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Bleak landscape for Nikki Haley yet she can still pose nagging questions for Donald Trump

Haley will continue to push the idea that she is the last alternative to the dreaded inevitability of another election campaign between Biden and Trump

Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley greeting supporters on New Hampshire primary day in Concord. Her stance on Trump is that events of the past decade have proven him to be an instrument of chaos. Photograph: EPA

Keith Duggan's face
Keith Duggan in Manchester, New Hampshire
Wed Jan 24 2024 - 17:35

Nikki Haley awoke on Tuesday to a downcast New Hampshire panorama: an overnight fall of slushy snow and collapsing grey skies obscuring the views of the state. Although she possesses a singularly tenacious optimism she might privately concede that her pathway to the Republican nomination for the US presidency looks equally bleak just now.

The morning television shows were predictably filled with Haley’s Republican colleagues calling on her to suspend her campaign now to leave the path clear for Donald Trump. “Looking at the map and path going forward, I don’t see it for Nikki Haley,” said Ronna McDaniel, the Republican National Committee chairwoman.

“I think she has run a great campaign. We need to unite behind our eventual nominee, which is going to be Donald Trump and we need to beat Joe Biden. It is 10 months away until the November election and we can’t wait any longer to put our foot on the gas to beat the worst president, to beat a president that has kept our borders open, allowed fentanyl to pour through, allowed inflation to go rampant. He is hurting the American people, and we need to unite to do everything we can to defeat him,” she said.

It was a more nuanced version of the message Trump has aggressively sold throughout his week of rallies in New Hampshire, insisting not only would he win the first primary of the year but that South Carolina, Haley’s home state, was in his pocket. The South Carolina primary is scheduled for February 24th.

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With perfect timing the Trump campaign was boosted by the endorsement of Senator Tim Scott, who dropped out of the election race in November. It was a ruthless, strategic move – 12 years ago it was Haley, then governor of South Carolina, who appointed Scott as senator. At a noisy rally in Manchester on Saturday, Trump conspicuously introduced a series of South Carolina’s grandees, including present governor Henry McMaster and the state’s attorney general and House speaker. In a race where perception is vital, this shrewdly positioned Haley as an outsider in the state she once governed.

With over 96 per cent of the votes in on Tuesday, Trump held a persistent 54 per cent to 43 per cent lead over Haley, a comfortable margin of victory but not sufficiently to silence the nagging questions the Haley campaign has posed with more venom in recent days.

Haley’s stance on the former president is that events of the past decade have proven him to be an instrument of chaos and that she – and now she alone – stands as the last alternative to the dreaded inevitability of another election campaign between Biden and Trump. A series of polls, most prominently that issued by the Wall Street Journal, indicated that if the presidential election did come down to a straight choice between Haley and Biden she would win by 17 percentage points. On Tuesday her campaign supporters continued to beat that drum.

“Look, Trump has his years as president to show much more success than Biden, there’s no question about that,” New Hampshire governor Chris Sununu, told Fox News. “But again it’s a nail-biter, which means Biden could still win and Kamala Harris is the next president. This is real stuff. That is what we are risking. Why not get behind Nikki Haley who wins in a landslide, who brings conservative values to the White House and carries all these other opportunities with her?”

Talk of a potential Trump wildfire is something his campaign would like to quench before it gains oxygen. In New Hampshire he was comfortably the go-to figure among the majority of Republican voters who believe his second term in office will be the panacea to all of the US’s ailments. But Haley’s strong showing among unaffiliated Republicans – who identify with the party’s values while remaining independent – with 62 per cent supporting her raises the broader question of whether moderate Republicans will get behind a Trump nomination in sufficient numbers.

It’s worth noting, though, that New Hampshire is a haven for independent-minded Republicans. Recent polls show Haley trailing Trump by 30 percentage points in South Carolina.

It leaves the Haley campaign with a difficult decision to make. Americans for Prosperity (AFP), a conservative policy network founded by the billionaire Koch brothers, is the most prominent donor to the Haley ticket, and claims to have already built the “largest grassroots operation in the country, with a presence in all 50 states”. The plan, said Michael Palmer, an AFP senior adviser, was fairly simple: to craft a narrative around a new candidate who is essentially a blank slate as opposed to “a book that’s already written, which is the case with Donald Trump”.

The narrow choice for Haley and her backers now revolves around whether they believe enough people in South Carolina are even interested in hearing a different story.

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