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      A Radical Proposal for Nikki Haley: Try to Win More Votes

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      Nikki Haley lost the New Hampshire primary but found a cause: getting under Donald Trump’s not exactly rhinoceros-thick skin. The story of the Republican primary campaign in the days since Trump’s victory has been one where the victor acts like a sore loser and the likely loser loosens up, goads her stronger rival and finds a pool of small-dollar donors to keep her in the race.Haley’s turn toward mockery and confrontation has created modest excitement in the disillusioned world of NeverTrump punditry. Maybe the remaining non-Trump Republican is giving up on being vice president or winning some future G.O.P. primary campaign. Maybe she’s ready to make Trump’s unfitness her exclusive theme. Maybe, as The Dispatch’s Nick Catoggio speculates, by needling and attacking and bringing out Trump’s worst behavior, she can even bring about the long-awaited Republican crackup that would finally defeat Trump on the scale that he deserves.I don’t think this hope makes a lot of sense. The idea that there exists some form of elite Republican denunciation, combined with egregious Trumpian misbehavior, that could shatter the G.O.P. coalition and send him to a Barry Goldwater or George McGovern-style defeat, seemed plausible enough eight years ago. It’s what I expected and what Republicans deserved.But I should have heeded the wisdom of Bill Munny in Clint Eastwood’s “Unforgiven”: “Deserve’s got nothing to do with it.” Because since then we’ve seen all kinds of terrible behavior, coupled with attempted repudiations from all sorts of Republicans, including Trump’s own aides and cabinet appointees. And yet the rule has held: Ask people if they like Trump and majorities do not, but put Trump up against the current Democratic Party, and he becomes a viable candidate for president.Maybe Haley is the right figure to change that. But she has nowhere near the pre-Trump fame of a Mitt Romney or the ideological credibility of a Liz Cheney. And based on what we saw from Chris Christie’s campaign, a pure repudiate-Trump candidacy is only likely to enhance Trump’s margins in the remaining primaries, emphasizing Haley’s hopelessness rather than her gumption.Moreover, wouldn’t there be something a little bit strange, after two consecutive primary campaigns in which Republicans desperately competed for a chance to face off with Trump one-on-one, for the winner of that prize to immediately give up on winning any more supporters? Haley’s consolidation of gentry Republicans succeeded in boxing out Ron DeSantis’s attempt to build a larger non-Trump coalition. Is she really not even going to attempt to build a larger coalition of her own?We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

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      Nikki Haley Looks to Home Turf to Challenge Trump

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      Nikki Haley, facing growing doubts and pressure to drop out, has winnowed the race to a one-on-one contest and is looking to make her case in South Carolina.A combative Nikki Haley brought her presidential campaign back to South Carolina on Wednesday after a disappointing defeat the night before in New Hampshire, and told a boisterous crowd in a cavernous ballroom in North Charleston that she would fight Donald J. Trump for the Republican nomination.“The political elites in this state and around the country say we just need to let Donald Trump have this,” she told her supporters, who were jeering at the idea. “Listen. We’ve only had two states that have voted. We’ve got 48 more.”Nowhere is more immediately important than South Carolina, where she served two terms as governor before being tapped to serve as Mr. Trump’s first ambassador to the United Nations. But just because it’s her home state does not mean it is friendly territory. As Ms. Haley looked to reinvigorate her campaign here on the ground, Republicans, as varied as local party officials and the chairwoman of the Republican National Committee, stepped up the pressure on her to drop out. As she made her case for pressing on, the former president significantly consolidated his support.While she spoke, the Trump campaign blasted out a fresh list of endorsements in South Carolina that now includes the state’s two senators, most of its House members, its governor and lieutenant governor, and much of its State House — more than 150 names in all.“Welcome home to Trump Country, Nikki,” Austin McCubbin, Mr. Trump’s South Carolina director, taunted.Some of Ms. Haley’s closest allies and confidants on Wednesday continued to insist that Ms. Haley had met her own expectations: She had winnowed the field and was now in the two-person contest she wanted, with time enough until the primary on Feb. 24 to spread her message to a broader electorate and draw contrasts between herself and Mr. Trump.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

