Former U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Nikki Haley has remolded her campaign strategy as she faces a do-or-die moment in the 2024 Republican primary race.
Haley, who is preparing to face former President Donald Trump in the Feb. 24 South Carolina primary, launched her campaign touting her political experience and that she “never lost an election.” She once shied away from broadsides in favor of calling for a “generational change” of leadership beyond Trump, 77, and President Joe Biden, 81.
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But the former two-term South Carolina governor has shifted her campaign’s messaging in recent weeks, launching a full-throttle fusillade against Trump as she seeks to wrestle the anti-establishment mantel from her former boss, a former reality TV star whose first run for office was the 2016 presidency.
Trump, who leads Haley by an average of 32.7 percentage points in her home state, deployed the “outsider” tactic in his first presidential campaign as a Republican political novice and brash New York businessman. Since then, Trump has effectively overtaken the GOP after winning the 2016 election and molding the party in his image.
But now, Haley appears to be adapting the tactic in her own campaign, hoping that an outsider persona could endear her to enough Republicans and independents looking for a new future in the GOP to keep her campaign running past February.
“The outsider lane is very appealing to voters. And so whether it fits or not, she’s going to wear it,” said Jason Roe, a Republican strategist who worked on Sens. Mitt Romney‘s (R-UT) and Marco Rubio‘s (R-FL) presidential campaigns.
In one of the most blatant signs of Haley snubbing the GOP establishment, campaign manager Betsey Ankney released a statement slamming Trump’s recent endorsement of North Carolina Republican Party Chairman Michael Whatley to head the Republican National Committee. He also endorsed daughter-in-law Lara as the RNC’s co-chairwoman in the wake of reports RNC Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel will step down.
“Trump just announced he is rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic,” Ankney said. “Under Donald Trump and current RNC leadership, Republicans lost elections in 2018, 2020, and 2022, and now the RNC is effectively bankrupt.
Ankney then went on to call for a full-scale dismantling of the RNC.
“Nikki Haley’s plan for the RNC? Blow it all up,” she said. “Everyone at the RNC will be fired, there will be a full and complete audit of the gross misuse of funds, and there will be a formal application process to become RNC chair based on MERIT, not on back-scratching.”
The comments are a sharp contrast to the Haley who launched a Republican campaign primarily focused on a cautious approach. One year ago, Haley barely mentioned Trump as she indirectly critiqued his leadership and mental capacity. Now she’s going on the attack against her former boss.
Her critics claimed this new role may be too late to save her campaign.
“I just don’t think it’s authentic,” Roe said. “I mean, certainly, she was very credibly an outsider as part of the tea party revolution that I think kind of propelled her career early on.”
Matt Dole, a Republican political consultant based in Ohio, pointed to Haley’s impressive resume as proof she isn’t the outsider she is portraying herself to be.
“She is very much the establishment, having been a governor and a member of the Cabinet and the U.N. ambassador,” Dole said. “Donald Trump was able to do it because he was a complete and total outsider. He was the host of the reality show running for president. So he had a different argument to make.”
Haley, though, has pointed to her work as governor bucking conservative orthodoxy as why the majority of GOP statewide leaders in the Palmetto State are backing Trump for president, including her successor, Gov. Henry McMaster (R-SC).
“Do you mean the speaker of the House and those elected officials that I forced to have to show their votes on the record when they were trying to hide behind voice votes?” Haley taunted at a rally in Conway, South Carolina, in late January. “Do you mean that same political group that I forced to pass ethics reform and made them show where their income comes from? … You can have them. I don’t want them.”
Timothy Head, executive director of the Faith and Freedom Coalition, told the Washington Examiner in an interview it makes logical sense for Haley to take on the anti-establishment mantle.
“She’s looking at a pretty long-shot approach I think and certainly in South Carolina but also Super Tuesday,” Head said. “But I think that she’s trying to kind of create a lane as a bit of an insert insurgent.”
Given Trump’s de facto incumbent advantage, Haley needed some other argument to make to voters, according to Head.
“You can’t kind of position yourself as mainline or mainstream because, by definition, the incumbent is the mainline or mainstream,” he added. “So she has to kind of position herself as something different, which again almost by definition is as an outsider from kind of the pure world of Trump.”
Haley’s campaign maintains that there are enough voters who want a new direction for the GOP to keep fueling her candidacy.
“Not only did Donald Trump not drain the swamp in Washington, he has become the leader of the swamp. That’s why all the career politicians are lining up behind him,” said spokeswoman AnnMarie Graham-Barnes in a statement to the Washington Examiner. “Nikki has always been an outsider, and voters are rallying around her call for term limits, mental competency tests, and tackling the spending addiction in both parties. Seventy percent of voters don’t want a Trump-Biden rematch. They want someone who’s going to knock some heads in D.C.”
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Dole, the Ohio GOP strategist, said this new, more aggressive version of Haley is a result of the GOP base’s unrelenting support of Trump and the result of Trump’s 30% dominance during the Iowa caucuses in January.
“I think Iowa broke something in Nikki Haley. And she very quickly sort of took on this mantle of being the anti-Trump person,” he said. “And she took on a new tone, to the point where she certainly isn’t going to be Donald Trump’s vice president at this point.”