Nikki Haley’s South Carolina strategy has a Donald Trump problem
In 2016, as Donald J. Trump stormed to victory in her home state, South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley endorsed Senator Marco Rubio as the fresh face of a “new conservative movement That will change the country.”
Now, Ms. Haley insists, she is the leader of the new generation, but even in her own country she finds that Mr. Trump is still standing in her way.
If she really wants to challenge for the Republican presidential nomination, Ms. Haley must prove in South Carolina that the party’s voters want to turn the page on the Trump era — and where she has predicted she will meet him once. on-one after strong performances in Iowa and New Hampshire.
“Then you let me and Trump go to my home state of South Carolina — that’s how we win,” she told a crowd gathered in a rustic banquet hall during a recent campaign stop in rural Wolfeboro, N.H.
But Ms. Haley’s path to victory on her home court will be steep. Since the state put Trump on a glide path to the Republican nomination seven years ago, he has solidified a loyal base. The candidate who upended state politics from outside the political system now has a firm grip on most of the Republican establishment. He recently appeared with Governor Henry McMaster and Senator Lindsey Graham and boasted more than 80 expressions of support from current and former officials across the state.
“It’s still clearly Trump’s party,” said Scott H. Huffmon, director of the statewide Winthrop Poll, one of the few mainstream surveys of voter attitudes in the state. “That means that many Republican voters are Trump supporters first and foremost. She needs to remind them that the company is bigger than one man.”
Ms. Haley tried to make that case Wednesday on the national debate stage, where rivals seeking to blunt her rise targeted her and put her on the defensive. She promised her approach would be different from Mr. Trump’s.
“No drama, no revenge, no whining,” she said.
While Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida has launched his bid for Iowa and former Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey has gone all-in for New Hampshire, Ms. Haley’s campaign officials say they have tried to spend equal time and resources in all three early years to spend. voting states.
Her campaign is headquartered in Charleston and supported by hundreds of volunteers. (The campaign declined to provide details on staff and volunteer deployments in all three states.)
But Ms. Haley’s efforts have so far been less pronounced in South Carolina. She spent 58 days campaigning almost evenly between Iowa and New Hampshire, but only 12 days in her own backyard. Her campaign has not yet released a full list of endorsements within the state, although several key state lawmakers and donors are expected to endorse Ms. Haley in the coming days, according to her campaign. A $10 million advertising effort is expected in Iowa and New Hampshire alone, with more than $4 million earmarked for television so far.
Ms. Haley’s campaign officials and allies argue that she still has time to make up ground, even as Mr. Trump remains dominant across the country and in all of the early states, where surveys show him leading his closest opponent by double digits. Former Vice President Mike Pence and Senator Tim Scott, a fellow South Carolinian, have dropped out of the race, helping Ms. Haley gain money and momentum and tightening the battle with Mr. DeSantis for second place.
At an energetic town hall event last week in Bluffton, S.C., Katon Dawson, a consultant for the Haley campaign in South Carolina and former chairman of the Republican Party, pointed to the crowd of more than 2,500 people — her largest crowd yet in her home state — and said the mailing lists generated by such events would help improve its grassroots game.
“If South Carolina comes into the picture, it’s going to jump into the gutter and we’ll be ready,” Mr. Dawson said, suggesting he expected the attacks on Ms. Haley to get uglier closer to the January games in Iowa. and New Hampshire.
Many of the attendees at the Bluffton event were former Trump supporters. Michelle Handfield, 80, a correctional volunteer, and her husband, John, 81, a retired photographer, said they were among Trump’s most enthusiastic admirers. Ms. Handfield, a former Democrat, said he was the first Republican she ever voted for in 2016.
Now, however, they planned to vote for Ms. Haley for reasons similar to what the former South Carolina governor has expressed: “Chaos follows him.”
“I think he was a great president, but they were after him from the beginning — the Democrats — and then what he says and does doesn’t help,” Ms. Handfield said. “I really wish he had won a second term, but I think he would now be doing more harm than good to the country.”
Still, many of the Republican primary voters remain staunch supporters of Trump, even as he has maintained a light campaign schedule so far.
“It’s fascinating that we see all of these campaigns in various stages of grief as President Trump continues to dominate the primary field,” said Alex Latcham, Trump’s first state director. “Right now, Haley is in the negotiation phase.”
Ms. Haley’s political base in the state remains the same as when she was governor: affluent — and more moderate — Republicans along the coast and in Charleston.
But her grip on the Midlands, tightened by her years in government, has loosened over time, and the support she had in the much more conservative Upstate around Greenville has sharply disappeared. To prevail, she must win back some of those conservatives and soften enthusiasm for Trump while fending off attacks from other opponents.
During the debate on Wednesday, Mr. DeSantis took aim at her conservative record as governor, saying he had signed a bill that would criminalize transgender people for using bathrooms in public buildings that do not correspond to their sex at birth. measuring unit. Ms Haley countered that such legislation was not necessary at the time, adding that she had not wanted to involve the government in the issue. The South Carolina Bill did not progress beyond its introduction at the State House.
Last week, Mr. DeSantis also addressed Ms. Haley while she was campaigning in South Carolina. On Friday, he appeared with Tara Servatius, a popular radio broadcaster from the Greenville station WORD, who has been using her show for weeks to portray Ms. Haley as an unreliable moderate.
“For the last 10 years I’ve been trying to get Nikki Haley to come and answer unscripted questions,” Ms. Servatius said, to which Mr. DeSantis quipped, “Good luck with that.”
Some Republican primary voters appear to be looking for a figure who embodies a more drastic conservative change. Tim Branham, 73, of Columbia, didn’t remember much of what Ms. Haley accomplished as governor. “In my opinion, the best thing you can say about Nikki is that she’s a Republican,” he said.
Yet Ms. Haley continues to attract major endorsements, along with a new wave of big-money donors looking for a Trump alternative, bolstering both her finances and her field operations.
Within a week of her campaign’s endorsement, Americans for Prosperity Action, the political network founded by billionaire industrialist brothers Charles and David Koch, had already poured $3.5 million into hiring door knockers, running digital ads and producing door hangers and media in Iowa and the South. Carolina, according to federal spending records. Within a day of the announcement, Americans for Prosperity Action had more than 140 volunteers and staffers in nearly half of South Carolina’s 46 counties spreading its message.
Kyle Kondik, an election analyst at the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics, said Ms. Haley’s appeal, which appears to be greater among college-educated Republicans who do not consider themselves particularly religious, has left her better positioned for success among New York’s Republican primaries. York. Hampshire.
But he added that a more telling test of how her message would fare among Republican primary voters in South Carolina — a group closely aligned with Mr. Trump — would be Iowa and its largely white and Christian evangelical Republican base.
“If Haley loses South Carolina, it could very well be a curtain call,” Mr. Kondik said.
Shane Goldmacher reporting contributed.