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      in US Politics

      Republican who said she held Trump accountable for January 6 endorses him

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      The Republican South Carolina congresswoman Nancy Mace faced widespread accusations of hypocrisy after she endorsed Donald Trump – the presidential candidate she previously said she held “accountable” for the January 6 attack on Congress.On Monday, Mace announced her endorsement, a day before the New Hampshire primary, in which Trump enjoys comfortable polling leads over the former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley, his only remaining opponent.“I don’t see eye to eye perfectly with any candidate,” Mace said. “And until now I’ve stayed out of it. But the time has come to unite behind our nominee.”Saying “it’s been a complete shit show since [Trump] left the White House”, the congresswoman said the US “needs to reverse all the damage Joe Biden has done”. Trump, she said, would be better on the economy, immigration and national security.“Donald Trump’s record in his first term should tell every American how vital it is he be returned to office,” Mace said.“Good Lord,” said Adam Kinzinger, an Illinois Republican who sat on the House January 6 committee then quit Congress over his opposition to Trump. “Nancy Mace is just the worst.”At present, Trump faces 91 criminal charges (17 for election subversion), attempts to keep him off the ballot for inciting an insurrection and assorted civil trials. Still, he has dominated the Republican primary, winning comfortably in Iowa last week.Observers were quick to point to what Mace made of Trump at the end of that term, in the aftermath of January 6.On that day, supporters Trump told to “fight like hell” to block certification of his defeat by Biden attacked Congress, seeking lawmakers to capture and possibly kill in a riot now linked to nine deaths, more than 1,200 arrests and hundreds of convictions.“Everything that he’s worked for … all of that, his entire legacy, was wiped out yesterday,” Mace told CNN on 7 January 2021. “We’ve got to start over.”On 11 January, Mace said: “We have to hold the president accountable for what happened. The rhetoric leading up to this vote, the lies that were told to the American people – this is what happens, rhetoric has real consequences. And people died.”Trump was impeached a second time for inciting the Capitol attack.On 13 January, Mace said on the House floor she would vote against impeachment but added: “I believe we need to hold the president accountable. I hold him accountable for the events that transpired for the attack on our Capitol last Wednesday.”While 10 House Republicans voted to impeach Trump, he was acquitted at his Senate trial when enough members of his party stayed loyal.Trump turned against Mace, endorsing a primary rival in her district in South Carolina. Mace fought off the challenge – with campaign help from Haley.Also on Monday, Steve Benen, an MSNBC producer, said: “Remember when Trump called Nancy Mace ‘absolutely terrible’ and tried to end her career? And when Nikki Haley scrambled to rescue her? A lot can happen in 18 months.”Mace is not the only senior South Carolina Republican to desert the former governor: the US senator Tim Scott, who Haley appointed in 2012, endorsed Trump on Friday.Jose Pagliery, a politics reporter for the Daily Beast, pointed to another widely remarked irony in Mace’s decision to endorse Trump this week, writing: “Rape survivor Nancy Mace just endorsed Donald Trump in the middle of his second rape trial.”In April last year, on CBS’s Face the Nation, Mace discussed both her work to improve the processing of rape kits by law enforcement and her support for exceptions for victims of rape or incest in abortion bans passed in Republican states.She also said: “I am a victim of rape, I was raped by a classmate at the age of 16. I am very wary and the devil is always in the details, but we’ve got to show more care and concern and compassion for women who’ve been raped.”In August, a New York judge dismissed a counterclaim by Trump in a defamation suit brought by the writer E Jean Carroll over her claim that Trump sexually assaulted her in a department store changing room in the 1990s.Explaining why the jury decided Trump “sexually abused” Carroll but did not endorse Carroll’s claim that he raped her, Lewis A Kaplan discussed the difference, under New York law, between forcible penetration with the penis or with fingers.The jury said Trump did the latter to Carroll. Kaplan, however, wrote: “Mr Trump did in fact ‘rape’ Ms Carroll as that term is commonly used and understood in contexts outside of the New York penal law.”The case has now reached a second trial, though a hearing scheduled for Monday was postponed due to juror illness.A representative for Mace did not immediately respond to a request for comment.Speaking to Fox News, Mace said Haley had been a “great governor” but voters in her South Carolina district were “overwhelmingly with Donald Trump”.“People want the primary to be over,” Mace said, pointing to an eventuality most pundits expect sooner rather than later, given Trump’s leads over Haley in New Hampshire, South Carolina (the third state to vote) and elsewhere.Mace also said that for voters in her district, “women’s issues” including abortion were “gonna be really important in the 2024 cycle”. More

