“I said I wanted to make sure that Americans could make their voices heard. I have done that. I do not regret it.” After a disappointing Super Tuesday, Nikki Haley announced Wednesday that she is ending her campaign. On Tuesday, she just kept ex-president Donald Trump from a total triumph: after her previous victory in the capital Washington DC, Haley also won the state of Vermont. She did this by presenting herself as the alternative for conservatives and centrists who do not want a second battle between Biden and Trump in November.
That group could have played a decisive role for Haley if she had actually become the Republican presidential candidate. But that scenario never came into view. In February she already lost in South Carolina, the southern state where she had been governor. Super Tuesday was a last-ditch opportunity for Haley to make a difference, but a narrow victory in a state with very moderate voters was less than hoped for and less than what she needed.
As a supporter of military aid to Ukraine, Haley, Trump’s former ambassador to the UN, fared significantly better than Trump among voters who care about foreign policy. This was evident from the exit polls conducted by polling agency Edison Research on behalf of a number of American media. She also scored much higher among voters who believe “that most undocumented immigrants should be given the opportunity to apply for legal status,” among Americans who are convinced that Joe Biden is the legitimate winner of the 2020 election and among people who oppose a federal ban on abortion.
That gave her a better educated support base of old-fashioned Republicans, suburban women, independent voters and – in primaries where non-Republicans can also vote – some centrist Democrats. Many of them are so-called “double haters”: averse to Biden and Trump. That coalition of voters was too small to dethrone Maga king (‘Make America Great Again’) Trump in a Republican primary dominated by his supporters.
And so Haley had no better option on Wednesday than to wish him luck, even if that wasn’t something he wanted to do. “I wish good luck to whoever would become president of America,” Haley qualified her congratulations. Moreover, she did not provide voting advice in favor of Trump. However, she stated: “this is his moment to make a choice.” If Trump wants her support and that of the part of her voters he can still convince, he will have to work for it. That also means taking Haley herself into account. “While I will no longer be a candidate, I will not stop using my voice for the things I believe in.”
Trump does not seem to want to put in much effort for the time being. “Nikki Haley took a beating,” Trump declared Wednesday, before suggesting that nearly half of her voters were “radical left Democrats.” His Democratic opponent Joe Biden did not hesitate to join the conversation. “Donald Trump has made it clear that he does not want Nikki Haley’s supporters. I want to be clear: there is a place for them in my campaign.”
Moderate Haley?
The fact that Haley was able to profile herself as a “moderate” alternative to Trump in the battle for the nomination says a lot about her party’s move to the right.
In 2011, she became governor of conservative South Carolina as one of the faces of the right-wing populist Tea Party. She consistently described herself as “very pro-life” and previously, as a member of Congress, supported the far-reaching restriction of the right to abortion. She cycled around that background during the current campaign, stating that “I don’t judge anyone for being pro-choice and I don’t want them to judge me for being pro-life.”
Her current position on abortion was that there was a need for a search “for consensus” in the wake of the Roe v. Wade decision being struck down. By remaining vague about what exactly that meant, Haley was able to rally both anti- and pro-abortion voters to her side.
Haley also stood for anything but a weak border policy in the field of migration, contrary to the image Trump painted of her. As governor, she signed a migration law that required law enforcement officials to check the residency status of people they stopped during traffic checks and other actions. This was done on the basis of suspicions that they were in the country illegally and, according to opponents, amounted to “racial profiling”. Unlike Trump, Haley, herself the child of Indian parents, linked her policy to a more inclusive discourse. “We should not talk about migrants as criminals,” she said, and “legal migration is more than welcome.”
Aim for 2028
Overall, Haley indicated that she was right-wing, but not a “chaos candidate” like Trump, who is willing to overthrow the rule of law and is politically unpredictable. It made her popular with a right-wing group of donors, partly because of her positions in favor of low taxes and against new import duties. These have kept her campaign afloat so far, even though victory seemed no longer in sight.
Now that the exit is a fact, Haley left it unclear what her next career move will be. In recent weeks she has made it clear that she does not see a role as Trump’s vice president. It also seems unlikely that she will return to the race as an independent candidate in November: that would undermine her standing within the Republican party and Haley has always said that she will remain loyal to her party. It seems much more likely that she will present herself again in 2028 as an alternative for voters who will have grown tired of Democrats or Trumpism by then. She herself used a quote from Margaret Thatcher, the uncompromising conservative Prime Minister of the United Kingdom: “never just follow the crowd”.
