In defeat, Haley is a player – not a busted flush

The first woman to win two Republican primaries (Washington DC and Vermont), Nikki Haley has departed the 2024 Republican primary battlefield to accompanying shrieks of glee from Trumpies. 

Despite prior bravado that she would fight on regardless, she has bent to the reality of an inevitable funding drought. No cash, no campaign. She has not endorsed Trump – she is no hypocrite. But she has wished him well: “I wish anyone that would be President well”. 

She is still on course to support the eventual nominee, but that will have to wait until the Republican’s July convention in Milwaukee. Until then “the aging, mentally unsound agent of chaos, unable to respect veterans or service members and unwilling to be faithful to the Constitution” – one of Haley’s sharper campaign critiques of The Donald – will have to go without the support of his former Ambassador to the United Nations.

Haley may have abandoned her campaign, but she remains firmly ensconced in her bully pulpit, campaigning to moderate the Trumpies. She says. Good luck with that.

Vermont apart, Super Tuesday was her whitewash. She had pledged to soldier on. Now she won’t. Is this now the end of Haley’s political road? Not necessarily. The former governor of South Carolina, a home state she humiliatingly lost, may be down. She need not be completely out. 

For Haley, it was important for democracy and the Republican party that the primary elections were contested. Not a coronation procession en route to Milwaukee. Haley has achieved that objective. Her plan was to cement herself in the public mindset as a politician prepared to fight for her principles, even against overwhelming odds. That worked.

The long term is where Haley’s eyes are sharply focused. In this country, where the age to become president seems to be at least 5 years beyond the average life expectancy of males (73), the former governor of South Carolina is a whippersnapper.

Haley is 52. Joe Biden was 78 when first elected. Do the math! That gives Haley 25 years to make it to the White House and still be a year younger than Biden when she picks up the keys. 

Long-haul political battles in the USA need grit. Haley’s persistence in what early on looked like a doomed cause in which she was patronisingly expected to “know her place” and cave quickly, marks her out beyond doubt as a potential front runner for the West Wing. Sometime. 

In two months of the primary season, she has garnered more respect in the public’s estimation than Vice President Kamala Harris has during almost four years in office. Why didn’t Haley pull stumps earlier? Hadn’t she been blasted? Don’t be distracted by the numbers. Quantifying the precise scale of Haley’s failing attempt to secure the nomination is about as useful as standing on a beach and wondering if the incoming tsunami is 60 feet, 80 feet, or 100 feet high. You’re a goner, whatever. 

That was always going to happen to any Trump opponent in this primary. Challengers Chris Christie, Ron DeSantis, Haley, Vivek Ramaswamy and Tim Scott were the only candidates to make it through to the 8 November televised debate. All gone – except Nikki Haley.

The rest of the pack folded early. Siren voices encouraged Haley to fold too. She defied them. And her funders backed her right up to Super Tuesday. They may be done for now, but will be there to support her in fresh, future campaigns. 

The immediate question is whether her dogged persistence in sticking in, until Tsunami Trump’s almost clean-sweep crashed onto the Super Tuesday beach, might yet make any difference in the upcoming campaign. Frothy talk she would run as a “third party” candidate was exactly that. Haley has ruled the option out. She does not want to destroy her own party. Nor do I think it’s in her nature to just be a spoiler.

Anyway, the 2024 general election’s “spoiler” – the Graham Greene-type “Third Candidate” slot – is already taken. It’s Biden’s headache, not Trump’s. “Spoiler” emerged from the shadows in the Michigan Democrat primary as “Uncommitted”, snaffling two delegates at the Democratic convention, to the president’s intense embarrassment. 

“Uncommitted” is the candidate to watch. I hear he has refused televised debates out of deference to the age of his opponent. Paddy Power may even soon quote odds.

During this campaign, or beyond, the “no one else stood up to him” trope has already been forged into an effective weapon in Haley’s armoury. The opportunity that gives her may come early should Trump trip and fall before November, unlikely though that is. The rozzers or the bailiffs could yet pull him down. For my money bailiffs enforcing whopping court awards are riskier for Trump than a Sheriff’s hand on his collar. 

More likely, the rewards of tenacity will blossom later. When? At some moment, in a political galaxy not that far, far away, when Darth Donald’s lightsabre has run out of batteries and the time has come to restore the Republican party to its traditional roots. 

To mix filmic metaphors, “Who ‘ya gonna call?” Anyone who had the spirit to stand up to the former president, even though it always looked like resistance was futile. Stand up Haley did, not least to all the Trump social media ballyhoo.

Particularly to snide attacks on her husband, a military officer, currently serving an active-duty deployment as a staff officer with the 218th Maneuver Enhancement Brigade in the Horn of Africa.

The defining moment for Haley was when she was swept off her feet in her home state, South Carolina. But her 40 per cent of the vote wasn’t inconsequential. Instead of a polite exit she pledged to give voters a choice rather than assent to a coronation. It took guts. She has felt the refiner’s fire. 

Her point about the democratic process was important and will have been noted by many beyond the 40 per cent who voted for her there. Haley’s platform policies are uninteresting in this election, mired as it is in Trump’s self-justification and abuse. They have gone almost unremarked. 

For the record, she is appealing to voters with policies that recall the time when the Republican Party stood for a fiscal conscience and foreign policy leadership. When the most sacred of federal programs and the international alliances that built the post-Second World War era are under enormous strain. 

A time when Ronald Reagan’s call to Gorbachev – “Tear down that wall” – resonated not just in America, but round the world. And was heard. Those were the days when America did what it said. 

That the Trump attack dogs have managed to coin only the unimpressive “Bird Brain” as anti-Haley invective is something of a compliment. It goes nowhere. Unlike the sharper “Sleepy Joe” moniker which has stuck even in 2024 and gains traction by the day. Or “Crooked Hilary” in 2016. Pots and kettles!

I admit it. These views are based on nothing more than instinct shaped as an observer of US politics over many electoral cycles, informal conversations with friends close to the Republican National Committee – and, most importantly, the first New York Yellow Cab driver to actually speak to me in years. At length. About Nikki Haley. He volunteered.

Nowadays cab drivers in Manhattan offer no running commentary, except at high volume to their wives about domestic conflict on their cell phones. 

They know more about reaching the Alisher Navoi Opera Theatre in Tashkent, Uzbekistan than how to thread through New York traffic to the Lincoln Center’s Met on Columbus Avenue. That Nikki Haley has made her mark in the Yellow Cab set should give her encouragement.

Pundits in the ever so sensible UK love to poke fun at American democracy’s perennial trials and tribulations as if in Westminster it’s all wine and roses. But who are we to tell Americans their politics plumb ever deeper depths of absurdity? 

Last Thursday, for the fourth time, we elected a person who once pretended to be a cat on national television as the Member of Parliament for Rochdale. Does he have nine constituencies in him, five to go? God forbid. Larry, the Downing Street moggy – national treasure and as seasoned a ratter as Gorgeous Gaza George Galloway is a serial constituency snaffler – now faces serious competition around Westminster’s bins. 

Back across the pond, Nikki Haley no longer stands even a cat’s chance in 2024. But she has secured her place in the voters’ psyche as a principled fighter. In the good old US of A, persistence is a highly tradeable commodity for any politician travelling the long road to office. That 40 per cent in Michigan has made Haley a player; not a busted flush. 

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