Former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley now faces a greater chance of being shut out in the 2024 Republican primaries than winning the nomination.
To avoid that fate, over the next few days, Haley is likely to target blue states and Washington D.C., where it is easy for independents and even Democrats to participate in a Republican primary, and Utah, a conservative state that has been unusually resistant to the GOP front-runner.
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Haley has lost the first six nominating contests of the year, including her home state of South Carolina. On Tuesday, former President Donald Trump beat her by nearly 42 percentage points in Michigan. She has broken 40% of the vote once and come within a rounding error of that number a second time. She also lost a nonbinding primary in which Trump wasn’t on the ballot by more than 30 points to a “none of the above” option.
One of the reasons Haley has kept going is that there are still so many places that haven’t voted and that Trump, even with his clean sweep up to this point, remains more than 1,000 delegates away from clinching the nomination.
A problem for Haley as the race starts shifting toward multiple contests all happening at once is that she isn’t favored anywhere. The RealClearPolitics national polling average has Trump at 78.7% to Haley’s 14.5%, a stunning 64.2-point gap. Trump led by 15.8 points by this time in 2016.
Haley’s campaign is projecting confidence. “Eleven of the 16 Super Tuesday states have open or semi-open primaries,” campaign manager Betsy Ankney wrote in a January memo. “Of the 874 delegates available on Super Tuesday, roughly two thirds are in states with open or semi-open primaries. Those include Virginia, Texas, Maine, Massachusetts, Minnesota, North Carolina, and Vermont, all with favorable demographics.”
Haley herself has alternated between defiance and sounding like someone who is running out of an obligation to give voters a choice, at least for now. Polls have shown deep misgivings about a Biden-Trump rematch this fall, but both men are undefeated in the primaries.
Biden doesn’t have a serious challenger. Haley is fighting to ensure Trump does.
If Haley is going to score an upset somewhere, the Friday-Sunday Washington, D.C., primary would seem like an opportunity. Trump won less than 14% of the vote in the primary in 2016, good for third place behind Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) and then-Ohio Gov. John Kasich, and 5% in the general election there in 2020. But the primary is limited to registered Republicans, of whom there are not very many.
In 2016, Rubio and Kasich got 2,068 votes combined while Trump couldn’t crack 400. By comparison, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) received 20,137 votes while losing the Democratic primary to former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton by 57.6 points.
Idaho and Missouri, seemingly more Trump-friendly territory, will caucus on Saturday.
From there, Haley will look to move to the D.C. suburbs of northern Virginia, where on Tuesday, she will seek to assemble a coalition of Never Trump Republicans and crossover voters. Further north, independents and centrists could boost Haley in Massachusetts, Maine, and Vermont. Finally, there are the Utah caucuses. Haley has visited the state — Trump has not.
Trump won Massachusetts, where there was a competitive Democratic primary, Virginia, and Vermont in 2016. He lost Utah and Maine to Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX), who was running to his right.
The other states Haley could hold out hope for on Super Tuesday are North Carolina, where Trump beat Cruz by 3.4 points in 2016, and Minnesota, where Rubio won eight years ago. What little polling in these states exists shows a big Trump lead, but the Minnesota polls, in particular, are old.
The same is true of the New England primaries. Fairly big Trump leads, but the polling is sparse and often outdated. Trump has also underperformed the polls somewhat whenever Resistance types have stormed the Republican primary.
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Henry Olsen of the Ethics and Public Policy Center has posited that Haley might be seeking a plurality of delegates in at least five states. That would give her some bargaining power at the Republican National Convention.
For now, Haley is surviving one primary at a time.