Why Nikki Haley Won't Quit

When Nikki Haley called the national media to Greenville, S.C., on Tuesday, she did something that was strikingly unusual even in this most bizarre of campaigns. She devoted an entire speech to explaining why she was not dropping out of the presidential race.

Hungry for attention, and tired of questions about why she wasn't reading the audience and the polls, her team had seductively labeled the event a “State of the Race” speech. There was plenty of speculation among Republican strategists that she might finally face reality. Perhaps, the theories went, Ms. Haley now understood that without some unforeseen act of God, there was no mathematical path to winning enough delegates to wrest the Republican nomination from Donald J. Trump.

“Some of you — maybe some of you in the media — have come here today to see if I'm dropping out of the race,” Ms. Haley said. “Well I'm not. Far from it.”

Her smile said it all. Ms. Haley had a good time, finally able to say what she had long thought about Mr. Trump and apparently thrilled to have drawn national attention to her message. She looked like a woman who didn't have much to lose, which people around her thought was about right.

Ms. Haley says she doesn't want anything from Mr. Trump. After serving as ambassador to the United Nations, she would not let any cabinet role tempt her into making a deal with him to end her quixotic campaign.

“Some people always said I ran because I really wanted to be vice president,” she said in her speech on Tuesday. “I think I answered that question pretty well.”

It is difficult to find a Republican lawmaker or official who does not privately speculate about Ms. Haley's ulterior motives. Will she hang in there as a Plan B candidate in case Trump dies or goes to prison? Is she positioning herself as the woman who will lead a post-Trump Republican Party — the soothsayer who warned that Trump would lose again so she can return in 2028 and say, “I told you so”?

Ms Haley dismissed such speculation on Tuesday: “If I was competing for any false reason, I would have quit a long time ago.”

She said she was “used to people questioning my intentions” and that she was “fighting for what I know is right.”

Her friends and allies say the doomsayers have unusually little effect on her. Her history of winning distance races means she is used to being left out and proving people wrong. Ms. Haley sometimes campaigns in a T-shirt with the slogan “Underestimate me. That will be fun.”

She was a young, first-time candidate who fell far behind in the polls and fundraising as she defeated a nearly 30-year-old incumbent for a seat in the South Carolina State House in a victory that shocked her state's political establishment . . Years later, in 2010, she defeated several of the state's political heavyweights in her race for governor: Henry McMaster, a former attorney general who is now governor; Gresham Barrett, a popular congressman at the time; and André Bauer, then the state's lieutenant governor. That same establishment now stands, almost human-like, arrayed against her in support of Mr. Trump.

One of those vanquished former rivals, Mr. Barrett, said in an interview Tuesday that Ms. Haley appeared before many of the “movers and shakers” in the Spartanburg, S.C., area at a fundraiser this week and “had no qualms” about she was in it for the long haul.

“I don't think a supporter left last night thinking this was a short-term thing,” Mr. Barrett said, adding that her backers were prepared to stick with her through Super Tuesday — and until the end, when that's also allowed. are.

Ms. Haley has told donors and friends that the personal attacks she has received from Mr. Trump and his allies have only hardened her resolve. Far-right activist Laura Loomer, who was on his plane with Trump for a recent trip to South Carolina, did viciously attacked Ms. Haley's 22-year-old son, Nalin, even questions his parentage.

At a recent rally, Mr. Trump wondered aloud why Ms. Haley's husband, Michael, did not join her on the campaign trail. Ms. Haley snapped back that her husband was serving abroad in the military — an act of service that Mr. Trump had never performed and could never understand. The emotional aftershocks were reflected in her speech on Tuesday. Mrs. Haley choked up as she said how much she wanted her and her children to be with him.

Ms. Haley presented her decision to stay in the race as a matter of principle. She pointed out that most Americans are unhappy with both likely choices in the fall. She said the country deserved better than these two old men and she was determined to give voters that choice. Resigning so early in the process, she said, would lead Americans into the longest electoral period in history — one that would result in a chaotic future for the country regardless of the outcome.

A spokesman for Mr. Trump, Steven Cheung, said in a statement to The New York Times that “Nikki 'Birdbrain' Haley still can't name a single state they think they can win.” He said Ms. Haley had become “the candidate of choice for Democrats and Never Trumpers who continue to suffer from Trump Derangement Syndrome.”

During the Trump era, Ms. Haley was not exactly known for her principled stands against the former president. She had made it clear what she thought of the man in the 2016 campaign. She found him morally unfit for the presidency – “everything we teach our children, you shouldn't do in kindergarten.” But then she voted for him, served under him, and praised him effusively. She even went so far as to claim that his childish insults to North Korea's Kim Jong Un – Mr Trump called him “little rocket man” – effective.

After the Jan. 6 riot, Ms. Haley flirted with abandoning Mr. Trump again. “He went down a path he shouldn't have followed, and we shouldn't have followed him, and we shouldn't have listened to him,” she said. Politics. “And we must never let that happen again.”

Two months later, she said she would resign and support Mr Trump if he were to run again in 2024. People close to Ms. Haley said she simply did not believe he would run again. Shortly after he announced his candidacy, she went back on her word, saying the country had only slid downwards and that his survival was “bigger than just one person.”

For much of this campaign, Ms. Haley has gone easy on Mr. Trump. So easily that Trump was seriously considering her as a potential running mate until early in the new year, according to three people with direct knowledge of his deliberations. Ms. Haley and her allies spent almost all their energy and money destroying Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida and clearing the rest of the field for a two-person race against Mr. Trump.

In recent weeks, Ms. Haley has finally unleashed herself on Mr. Trump.

She has portrayed him as a sycophant of President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia and challenged him to say that Mr. Putin was responsible for the death of dissident Alexei Navalny in a remote prison. She has criticized Mr. Trump for spending more time and money in court than on the campaign trail and attacked him for tightening his grip on the Republican National Committee, claiming he planned to use it as “ his piggy bank for his personal affairs'.

Every day, her campaign sounds more and more like the fierce anti-Trump campaign of Chris Christie, the former governor of New Jersey, who attacked and taunted the frontrunner at every opportunity. After Mr. Trump released his latest moneymaker — Trump-branded gold sneakers — Ms. Haley's campaign trolled the announcement: to post an image on social media of a white sneaker decorated with the Russian flag.

Whatever her motivation, there are other, more prosaic reasons to continue the fight a little longer, through Super Tuesday on March 5.

Kevin Madden, a former Republican strategist who worked on Mitt Romney's 2012 and 2008 presidential campaigns, said this campaign helped Ms. Haley raise her national profile and build transferable infrastructure, relationships and “muscle memory” should she decide to run. to try again. He argued that even a Haley endorsement of Trump wouldn't “completely undo” her because voters have short memories.

There is one last factor. Ms. Haley has benefited from a self-reinforcing conveyor belt of wealthy anti-Trump donors eager to continue funding what some privately admit is a futile effort.

“Candidates have no shortage of reasons to run,” Mr. Madden said. “They have run out of resources.”

Mrs. Haley has had enough.