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      in Elections

      Haley Campaign Making $4 Million Ad Buy in South Carolina

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      Nikki Haley’s campaign announced on Saturday that it is making a $4 million buy for television, radio and digital advertising in South Carolina that will begin the day after the New Hampshire primary, as she seeks a one-on-one contest with Donald J. Trump.The reservation, which was announced by Ms. Haley’s campaign manager, Betsy Ankney, at an event hosted by Bloomberg News, will span all seven media markets in the state. It was presented as an indication of her intention to stay in the race regardless of the outcome on Tuesday.“I know everyone wants us to put a number on it,” Ms. Ankney said of how she would need perform. “We have never done that. We will never do that.”Ms. Haley has campaigned aggressively New Hampshire, the state where she has polled strongest against Mr. Trump, though she still trails the former president by double digits in polling averages. Ms. Ankney repeatedly declined to describe what she would consider a strong showing in New Hampshire, other than saying Ms. Haley needed to show “incremental progress” against Mr. Trump.“There is no specific benchmarks on what we need to do or not do,” she said.Ms. Ankney, echoing Ms. Haley, presented the race as a choice between a Biden-Trump rematch “with two 80-year-old men” or a next generation nominee, though she acknowledged the road ahead is steep.“Beating Donald Trump is not easy,” Ms. Ankney said. “He is a juggernaut. But how do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time.” More

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      Even if Nikki Haley Shocks Trump in New Hampshire, It Won’t Matter

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      Nikki Haley did well enough in the Iowa caucuses Monday night to keep her supporters’ hopes alive. But her third-place showing, on the heels of Ron DeSantis and a mile behind Donald Trump, was also just disappointing enough to raise doubts about her candidacy.Her plan coming out of Iowa is a classic underdog strategy: Use strong early results to upend expectations in the contests to come, reshaping the dynamic of the race one upset victory at a time. So, the thinking goes, her solid-enough performance in Iowa will propel her higher in New Hampshire, where she holds a strong second place in the polls.It’s possible. But even if Ms. Haley does well in New Hampshire, it won’t matter. That’s because Ms. Haley is starkly out of step with the evolution of her party over the past decade.The shape of today’s Republican electorate can be seen most clearly in national polling of Republican voters, where Mr. Trump has led by a substantial margin for months. Even in the unlikely event that all the voters who have told pollsters in recent weeks that they support Mr. DeSantis, Chris Christie and the former Arkansas governor Asa Hutchinson switched over to Ms. Haley, she would reach only the high 20s, placing her more than 30 points behind Mr. Trump, who sits at around 60 percent. (The voters who have said they support Vivek Ramaswamy, who dropped out of the race on Monday night, would likely switch to Mr. Trump.)Sure, Ms. Haley might peel off some of those Trump voters if she manages to puncture his air of inevitability by knocking him sideways in New Hampshire. But imagining that she could wrest the nomination from him ignores the fact that, if he were to suffer a humiliating setback in New Hampshire, Mr. Trump would be guaranteed to attack her with a viciousness he has so far reserved primarily for Mr. DeSantis. In December, as she climbed in the polls, MAGA loyalists like Tucker Carlson and Steve Bannon offered a preview of these sort of slashing attacks (referring to her as a “hologram” sent by donors or as potentially worse than “Judas Pence”).More important, though, the fulfillment of the Haley campaign’s hopes would require a wholesale shift in preferences among millions of Republican voters.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

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      In South Carolina, Biden and Harris Test Policy-Heavy Pitch to Black Voters

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      The president’s re-election campaign is looking to rekindle support among a group that was pivotal to his 2020 victory, in a state that revived his candidacy.As Democrats amplify their concerns about President Biden’s status with Black voters, South Carolina has emerged as a proving ground for his campaign: one where he can test his message to a predominantly Black electorate and use it as a largely ceremonial launchpad for his re-election.At events over the last few days, both Mr. Biden and Ms. Harris offered reverential, policy-heavy re-election pitches to largely Black audiences and celebrated the Black organizers and community leaders who helped deliver the White House to Democrats, starting with those in the Palmetto State.They also drew a contrast with former President Donald J. Trump and other Republican leaders, whose election denialism and efforts to “whitewash” history, they said, threaten the progress that Black Americans have spent generations fighting for.Black voters have expressed frustration with the Biden administration for falling short on key campaign promises, and have shown less enthusiasm for Mr. Biden’s re-election in polls and interviews. But in South Carolina, both Mr. Biden and Ms. Harris aimed to highlight the lesser-known victories their administration has notched over the last three years, and they argued that a second term would allow them to achieve even more. Black voters’ disaffection with Democrats, campaign aides and allies argue, is rooted in their lack of awareness of the White House’s accomplishments rather than in fundamental flaws with the Biden-Harris ticket.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

