Was New Hampshire Nikki Haley's Political Graveyard?
Why Is She Staying In The Race?
Before the ballots were cast in the New Hampshire primary, I speculated that New Hampshire would be where Nikki Haley’s campaign would go to die.
Simply put, no one gives Nikki Haley any chance at all if she loses in New Hampshire by the anticipated margins for Donald Trump.
Will Nikki Haley pull off a miracle upset win in New Hampshire, which would breathe new life into her campaign? It’s not impossible…but I would not bet any money on it.
New Hampshire is on track to be the state where Nikki Haley’s Presidential campaign goes to die.
Yet in the aftermath of the primary results, Nikki Haley insists her campaign is not over yet.
A defiant Nikki Haley resisted calls to end her campaign and promised to keep fighting after suffering back-to-back losses to former President Donald Trump in her bid to capture the GOP nomination for president.
“This race is far from over,” Haley told her supporters Tuesday after Trump was declared winner of New Hampshire’s first-in-the-nation primary.
What does she see in the New Hampshire results to give her confidence that she still can win the nomination? Is she seeing a pathway to victory that is really there, or that she just imagines is there?
The short answer: she has no path to victory in the real world.
One possible source of Nikki Haley’s misplaced confidence in her campaign’s future may come from the fact that she seemingly did better against Trump than the polls suggested.
However, the more important story may be that Trump’s margin of victory appears to be significantly less (at least at present) than the polling data suggested would be the case. An 8% margin of victory is a decisive win, but the polling data was showing a margin roughly twice that size.
Did Nikki Haley overperform in New Hampshire? Or did she just get lucky?
Yet if we look at the actual percent vote totals against the polling percentages, we see that Donald Trump’s final percent vote tally was pretty close to what the polls had projected just a few days before the election.
What the last polls before primary day surmised was that most of Ron DeSantis voters would be going to Donald Trump rather than Nikki Haley.
Instead, Nikki Haley was the prime beneficiary of Ron DeSantis exiting the race. If we add DeSantis’ support to Nikki Haley and remove it from Donald Trump we find that the polls are very close to what the actual vote was.
While Haley being the beneficiary of Ron DeSantis bowing out would appear to be a positive sign for Nikki Haley, the poll data also shows that the percentages for Donald Trump were fairly accurate in the RealClearPolitics polling aggregates.
The New Hampshire primaries were a repeat of the Iowa caucuses in this one key aspect: Donald Trump got the measure of support the poll data indicated he would get.
Thus the poll data from Iowa and New Hampshire, coupled with the actual ballot results for those two states, gives a measure of confidence in the polling data for the Nevada caucuses (February 6) and the South Carolina Primary (February 24).
While we do not have an abundance of poll data for either state, if we take the existing RCP aggregates at face value, both states give Donald Trump a compelling if not insurmountable advantage over Nikki Haley.
Haley is not even polling in Nevada.
In her home state of South Carolina, Nikki Haley trails Donald Trump by more than 30 percentage points.
Before DeSantis dropped out of the race, Donald Trump held a commanding, even insurmountable lead over both Ron DeSantis and Nikki Haley.
If South Carolina is a repeat of New Hampshire, then the DeSantis vote is likely to accrue to Nikki Haley. Lacking clear data to establish how the 15% supporting other candidates might flow to either Trump or Haley, let us assume that vote is split evenly between Trump and Haley. The result is another blowout win for Donald Trump.
Hopefully, corporate media will develop an interest in polling South Carolina to see where the current levels of support are for both Trump and Haley, but if we use the last poll aggregate as a point of departure, and account for how the supporters of the candidates that have dropped out of the rate will vote—either for Trump or for Haley—it quickly becomes clear that Donald Trump has a compelling and commanding lead over Nikki Haley even in her own home state.
What should give Nikki Haley’s campaign staff pause is how the RCP poll aggregates have been fairly accurate when stacked up against the actual vote tallies come primary day. Unless new polling data shows Donald Trump losing significant support to Nikki Haley (and there exactly ZERO current news narratives which would support such a shift in voter sentiment), the polling data even in South Carolina puts Nikki Haley on track for another drubbing just as was the case in Iowa and New Hampshire.
If the RCP polling aggregates continue to be relatively accurate in tracking final voter support in the Republican primaries, it is already clear that Nikki Haley has no plausible way of winning any primaries. She is almost certain to lose her own home state to Donald Trump—the one state she arguably should win as a “favorite son/daughter” candidate.
As she is not likely to win any states, there is no plausible pathway to the nomination for her. Even if Trump were to be convicted by either Jack Smith or Fani Willis before the GOP convention, not even GOP convention rules prevent Trump’s won delegates from voting for him at the convention.
Given that Trump’s popularity nationwide has risen as the criminal cases against him have moved forward, Republican voters have largely concluded those cases don’t really mean much. Even last spring, voters expressed a willingness to vote for Trump even if he gets convicted on all charges.
Thus while Nikki Haley got a higher percentage of votes, and lost by a narrower margin than the polls indicated on the eve of the primary, the end result is still the same: Nikki Haley lost, and lost badly. Donald Trump has been in the driver’s seat all along, and that did not change for New Hampshire; this race has been his to lose and remains his to lose.
New Hampshire really was Nikki Haley’s political graveyard. She just refuses to admit it.
One of the intriguing - and frequently exasperating - aspects of politics is that there is so much spin. You can’t take anything at face value. Whether it’s a candidate, his opponent, or the media, every adjective and adverb seems to be carefully chosen to advance an agenda. So, to read an essay such as yours which succeeds in analyzing just the factual data is truly valuable, Peter. Thank you.
We are left to speculate on what Haley is actually gunning for. A Cabinet position? The undisputed leadership of her faction? Maybe she is confident that Trump will be incarcerated and unable to take office, and the party will be forced to turn to the first-place Also Ran. Does she have some underhanded trick up her sleeve to make sure Trump is hauled off to prison? (I would consider possible ANY move by a power-hungry politician.)
I’m not so sure about most of DeSantis’ supporters switched to Haley, though, in spite of what the polling data suggests. I know that I, for one, could have been in favor of DeSantis, but NeverNikki.