Nikki Haley’s Campaign Doesn’t Want to Talk About Running on Principle

Nikki Haley isn’t ready to throw in the towel. Her campaign held a press call this morning, in which press secretary Betsy Ankney took questions submitted through the Zoom chatbox. As I’ll discuss below, I asked about what Haley intends to accomplish by continuing to run other than hoping to win the nomination. From what I could tell, my question was the only one in the public queue that the campaign declined to address (although the campaign says that there were over 100 people on the call and over 50 questions were submitted; not everyone puts their questions on full public view). I followed up with the campaign and received a response that was essentially a non-answer. That, and the content of the call, tells us something about the limits of Haley’s message, the purpose of her campaign, and how far it is likely to persevere.

The theme of the call was to press home Haley’s message of general-election electability. Ankney’s essential message was that Donald Trump “will not defeat Joe Biden in November and will take the Republican ticket down with him.” The Republican National Committee will continue to be a shambles if Trump is the nominee and focused on dominating it for his personal interests, and “if Trump is the nominee, the House is gone and the Senate map shrinks from eight or nine seats to three” in the most favorable Senate cycle Republicans will have for six years. All of that is fair and reasonably true; while Joe Biden is so politically damaged that Trump might still win and Republicans might make some gains in Congress in the fall, there are ample reasons to believe that Haley would be a much stronger general-election candidate, would lead a stronger down-ticket performance, and would leave the party in much better financial shape. Those are all sound reasons to vote for Haley over Trump.

The campaign also emphasized that it intends to keep going after South Carolina. Ankney talked about an ad buy in Michigan, a significant national ad purchase ahead of Super Tuesday, and having an organization in place after that, although she declined to give dollar figures when asked about the campaign’s fundraising and cash on hand. Campaigns always say this stuff; we need to look to other indicators to guess how far Haley is really willing to press her campaign.

In the real world, discussing Haley’s chances of being the nominee at this point is wishcasting. Ankney didn’t try to convince anybody otherwise; she kept stressing that the campaign is realistic about the odds and willing to keep going in spite of them. Yet the campaign’s message is still premised entirely on the notion that Haley is running to win and for no other reason.

That’s not much of an argument for staying in the race after Super Tuesday. Sure, Trump could still get struck by lightning on the golf course or fall through the Earth’s crust, but absent a deus ex machina event, there’s no realistic prospect of there being a nominee other than Trump. And if Haley’s only reason for running is to offer a better nominee, why should anybody put additional resources into her campaign if they don’t expect that to happen?

Running to win is not, however, the only defensible argument for staying in a presidential race once the winner is inevitable. There is an entirely respectable and honorable tradition of campaigns running to register a principled protest on behalf of voters who are dissatisfied with the expected nominee. A protest campaign is its own reason for existence, regardless of its odds of victory. And it serves a practical function. What a protest campaign does is advertise that there is a faction of the party that is unsatisfied, doesn’t wish to be taken for granted, and needs to be wooed in order to support the nominee in November. The protest candidate isn’t in it to win, and isn’t necessarily even in it to obtain a position for herself. The protest candidate represents her voters and their ideas. The candidate — especially a populist candidate such as Bernie Sanders, Pat Buchanan, or Jesse Jackson, but sometimes an ideological candidate such as Steve Forbes, Eugene McCarthy, or John Ashbrook — can quite reasonably say to voters and donors and activists, “I’m staying in this race to give you a voice and a place at the table.”

By tradition, the protest campaign is a success when it extracts concessions from the nominee on policy and/or personnel — or when it makes an argument for an alternative vision of the party that comes to prevail, sooner or later.

That is sometimes done explicitly. In July 2020, Joe Biden’s campaign sat down with representatives of the Sanders faction and hammered out an explicit set of policy concessions. In 1996, Bob Dole placated the Forbes faction by adopting a tax-cut proposal and putting Jack Kemp on the ticket — both of which presaged the ultimate policy success of the Forbes campaign in influencing George W. Bush’s platform in 2000. In the days when nominees were chosen by conventions, that sort of horse-trading was the essential stuff of American democracy.

So, that’s what I asked the Haley campaign: What concessions would she want from Trump if he’s the nominee, not for herself but for her voters? What does she stand for that would provide a rationale for a protest campaign that could continue as far as the convention? The campaign pointed me to what Haley told ABC’s This Week:

Keep in mind I’m running against him for a reason. I’m running against him because I don’t think he’s the right person at the right time. I don’t think he should be the president. The last thing on my mind is who I’m going to support. The only thing on my mind is how we’re going to win this. The only thing on my mind is how we’re going to make sure that we correct what’s happening in America and we bring this country back together, allow her to heal, and move on in a strong way. . . . Y’all can talk about support later. Right now, you can ask him if he’s going to support me when I’m the nominee. [Emphasis supplied by the Haley campaign.]

That’s a fine message on its own terms, but it carries an expiration date as the defeats pile up and the delegate math gets prohibitive. It’s not how Bernie Sanders would have answered the question, because Bernie cast himself as the leader of a movement, not a superior applicant for the job. The fact that Haley’s press team didn’t want to talk about running a protest or message campaign on behalf of voters Trump still needs to woo tells us that Haley and her team really do not, as of now, see her campaign in those terms. That suggests to me that she may not have much to run on past Super Tuesday.