When Nikki Haley dropped out of the 2024 presidential campaign in early March, she declined to endorse Donald J. Trump and explicitly urged him to court her and the political coalition she had built. “Now it’s time for him to decide,” she said at the time.
It’s been almost three weeks. He didn’t call.
There was never much magnanimity in the MAGA movement.
But as Mr. Trump prepares for a rematch against President Biden that is expected to have little room for error – the last race was decided by fewer than 50,000 votes in three states – the question is whether Mr. Trump’s decision, any kind of Dealing with reconciliation with Ms. Haley after a brutal and personal primary will be important.
Even outside the race, Ms. Haley has continued to attract significant numbers of voters in ongoing primaries. In the five swing states that have held primaries so far – Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, North Carolina and Nevada – a total of about 750,000 people voted for Ms. Haley.
These five states were decided by a combined total of around 250,000 votes in the 2020 general election.
Some of Ms. Haley’s votes came from supporters who voted before she dropped out of the race. But the votes she won came from some of the most critical demographic and geographic swing blocs in the country.
“I think I speak for a lot of people because we are extremely frustrated that we have Biden and Trump to choose from,” said Irma Fralic, a co-chair of Women for Nikki who lives in swing state Pennsylvania and is undecided is about who to vote for in November. “The risk for Donald Trump would be that people wouldn’t vote because they’re not happy.”
In some ways, about half of Haley voters said in November that they would support Mr. Biden. In North Carolina, exit polls showed that about four in five Haley supporters would not commit to voting for the Republican candidate. What’s less clear is whether these were anti-Trump Democrats who voted in the Republican primaries or dissident Republicans the party needs to bring back into the fold.
Although Mr. Trump did not reach out to Ms. Haley personally, he expressed some of the same concerns she had expressed about her party’s handling of abortion. Mr. Trump’s reticence on the issue comes even as he has bragged about appointing the judges that led to the end of federal abortion rights.
Seeing potential to exploit, the Biden team has begun testing the effectiveness of different messages to see how they can win over disillusioned Haley supporters, according to two people familiar with the matter.
But bypassing niceties after defeating Republican rivals is one of many political norms that Mr. Trump is breaking, practicing his distinctive brand of “they always bend on the knee” brand of politics that has forced his rivals to do so for years , either giving in or being pushed towards exit entirely.
Even his own vice president’s recent rejection deserved little more than a dismissive wave. “I couldn’t care less,” Mr. Trump said.
Mr. Trump’s advisers said that his rapid march to the nomination by an overwhelming margin had left the party unusually united so early after a contentious primary, and that they were not treating Ms. Haley as a leader with a loyal following that would appeal to the court requirement.
“Our doors are open to anyone who wants to join Donald Trump,” said Chris LaCivita, a top Trump adviser. “Our public relations work is based on the contrasts between President Trump and Joe Biden and on the issues.”
Dave Carney, a Republican strategist in New Hampshire, said the idea that securing Ms. Haley’s support would free up her coalition was an outdated view of American politics.
“Back in the day,” Mr. Carney said, “you would negotiate a deal — you would be secretary of state and campaign for me and bring all your people with you. “Those days are long gone.”
American politics has become increasingly tribal, and even dissatisfied Republicans are under considerable pressure not to oppose Trump in November.
“They are not Haley voters,” Mr. Carney said of Ms. Haley’s primary voters. “These are voters who voted for Haley.”
That same partisan dynamic is one reason the Biden team remains confident that the parts of its base that have flirted with Mr. Trump — Black, Latino and young voters — will eventually come back into the fold.
Still, at times it appeared as if the Trump operation was actively pushing away Ms. Haley’s supporters. In January, Mr. Trump threatened that donors who gave to Ms. Haley would be “permanently expelled from the MAGA camp.” The result was one of Ms. Haley’s strongest fundraising days.
The morning after Super Tuesday, Mr. LaCivita, a decorated combat veteran, posted an image from a famous scene in “Apocalypse Now” in which Robert Duvall’s character declares, “I love the smell of napalm in the morning.” It may have communicated more, than Mr. LaCivita intended.
Here was a landscape burned, leveled and desolate after a war. It was a moment reminiscent of the brutal and deeply personal gun attacks that Team Trump first used against Gov. Ron DeSantis.
