What Nikki Haley Is Trying to Prove

She’s highly unlikely to win, but she’s looking to send a message.

Latest Feb 24, 2024 0 66 Add to Reading List

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Nikki Haley faces terrible odds in her home state of South Carolina and beyond, but she has vowed to keep going. Beyond her own political ambitions, her campaign may be about trying to send a message to the Republican Party.

First, here are four new stories from The Atlantic:

Existential, Financial, Practical

Say what you want about Nikki Haley, but she is sticking with it. She continues to trail significantly behind Donald Trump in the polls, even in her home state of South Carolina, despite raising money from donors at a steady pace. Yet Haley has vowed to stay in the Republican primary at least through early March. Why is she still here?

Many have speculated in recent months that Haley is angling for a different higher office, perhaps that of the vice president. She has said that she has no interest in that job, a claim buttressed by her newly harsh posture toward the party’s likely nominee. Others have wondered if perhaps she is teeing up a future run—a claim she has also denied. “My own political future is of zero concern,” she said earlier this week in a “State of the Race” press conference that her campaign held, seemingly to fend off such speculation.

Haley has said that she is fighting for “something bigger” than herself, and she may well be running at least in part on behalf of a larger cause. As my colleague Ronald Brownstein wrote today, Haley is “showing a determination to force Republicans to wrestle with the general-election risks they are accepting by renominating” Donald Trump. “The biggest question in South Carolina may not be whether Haley can beat Trump, but whether the state provides her more evidence, even in defeat, to make that case,” Ronald writes.

These calculations seem somewhat existential. But, as always in campaigns, they are also financial and logistical. Haley faces little downside to staying in the race at this point, Seth Masket, a political scientist and the director of the Center on American Politics at the University of Denver, told me in an email. After all, she is running against an older rival who is in, as Masket put it, a “tremendous amount of legal and financial jeopardy.” Plus, her campaign still has plenty of cash. As experts explained to me last month, a simple but meaningful factor that motivates candidates to quit races is running out of money. But Haley has lately been on a fundraising tear, particularly with venture capitalists and businesspeople. After Trump won New Hampshire, Haley raised $5 million from donors. She raised another $1 million after Trump took a shot at the absence of her husband, who is serving in the military overseas. In January, her campaign brought in more than $11.5 million from grassroots efforts while her allied super PAC raised $12 million, outpacing Trump’s fundraising efforts, the Associated Press reported.

Haley’s wealthy donors are loving her more aggressive posture toward Trump. In recent weeks, she has attacked him more directly than she did at any earlier stage of the race, calling him “toxic” and “unhinged” and mocking his gold-sneaker fundraiser. “Haley’s billionaire supporters adore this new, aggressively anti-Trump candidate, and they’re rewarding her with cash,” my colleague Elaine Godfrey wrote last month.

In many ways, Haley is framing herself as an old-school conservative candidate: big on national security, fiscal conservatism, and business interests. She is a favorite of those Republicans who seem to long to return to the days of less chaotic party politics. But her credentials may not play well in the state where she was once governor. Although South Carolina has a sizable pool of educated conservative voters, especially around its urban centers, the state will also likely see a strong turnout from MAGA world in the polls.

The trouble for Haley is that her momentum with donors is building even as her opponent cements his dominance. Trump has managed to lock up endorsements from many of the most prominent Republican players in the state. (Haley, meanwhile, has reportedly left a string of grudges and broken alliances behind her in her home state over the years.) Trump is trouncing Haley in the South Carolina polls—and the state has had an outsize impact in recent national elections. It was won, Ronald noted in his article today, by all but one of the candidates who went on to clinch the Republican Party’s primary nomination through 2016.

Haley may face defeat and humiliation this weekend. But as Masket noted, her recent baiting of Trump into attacking her when he could be attacking Joe Biden may undermine support for him in the general election. Trump’s jabs at Haley could also remind general-election voters, particularly women, moderates, and independents, of the type of bullying he is capable of. Haley’s campaign could weaken Trump, even if she drops out in the weeks to come.

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The Mystery of Partner ‘Convergence’By Faith Hill

Psychologists occasionally talk about the “Michelangelo phenomenon”: Over time, romantic partners start to slowly change each other, like sculptors chipping away at blocks of marble. Could I help you find a therapist? one might ask their beloved. What if we started jogging together? Hmm, wearing the fedora again? Eventually—the hope goes—they'll have chiseled a masterpiece of a companion. The result isn’t always a perfect David, but the point is that relationships mold people. And some researchers have found that when that happens, the art tends to look conspicuously like the artist.
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