Haley Camp Looks Past South Carolina to Open Super Tuesday Primaries as Momentum Wanes

In the monthslong slog leading up to Iowa and New Hampshire, Nikki Haley’s campaign advisers urged reporters to keep in mind the former U.N. ambassador’s so-called secret weapon in the GOP primary: upward momentum.

Two presidential nominating losses later, that theory of the case is on shaky ground. Haley endured another public-relations nightmare Tuesday evening when Nevada Republicans chose the “none of these candidates” option over Haley in the state’s GOP primary, where Trump did not appear on the ballot and no delegates were awarded. (The former president is expected to sail to victory in Thursday’s state-GOP-run caucus, where delegates are up for grabs.)

For their part, Haley’s advisers are downplaying the Nevada results.

“We have not spent a dime nor an ounce of energy on Nevada,” Haley campaign manager Betsy Ankney said during an expectation-setting press call Monday morning. “We made the decision early on that we were not going to pay $55,000 to a Trump entity to participate in a process that was rigged for Trump.”

As Haley barrels toward her home state of South Carolina, where she served as governor from 2011 to 2017 and where she continues to trail Trump by double digits in most polls, Ankney maintains that her candidate will “continue to fight as long as we have the momentum and resources to do so.” It was that momentum, which received significant press attention in the weeks leading up to Iowa, that allowed Haley to win key donor support away from Ron DeSantis as his numbers began to flag.

But now, as that pre-Iowa surge grows stale, Haley’s camp is tempering expectations in South Carolina as it continues to set its sights on a number of upcoming open or semi-open primaries on Super Tuesday. In an open primary, voters do not have to formally register with a political party ahead of Election Day in order to vote in that party’s primary. In a semi-open primary, voters who are not affiliated with a political party can choose which party’s primary they would like to participate in.

Of 874 delegates up for grabs on March 5, nearly two-thirds are in states with open or semi-open primaries, including Texas, Maine, and Virginia. The campaign is eyeing several states that have a large contingent of college-educated voters, suburban voters, and independents, who tend to support Haley over Trump. Those states include Massachusetts, Minnesota, North Carolina, Utah, Vermont, and Virginia.

But first comes her home-state primary on February 24. On a Monday press call, Ankney declined to set a specific goal in South Carolina, saying only that Haley “wants to be strong in South Carolina and continue to show momentum and continue to gain support” — a strong indicator that her campaign is preparing for a loss. 

Her campaign is quietly hoping that Democrats who didn’t participate in last weekend’s low-turnout primary will give her a boost in the state’s GOP primary later this month. Many Palmetto State experts are skeptical that will pan out. 

“I don’t know that it will be any mass move from quote unquote Democrats to the Republican primary,” said South Carolina-based GOP strategist Chip Felkel. He added that the Democratic primary was a “non-event.”

The Haley campaign maintains they are not courting Democrats but are focused on winning over independents and increasing turnout among Republicans who might not always vote in a primary election. Ankney noted in Monday’s press call that 750,000 people voted in the 2016 Republican primary in South Carolina, of 3.3 million registered voters in the red state. 

But Republican members of South Carolina’s congressional delegation, who have overwhelmingly backed Trump, are adamant that Haley has no shot of winning their state’s primary later this month.

“I don’t know the rationale behind it,” Representative Russell Fry says of Haley’s presidential long-shot campaign, citing polling that has shown Trump up double digits for months now. “South Carolina has proven time and time again that it is a Trump state and it’s going to be on February 24.”

“To me, this is not ambassador Haley’s time. It is Donald Trump’s time,” Representative Joe Wilson said in a brief interview in the U.S. Capitol on Tuesday, in which he stopped short of calling on Haley to drop out of the race. “I’m not going to be critical of anybody for staying in the race.”

Hurting Haley’s chances are the scores of on-the-fence elected lawmakers and even former presidential rivals who have endorsed Trump en masse. That includes South Carolina representative Nancy Mace, whom Haley campaigned alongside in 2022 to help her win reelection against a Trump-backed challenger.

“He is literally running away with the election down here,” Mace said in explaining her decision during a recent interview with National Review. “I hope that Nikki will not go all the way to South Carolina. There’s a real opportunity for her to run in ’28 like everybody else.”

“I respect her,” said Mace, who asked Haley to cut an ad for her ahead of her Charleston-area congressional primary last cycle, a source familiar with the matter reminds NR. “She was a great governor. She ran a great race, and she made it deep into the playoffs, but the playoffs are over and we need to start the Super Bowl.”

Publicly at least, Haley maintains she’s playing the long game.

And if she stays in, open-primary states may be a bright spot for her, says Joseph Daniel Ura, who chairs the Clemson University department of political science, particularly in states that are “culturally, politically moderate to progressive, where the Republican Party and Republican partisans might be more open to a kind of moderate appeal.”

Given Trump’s legal troubles, Haley may simply think she has nothing to lose by staying in. “I think she’s trying to capture delegates and looking for a little luck and some help from juries to have his numbers start dropping and then be an alternative even if it goes all the way up to the convention,” says Felkel, the South Carolina–based GOP strategist. “That is the longest of long-shot strategies, but it’s worth considering.”

Around NR:

• Madeleine Kearns offers her take on Nikki Haley’s appearance on SNL last weekend: 

This kind of self-deprecating humor is sorely missing in American politics. And Haley pulled it off with class. But while she’s signaling that, on a personal level, she doesn’t take herself too seriously, the trouble is that, on a political level, neither do many others.

• Presidents don’t get to run a “basement campaign,” writes Noah Rothman, after a recent poll found Trump with a 23-point advantage over Biden when voters were asked to say which of the two leaders has the “mental and physical health” to be president.

Why wouldn’t voters draw those conclusions? The president has given them no reason to think otherwise. Indeed, Biden and his advisers seem to think that hiding the president from the public would disabuse voters of their impression that his physical condition is rapidly deteriorating. That’s a bizarre assumption, but it’s one the president’s handlers have spent the last year operationalizing.

• While Democrats have anxiety about nominating Biden again, there is no indication that that anxiety will translate into support for any other candidate, Jim Geraghty observes:

On paper, Minnesota congressman Dean Phillips is what Democrats say they want — a younger (55-year-old), healthier body and mind, with a record of 100 percent agreement with the Biden administration’s policies and positions. This past weekend, in a not-particularly-covered Democratic South Carolina primary, Biden crushed Phillips, 96.6 percent to 1.6 percent. Yes, we all knew that the Palmetto State was one of Biden’s strongest in the Democratic primaries, but Phillips couldn’t even keep Biden’s percentage of the vote outside of the range of normal human body temperature.

• Jeffrey Blehar reacts to a “truly nightmarish poll” for Biden from NBC, saying the results show an electorate that is not acting like Trump has disqualified himself from the presidency:

Clearly, the American people aren’t yet feeling the “vibe shift” that many economists and observers (as well as white-knuckled Democratic partisans) were predicting would quell voter anger about inflation.

• Charles C. W. Cooke doubts that Democrats are looking to swap out Biden for another candidate at some point this cycle:

It’s not an accident that Joe Biden was voted in as the Democrats’ presidential nominee in the first place, and, even now, it’s not at all obvious to me that anyone else would represent an improvement over him. That isn’t because Biden is strong — he’s not, he’s a disaster — but because the Democratic coalition doesn’t actually make a great deal of sense, and to remove Biden from its head would be to start a fight over the direction of the party that the party would be foolish to start deliberately in an election year. I don’t think they’ll do it.

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