Nikki Haley keeps racking up votes in final stretch of the GOP primary, and Donald Trump keeps ignoring them
Biden has a strategy for trying to bring anti-Trump Republicans to his side, while Trump still hasn’t reached out to Haley two months after she dropped out of the primary.
Nikki Haley during a press conference Wednesday announcing she was suspending her campaign for the Republican presidential nomination. | Chris Carlson/AP
In late April, staffers at Joe Biden’s headquarters fixated on votes for Nikki Haley rolling in during the Pennsylvania primary, as she pulled 20 to 25 percent support in the largely upscale, suburban collar counties around Philadelphia.
Most remarkable: Haley had dropped out more than six weeks earlier.
Within a day, the Biden campaign dropped an additional six-figure TV and digital ad buy in Bucks, Chester, Delaware, and Montgomery counties, explicitly targeting Haley voters with an ad featuring former President Donald Trump bad-mouthing his former U.N. ambassador and her supporters.
The ads are part of a much larger — and mostly behind-the-scenes — strategy to reel in anti-Trump Republicans, who continue to show up everywhere from Arizona to Wisconsin. The Biden campaign views Haley voters as a core part of its coalition this fall, especially as polls show some erosion among traditional Democratic groups such as young voters. Top campaign officials continue to court major Haley donors and possible anti-Trump GOP endorsers while honing their messages for bringing in Haley voters.
Trump, meanwhile, has made no such moves to bring Haley voters back into the GOP tent. Two months after she dropped out of the primary, Trump has yet to contact Haley to ask for her support, according to a person familiar with their relationship, granted anonymity by POLITICO because they were not authorized to speak on the record.
“A lot of these voters will come home by November, but his future is in his hands,” said former Indiana GOP state Rep. Mike Murphy, who had been working to organize a fundraiser for Haley before she dropped out of the race. “If he fucks up more in court, gets convicted and makes an ass of himself like he continues to do, then these people are going to continue to be disgusted with
As the now-settled presidential primary enters its final weeks, the anti-Trump protest vote is expected to keep rolling in. The Trump campaign has rebuffed the idea that a lingering opposition to Trump in the primaries will be a factor for him come November, but Biden’s campaign is betting it will play a sizable role.
The warning signs for Trump are striking because of the geography of where those voters live: suburbs, the place Trump warned in 2020 were under threat in a Biden presidency, are still getting bluer. The latest example came this week in barn-red Indiana’s primary, where Haley’s zombie campaign won 22 percent overall. The numbers were even higher in the suburban donut counties like Hamilton, the wealthy Indianapolis suburb of gated communities with manicured lawns, where Haley won 34 percent of the vote.
Similar patterns unfolded in key battleground states across the country. In Georgia’s primary, Haley won about 13 percent of the vote; she performed 10 points higher in suburban Cobb County, north of Atlanta. In crucial and swingy Arizona, Haley won 21 percent in Maricopa County, gaining more than 1 in five votes in the Phoenix suburbs. And in Wisconsin last month, Haley took as much as 17 percent of the vote in the counties surrounding Milwaukee.
“In every swing state, except for Nevada, the number of Nikki Haley [primary] voters far outpaces the [margin] between Trump and Biden in 2020,” said Robert Schwartz, executive director of the Haley Voters Working Group and an adviser to the Haley Voters for Biden super PAC. “In all those places, if you can get 20 percent to vote for Biden and another 5 to 10 percent who don’t vote at all, that’s going to be the difference-maker in this election.”
Trump isn’t doing anything to court Haley and her supporters
Haley is hosting dozens of top donors at a retreat Monday and Tuesday in Charleston, S.C., according to a spokesperson. She is not expected to endorse Trump or encourage donors to give to any other candidate during the event, which the Wall Street Journal first
reported. him.”
Newly installed at the conservative Hudson Institute, Haley has focused her public criticism on Biden in recent weeks. Her former campaign aides, meanwhile, have taken to publicly mocking the Trump campaign and calling attention to Haley’s continued vote shares.
“We are well past the primary,” said Haley’s former spokesperson, Olivia Perez-Cubas posted on X while sharing Haley’s near-35 percent vote total in Marion County, Indiana, which includes Indianapolis. “If you’re not paying attention yet, you should.”
Trump dominated the GOP primary. Haley only won contests in Washington, D.C, and Vermont, where the GOP electorate skewed moderate and anti-Trump, unlike much of the Republican base.
When she dropped out of the race, she declined to put her support behind Trump as most of her primary rivals had done. Instead, she called on Trump to give her supporters a reason to come back to the fold.
“It is now up to Donald Trump to earn the votes of those in our party and beyond who did not support him,” a defiant Haley said from her Charleston-area campaign headquarters March 6, as she announced she was ending her bid.