Nikki Haley has vowed to fight on in her bid to become the Republican party’s nominee for president, even as polls suggest she is on course to lose to Donald Trump by double digits in her home state of South Carolina on Saturday.
Haley, who cut short her second term as governor of South Carolina in 2017 to serve as Trump’s ambassador to the UN, has outlasted a dozen fellow Republicans in her bid to become the party’s nominee.
But she faces increasingly slim odds as the last person standing against the former president — and is bracing for a potentially humiliating defeat in her home state when the polls close there at 7pm eastern standard time.
Trump comfortably won last month’s Iowa caucuses, New Hampshire primary and Nevada caucuses. The final FiveThirtyEight average of opinion polls in South Carolina show him ahead by a margin of more than 30 points, with more than 61 per cent of likely primary voters saying they back Trump, compared with about 34 per cent who say they support Haley.
“We’re going to have a gigantic victory here in South Carolina,” Trump told several thousand supporters at an election eve rally on Friday in Rock Hill, South Carolina, adding: “We’re going to show crooked Joe Biden and the radical left Democrats that we are coming like a freight train in November.”
Still, Haley, whose campaign has been propped up by millions of dollars in donations from Wall Street and other deep-pocketed donors, has sharpened her attacks on Trump in recent weeks, and insisted she will stay in the race until at least Super Tuesday on March 5, when more than a dozen states will hold primaries.
“South Carolina will vote on Saturday. But on Sunday, I’ll still be running for president,” Haley said in a speech this week on the campus of her alma mater, Clemson University, in Greenville, South Carolina. “I’m not going anywhere.”
“We’re going to keep going all the way through Super Tuesday. That’s as far as I’ve thought in terms of going forward,” Haley told reporters on Saturday morning after voting with her family on Kiawah Island, a resort community about 25 miles south of Charleston.
“There is a choice,” Haley added. “We can leave the drama and the chaos. We can leave the incompetence, and we can go to something that is normal.”
Betsy Ankney, Haley’s campaign manager, conceded that “the math is challenging” on Friday.
“But this has never just been about who can win a Republican primary. This battle is about who can win in November,” Ankney said.
Haley has made electability a core tenet of her stump speech, pointing this week to a new Marquette Law School poll finding Trump and President Joe Biden virtually tied with voters nationwide, while Haley led Biden in a hypothetical general election match-up by 18 points.
Yet Haley is increasingly unlikely to stop Trump, who continues to win nominating contests and collect the delegates required to be officially selected as the Republican nominee at the party’s convention this summer in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.
On Saturday, Trump spokesperson Steven Cheung said Haley was “no longer living in reality” and “continues to gaslight voters and the media into believing she has a chance to win her home state of South Carolina and other states when she hasn’t received any type of real support or shown even a shred of momentum.”
“The primary ends tonight and it is time to turn to the general election,” Cheung added.
Trump, who has done relatively little in-person campaigning in South Carolina compared to Haley, is scheduled to speak at the CPAC conference in Washington on Saturday afternoon before flying to Columbia, the state capital, for an election night party with supporters. Haley will hold her own election night party in Charleston.
Chris LaCivita and Susie Wiles, senior advisers to Trump’s 2024 campaign, issued a memo this week insisting “the end is near” for Haley. Citing public and private polling data, LaCivita and Wiles said Trump was on course to rack up enough delegates to win the Republican nomination by mid-March.
Ankney, however, announced a “seven-figure” investment for the Haley campaign on Friday, with advertisements to run across the Super Tuesday states in the coming days. Haley spent about $11.4mn on ads in her home state this month, according to AdImpact data — over $10mn more than Trump.
Republican campaign veterans, nevertheless, are increasingly sceptical of Haley’s staying power.
Doug Heye, a former spokesperson for the Republican National Committee and a Trump critic, said it was “valuable that somebody is out there telling the truths that need to be told”.
“She’s telling the truth with an eye on potentially being able to say: ‘I told you so’ in November,” Heye added. “Maybe people listen, maybe they don’t, either today or the day after the election, but that is a big part of it.”
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