Nikki Haley battles on, but path to victory over Trump remains narrow

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What makes Nikki run?

When the American writer Budd Schulberg asked a similar question in a famous 1941 novel – What Makes Sammy Run? – the answer was ambition and “running people down.”

Nikki Haley, who otherwise bears no resemblance to Sammy Glick in the novel, does have ambition and – belatedly, according to many of her aides and supporters, and maybe too late – now is in the process of running down Donald Trump as the campaign to be the Republican presidential nominee heats up in her native South Carolina.

With a meet-and-greet event scheduled for Aiken on Monday afternoon and a giant rally in Spartanburg set for the evening, Ms. Haley is ramping up her effort. She has run, and won, statewide twice in South Carolina and served as governor for six years starting in 2011. On the weekend, her campaign sent out messages blasting that “Nikki is here to stay!” and asserting, “She fights, and she wins. … Nikki is ready to continue defying pollsters, pundits and predictions!”

At least for the next month.

She has indicated she will stay in the race against Mr. Trump, who defeated her in both Iowa and New Hampshire in January, until Super Tuesday (March 5), when 15 states and the territory of American Samoa choose delegates for the Republican National Convention. Her perseverance is in defiance of Mr. Trump’s insistence that he is the inevitable nominee and his suggestion that she has gone from an unwelcome insurgent in a party that he now controls to a destructive irritant who now is irrelevant.

There remains a narrow path for Ms. Haley to the nomination, but a mortifying defeat in a state where she first attracted attention 19 years ago as a state legislator would be a devastating blow. Mr. Trump holds a lead of almost two-to-one over Ms. Haley in South Carolina, and the most encouraging recent poll from Ms. Haley’s standpoint came just after she finished second in New Hampshire. The survey taken between Jan. 26 and Jan. 30 by the Monmouth University Polling Institute for The Washington Post showed her behind by 26 percentage points.

She has a slight chance of reviving her campaign this week, in the confusing, almost inscrutable combination of both caucuses and a primary in Nevada, where state rules do not permit candidates to compete in both contests.

Mr. Trump, who chose not to participate in the primary, almost certainly will prevail in the more significant caucuses, which will be held Thursday and where the former president likely will sweep all 26 of the Silver State’s convention delegates. But if Ms. Haley, who is competing in the Tuesday primary, comes away with more votes in that contest than Mr. Trump wins in the Thursday caucuses, she will be able to claim a moral, symbolic victory over her rival.

But to remain competitive in the party’s nomination fight, Ms. Haley must continue to win convention delegates.

That requires that she achieves a credible showing in South Carolina; perhaps prevails in at least one of the early March caucuses in Michigan (where the GOP is deeply split between Trump-oriented activists and establishment Republicans who cling to the political profile of former president Gerald Ford, who died more than 19 years ago), North Dakota (where the governor, former presidential candidate Doug Burgum, has endorsed Mr. Trump), Idaho and Missouri; and then pulls off surprisingly strong performances on Super Tuesday, when several Trump-oriented states vote but where her best, but extremely remote, chances may be in Colorado, Massachusetts, Maine and Vermont.

However, the path forward for Ms. Haley may be a road not taken by any Republican candidate before.

It depends on events not predictable, and it depends on steadily accumulating convention delegates, even if they are small in number – but a sufficient amount that she is left with enough to claim front-runner status if, for example, Mr. Trump, who is 77 years old, is stricken with a health episode or if he is convicted of a crime.

Mr. Trump, despite apparent visible bad shape and an unhealthy diet, seems exceedingly robust. But a Bloomberg/Morning Consult poll released last week indicated that more than half of voters in swing states wouldn’t vote for Mr. Trump if he were convicted of a criminal offence. A New York Times/Siena College poll taken late last year showed that a quarter of Trump backers would abandon their support if he were convicted of a criminal offence.

Those are thin reeds on which to base a campaign, especially since it is not clear that any Trump trial, let alone a conviction, would occur before the convention.

Before she stepped up her attacks on Mr. Trump, raising questions about his mental fitness and his volatile temperament, Ms. Haley could have been considered a plausible running mate for the former president.

Mr. Trump might otherwise benefit from campaigning with a female (his support is weaker among women than men, especially in the suburbs, a major battleground in the November election) and someone of Sikh heritage (people of colour tend to lean Democratic). Even with her earlier, gentler jibes at Mr. Trump, it would not have been inconceivable for him to select her; Ronald Reagan chose George H. W. Bush in 1980 even though Mr. Bush derided Mr. Reagan’s support of the supply-side theory as “voodoo economics.”

But that option now is out of the question. Mr. Trump’s ire at Ms. Haley, on full display the night of the New Hampshire primary and in repeated references to her as “birdbrain,” make it clear that he will go in another direction.

Perhaps Ms. Haley’s best chance is to conduct a suasive and respectable campaign and emerge, following the Trump general-election defeat that her aides predict, as the clear front-runner for 2028.

Senator John McCain of Arizona didn’t prevail in 2000 but was the Republicans’ nominee eight years later, and Governor Mitt Romney of Massachusetts was defeated for the nomination by Mr. McCain in 2008 but was the nominee in 2012. In the Democratic Party, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton was defeated by Senator Barack Obama in 2008 but was the party’s nominee in 2016.

While all the defeated contenders in the current GOP contest ran competitive, credible campaigns, there remains a sobering warning for Ms. Haley: Although Joe Biden won the White House in his third attempt, none of those listed above – political figures who won their party’s nomination in their second try – eventually won the presidency. The risk for Ms. Haley thus comes from the title of another Budd Schulberg novel, published six years after his meditation on Sammy Glick. It was called The Harder They Fall.