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      Biden’s 2024 Playbook

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      Mary Wilson and Rachel Quester and Marion Lozano, Dan Powell, Rowan Niemisto, Diane Wong and Listen and follow The DailyApple Podcasts | Spotify | Amazon MusicYesterday, we went inside Donald Trump’s campaign for president, to understand how he’s trying to turn a mountain of legal trouble into a political advantage. Today, we turn to the re-election campaign of President Biden.Reid Epstein, who covers politics for The Times, explains why what looks on paper like a record of accomplishment is proving to be difficult to campaign on.On today’s episodeReid J. Epstein, a politics correspondent for The New York Times.The president and his team have waved away Democrats’ worries about his bid for another term.Kent Nishimura for The New York TimesBackground readingIn South Carolina, Democrats see a test of Biden’s appeal to Black voters.Political Memo: Should Biden really run again? He prolongs an awkward conversation.There are a lot of ways to listen to The Daily. Here’s how.We aim to make transcripts available the next workday after an episode’s publication. You can find them at the top of the page.Reid J. Epstein More

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      Nikki Haley, in Retreat, Says ‘Of Course the Civil War Was About Slavery’

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      A day after giving a stumbling answer about the conflict’s origin that did not mention slavery, Ms. Haley told an interviewer: “Yes, I know it was about slavery. I am from the South.”Nikki Haley, the former South Carolina governor and Republican presidential hopeful, on Thursday walked back her stumbling answer about the cause of the Civil War, telling a New Hampshire interviewer, “Of course the Civil War was about slavery.”Her retreat came about 12 hours after a town-hall meeting in New Hampshire, a state that is central to her presidential hopes, where she was asked what caused the Civil War. She stumbled through an answer about government overreach and “the freedoms of what people could and couldn’t do,” after jokingly telling the questioner he had posed a tough one. He then noted she never uttered the word “slavery.”“What do you want me to say about slavery?” Ms. Haley replied. “Next question.”Speaking on a New Hampshire radio show on Thursday morning, Ms. Haley, who famously removed the Confederate battle flag from the grounds of the South Carolina Capitol in Columbia, said: “Yes I know it was about slavery. I am from the South.”But she also insinuated that the question had come not from a Republican voter but from a political detractor, accusing President Biden and Democrats of “sending plants” to her town-hall events.“Why are they hitting me? See this for what it is,” she said, adding, “They want to run against Trump.”In recent polls, Ms. Haley has surged into second place in New Hampshire, edging closer to striking distance of former President Donald J. Trump. To win the Granite State contest on Jan. 23, the first primary election of 2024, she will most likely need independent voters — and possibly Democrats who registered as independents. That is how Senator John McCain of Arizona upset George W. Bush in the state’s 2000 primary.But the Civil War gaffe may have put a crimp in that strategy.“I think the cause of the Civil War was basically how government was going to run,” she said Wednesday night, “the freedoms and what people could and couldn’t do.”The answer echoed a century’s argument from segregationists that the Civil War was fundamentally about states’ rights and economics, not about ending slavery.Late Wednesday night, even Mr. Biden rebuked the answer: “It was about slavery,” he wrote on social media.She tried to walk back her comments on Thursday, asking: “What’s the lesson in all this? That freedom matters. And individual rights and liberties matter for all people. That’s the blessing of America. That was a stain on America when we had slavery. But what we want is never relive it. Never let anyone take those freedoms away again.”The episode also undermined her appeal to moderates and independents seeking to thwart Mr. Trump’s return to the White House by portraying Ms. Haley as an agent of compromise.Her record as governor of South Carolina included blocking a bill to stop transgender youths from using bathrooms that corresponded to their gender identity. Her push to lower the Confederate battle flag came after the mass shooting of Black worshipers at a Charleston church by a white supremacist. And she has recently called for a middle ground on abortion.“Haley’s refusal to talk honestly about slavery or race in America is a sad betrayal of her own story,” said Representative Ro Khanna, Democrat of California. More