This morning, in a chat with reporters at the Fairmont Hotel in Washington, Nikki Haley gave her most emphatic rejection of the option of running as the presidential candidate of the organization No Labels.
“If I were to do No Labels, that would require a Democratic vice president. I can’t do what I want to do as president with a Democratic vice president,” Haley said. “I want to shrink the size of government and get it efficient again. I want to make sure that we get our kids reading again by putting more of those federal funds pushing it down to the state level — from education to health care to welfare and mental health, I want to take all of that out of D.C. and send it to the states. I can’t do that with a Democratic vice president. I want to make sure we do peace through strength, I don’t know if our foreign policies would agree.”
Haley later elaborated, “I’ve always believed that if you’re going to do something, do it right, or don’t do it. And I don’t think I could do it right if — if I ran for No Labels, that would mean it’s about me.”
That would appear to slam the door shut on the possibility of Haley appearing on the No Labels ticket. This past weekend, Joe Cunningham, the former South Carolina Democratic congressman and current national director of No Labels, told Fox News, “Nikki Haley is someone we would definitely be interested in.” Note that if Haley were to become the nominee of No Labels, she could run afoul of sore-loser laws, which bar candidates who have lost one party’s primary from running for the same office with another party, in eight states that have 131 electoral votes.
“All the talk of independent, No Labels, all of that, I haven’t talked to anybody about that. I know they have sent smoke signals that they want me to talk to them,” Haley said. “But I’m a Republican. At the end of the day, my sole focus is really, ‘What do we need’ — this is a primary. I’m trying to talk about the way forward for Republicans.”
Right now, Haley has 24 delegates to the GOP convention in Milwaukee, while Trump has 122 — and the margin isn’t likely to improve on Super Tuesday. For those wondering what Haley’s next step will be, if her bid for the Republican nomination is unsuccessful, it appears Haley herself isn’t all that sure what would be next for her.
“I don’t look all the way down the road, I’ve never been that way, all my life,” Haley said. “I’m certainly not doing that in this election. My approach has always been, as long as we’re competitive, as long as Americans say, ‘We want you to do this,’ we’re going to keep doing it.”
During her meeting with reporters, Haley didn’t take the bait and express a preference for who should replace Mitch McConnell as the leader of Republicans in the Senate. But she does think that the next GOP leader in that chamber ought to be, as she sees herself, a happy warrior — and that the current tone of the Trumpified GOP is repelling more voters than it attracts.
“The tone at the top matters, right?” Haley asked. “What you’re hearing now is, seeing the wave of what Congress thinks they need to do to win — I’ll ask you if we’re winning.”
Having just lost the Michigan primary, Haley points back to an era of Republican victories in that state, in the not-so-distant past.
“I remember going there to be with Governor Rick Snyder, and it was such a beacon. They were winning races up and down the ticket, had passed right-to-work, which was unimaginable. And now I went to Michigan, [Republicans have] lost the governor’s mansion, they’ve lost the state house, they’ve lost the state senate. Then I went to Minnesota — exact same thing. Then I went to Colorado. No Republican has gotten over 45 percent statewide. All of these losses happened after Donald Trump became president in 2016.”
Turning to the nearest Super Tuesday state, Haley added, “Look at Virginia — the only reason Glenn Youngkin won was because he distanced himself from Trump.”
That’s not entirely accurate, as Youngkin played a nuanced game, emphasizing or deemphasizing his agreements with Trump depending upon the audience. But it’s safe to say that the buttoned-down but sunny Youngkin isn’t a particularly Trumpy candidate, and the latter half of 2017 was probably the period where Trump was least in the public’s mind in the last eight years.
“Now you’ve got a situation in Congress where they’re all falling all over themselves, to show they’re more Trump than anybody else,” Haley lamented. “But if you make it all about one man, and not about the direction of our country, then what are we doing? When I look at the Senate, what I want to see is a leader who’s going to be focused on America and results for the America people . . . not rewarding people for peacocking on TV.”
Every now and then, Haley’s “happy warrior” persona slips a bit to reveal a frustration with an electorate that keeps saying it doesn’t want a 2024 rematch of Grumpy Old Men but that just won’t vote in enough numbers to alter the current trajectory towards that rematch.
On Thursday, “you had two old guys running for president who showed up to the border for photo ops,” Haley said. Haley contends Biden has “literally done nothing to secure” the border and that Trump recently torpedoed the best chance of accomplishing anything this year.
Haley didn’t love the proposal from Senator James Lankford (R., Okla.) for foreign aid and border security, but she saw it as a useful first step to a better bill.
“We had, two weeks ago, a border bill,” Haley said “My thoughts on it, he strong part was strengthened asylum laws, we have to have that . . . the weak part was, it didn’t have Remain in Mexico, we have to have that. It had a 5,000-person threshold, we don’t even want a one-person threshold. But instead of Congress getting in a room, and making it stronger and passing something out, Trump told them not to pass anything until after the general election. We can’t wait one more day! And so then, the whole thing fell apart. It’s just a lack of results.”
She sees the same dynamic at work in the impasse over funding for Ukraine and Israel. “You have Donald Trump and Republicans following him, walking away from what we’ve always done, which is strengthen our alliances, building strong alliances to keep our enemies away. And they’re doing it under the premise of a lie. They’re saying that you have to be for Ukraine and Israel, or that you have to be for securing the border — that’s a total lie.”
In an ordinary election cycle, being the runner-up and winning anywhere from 26 percent to nearly 40 percent of the vote in the early primaries, and accumulating the second-most delegates to the convention, would be, to paraphrase former Illinois governor and The Apprentice contestant, Rod Blagojevich, “a valuable thing.” In this environment, it’s not quite clear what Nikki Haley gets for winning about a third of the primary votes so far. Trump’s unlikely to want her as a running mate or in another cabinet post, and it’s not even clear whether she’ll address the GOP convention in Milwaukee.
But in an era with such a highly unusual former-president front-runner, perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised Trump still faces an unusual challenger.