As Nikki Haley stubbornly clings to life ahead of Super Tuesday, warning that nominating Donald Trump for president a third time would mean “suicide for our country,” some of her closest supporters take solace in the fact that the future is unknowable.
Perhaps there is a “fatal landmine” that the former president “could step on at any minute” or a lurking controversy that could “land him deep in the bottom of a well,” speculated Michigan State Rep. Mark Tisdal, who served on Haley’s leadership team for that state. “She is an alternative,” added Utah state Sen. Todd Weiler, who campaigned with Haley earlier this week, “and nobody knows what the future holds with the lawsuits and the age of both of our leading candidates.”
Such are the unrealized hopes of the anti-Trump coalition. He will turn 78 in June, just three years younger than President Biden. He faces 91 felony counts in total among his four criminal indictments.
He has swept the first six nominating contests regardless.
And Trump has yet to trip into a proverbial well or stumble onto any of the aforementioned landmines. During the primary, that is. Haley has urged the GOP to look to November from the beginning, offering up a well-worn rebuttal to the chorus of party members calling on her to exit. Now she has some data to make that case: “He lost 40% of the primary vote in all of the early states.”
An accountant before politics, Haley points to the percentages in her favor as evidence of Trump’s weakness. In Minnesota Monday, she told a crowd, “You can’t win the general election if you can’t win that 40%.” Of course, unless the arithmetic changes in a hurry, Haley can’t win a primary with those numbers, either. As one prominent GOP operative put it to RealClearPolitics, requesting anonymity to speak frankly, “She’s not building a big movement. What she’s doing is lying in wait and hoping for disaster.”
Her campaign rejects outright any suggestion that Haley is waiting for catastrophe, legal or otherwise, to fall on Trump. They point to her dogged cross-country schedule and her seven-figure national ad campaign as evidence she hasn’t adopted a rear-guard strategy. They say Haley plans to win.
“There’s a lot at stake this election. Nikki is fighting for the future of the Republican Party and long-standing conservative principles like fiscal discipline and a strong national security,” said spokeswoman Olivia Perez-Cubas. “If we don’t right the ship, Republicans are going to keep losing and that means Democrats and the far left will keep winning.”
The substance of Haley’s fight has earned her comparisons to once-beloved Republican presidents. “She certainly represents the values and principal policy positions of a Reagan-Bush coalition,” said GOP strategist Whit Ayers. But unless things change in a hurry, her campaign could be compared to also-rans such as Pat Buchanan in 1992 and Steve Forbes in 1996, said Ayers, who noted that “there are a lot of people who’ve run for reasons other than simply winning the nomination.”
Writing in Politico, conservative columnist Henry Olsen speculated about one of those potential reasons to stay in the race. The more delegates Haley wins, the more influence she will have at the Republican National Convention “to get concessions from Trump on things she cares about, such as U.S. support for NATO.”
Speculation is in season, and more than one pundit has already written the Haley obituary. For her part, the former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations sticks to her argument that if Republicans nominate her old boss, “we will lose. It is that simple.” She brought this message with her to Utah, where the Republican governor, Spencer Cox, argued that if his party nominates Haley, “or literally anyone else, we would win by 10 to 14 points.”
Haley has targeted states in her final swing that are more moderate than Trump strongholds like Iowa and New Hampshire, places like Minnesota and Utah where his old rivals handed him defeats the last time there was a presidential primary. She will also spend Super Tuesday in Texas, one of six states that holds open primaries next week where registered voters, regardless of party affiliation, can vote for Republicans or Democrats.
“Republicans used to be about smaller government. We used to be about fiscal responsibility, too, and families. All of that has been abandoned under Trump,” Weiler said to explain Haley’s appeal out West. “That’s a message I think that resonates with Utah.”
“We’re a God-fearing people. We love our families. We want a president who our kids and our grandkids can look up to,” he added, “and we traditionally shy away from bullies.”
Now the last woman standing, the former diplomat has been more aggressive with Trump as he gains momentum. But Troy Eid, a former U.S. attorney during the Bush administration who now co-chairs Haley’s Colorado leadership team, said Haley “is not trying to cut people out; she’s trying to make the tent bigger.” If she fails in that mission, he worries, “the country will go off a cliff.”
“The other thing I worry about is that this election cycle, there are no issues,” he said of how the Republican frontrunner has built a lead focused, in Eid’s estimation, on himself and not the challenges facing the country. “I’m amazed that we maybe have our two candidates from both parties, maybe that’s gonna happen next week ... and we don’t have any issues on the table.”
No matter the result next week, Eid wants Haley to fight on until victory or the bitter end. “I hope she’s there when they’re going to have the national convention,” he said, “even if they don’t let her in the door. At this rate, who knows what will happen, but she needs to be outside and talking about issues like she did yesterday in Colorado.”
