a general election. Both of these arguments are ridiculous. Neither of them stands up to scrutiny.

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