Nikki Haley made it further in the Republican primary contest than most would have expected.
She got the one-on-one contest against Donald Trump that the other candidates were hoping for, but it was a mismatch. She won about 40 percent in New Hampshire and South Carolina, early states that were favorable territory for her where she was able to devote considerable time and resources. As the primaries and caucuses arrived more quickly on the calendar, though, she began to win a share of the vote closer to the far-distant second place of her national polling. Haley won Vermont and (over the weekend) Washington, D.C., not exactly Republican bellwethers, and she continued to show respectably in a handful of other states. But she got wiped out in most of the Super Tuesday states yesterday, ending any pretense that she had a path to the nomination.
There was probably no beating Donald Trump this year, certainly not after the indictments. He has pulled off a near-sweep of Republican primaries and caucuses that is unprecedented in a race without a sitting president, although, given how he’s defined away his 2020 loss, Trump was a quasi-incumbent in the race.
Haley deserves credit for talking about spending and debt and supporting aid for Ukraine at a time when this didn’t win her any points with the Republican base. She also became more pointed in her criticisms of Trump as the race progressed. But her political problem was that she sounded too much like a Republican circa 2004 to have broad appeal in the party, and she didn’t show any ability to break out of the 30 percent or so of the primary electorate disaffected with Trump.
There will now be much attention on whether she will endorse Trump, although it is doubtful she can deliver her voters; they aren’t particularly bonded to her, and this bloc of non-Trump voters existed well before she ran. Still, Trump should want her endorsement and should be trying to woo her — and those voters — instead of engaging in his typically graceless behavior.
The general-election race that most Americans didn’t want is now upon us. But we still believe Republicans would have been better served, in November and beyond, to have chosen someone other than Trump as their standard-bearer.