Two hours later, Ms. Haley formally conceded in South Carolina, declaring that Mr. Trump “must win the votes of those in our party and beyond who did not support him.” At the very moment she congratulated him – at 10:05 a.m. – Mr Trump posted on his social media page that Ms Haley had been “beaten”, egging her on to stay in the race and commit further defeats suffer. His campaign later released a statement claiming the post was made “before” her speech.
In contrast, the Biden campaign released a statement from the president welcoming Haley’s supporters. “There is a place for her in my campaign,” Mr. Biden said.
Mr. DeSantis endorsed Mr. Trump the day he dropped out of the race in January. But after the governor’s private comments that were somewhat critical of Mr. Trump were leaked in February, the Trump team quickly went back into combat mode, mocking his weight and calling him a “sad little man.”
Mr. Trump’s handling of the early stages of his nomination is in stark contrast to the recent contested Democratic primaries. In 2020, Mr Biden’s team formed joint policy task forces with his final rival, Senator Bernie Sanders. Progressives said the resulting goodwill was significant.
“It immediately said that there was a real attempt to bring people together,” recalls Ari Rabin-Havt, Mr. Sanders’s deputy campaign manager.
Now senior Biden officials say they are in almost daily discussions with Ms. Haley’s financial backers.
Jeffrey Katzenberg, the Hollywood mogul and co-chair of the Biden campaign, said Mr. Trump was “driving people away from his own party.” He added that he sees his job as “rolling out the red carpet and welcoming them.”
For years, Mr. Trump has built his strength within the Republican Party by pushing his rivals out of office. He has regularly targeted Senator Mitt Romney, the party’s last nominee before him, as well as Paul Ryan, the former speaker of the House of Representatives, and Karl Rove, the architect of George W. Bush’s presidential campaigns.
Many doubt that Ms. Haley and most of her supporters won’t join in at some point.
“He treats her no better or worse than any other human being broadly speaking,” said Philippe Reines, a former senior adviser to Hillary Clinton. “And if you look at these other people, they come along. Look at Ted Cruz. He calls his wife ugly, accuses his father of killing JFK, and there is no man left in the tank.”
The list of those who have stood by Mr. Trump after tough speeches is long, most recently including Mr. DeSantis. Former Texas Gov. Rick Perry called Mr. Trump a “cancer of conservatism” in his Cabinet in 2015 before he took office. Sen. Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican leader who said Mr. Trump’s actions surrounding the Jan. 6, 2021 insurrection were a “disgraceful dereliction of duty,” endorsed him this month.
In the Republican primaries, Mr. Trump performed weakest in the suburbs – and Ms. Haley did best. These are the same areas that have contributed to Republican defeats since Mr. Trump was elected in 2016.
In Johnson County, the most populous county in Kansas that includes the Kansas City suburbs, Mr. Trump won just two-thirds of the vote, with Ms. Haley getting 22 percent and a “no” option getting seven percent. And in the swing state of Arizona, Ms. Haley performed strongest in Maricopa County – which includes Phoenix and its suburbs – at 21 percent.
Major pro-Trump voices are already writing off these votes.
“Fuck Nikki Haley — we don’t need her support,” said Stephen K. Bannon, the influential former Trump adviser, on his post-Super Tuesday podcast. Mimicking critics calling for a “Kumbaya” moment, he added: “‘Oh, we need to get the Nikki Haley voters’ — they’re all Democrats. They’re all going to vote for Biden anyway.”
John R. Kasich, the former Ohio governor who was one of the last candidates to stand against Mr. Trump in the Republican primary in 2016, said most Republicans would support Mr. Trump because the nation was so divided, even if the former The president’s behavior “doesn’t help him.”
“We’re just so polarized that they could say, ‘I don’t like Trump, but I’m not going to vote for Biden,'” Kasich said. After eight years, he said, most have become accustomed to Mr. Trump’s behavior.
“If they pay attention, they say, ‘Oh, that’s just Trump,'” he said. “‘That’s just Trump.'”
Jonathan Swan contributed reporting.
Source link
2024-03-26 07:00:08
www.nytimes.com
