Haley announced her exit Wednesday after winning the Washington, D.C., primary on Sunday and Vermont on Super Tuesday, but losing more than 20 other contests to Donald Trump.
“I said I wanted Americans to have their voices heard,” Haley said. “I have done that. I have no regrets.”
Haley declined to endorse Trump yet, urging him to convince her voters to support him. Haley’s lack of endorsement stood in contrast to many reluctant establishment voices, like GOP Senate Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) on Wednesday, rallying around Trump.
Now, we move into what is likely to be an expensive, incredibly vicious and prolonged general election slugfest between a president and a former president.
But before we turn the page, let’s look at what the Republican battle — and specifically, Haley’s candidacy — taught us.
It’s been clear for a while that Haley wasn’t going to win the nomination, but she nevertheless stuck it out for a longer period of time than candidates in her position usually do. In doing so, she gave us some very important information about the state of her party.
With Trump racking up win after win, the writing has been on the wall for weeks for Haley’s exit. And she all but acknowledged her campaign was about making a point rather than actually winning.
That point: Donald Trump is a liability for my party, and I’m going to prove it.
Ultimately, Haley’s campaign mostly served a somewhat different but valuable purpose: showing how much of today’s Republican Party is defined by Trump and has little use for traditional conservatism.
Haley’s campaign gave us a pretty direct test that has eluded us previously: what would happen if voters were faced with a one-on-one choice between Trump and the GOP of yesteryear.
Haley exuded the Reagan and George W. Bush eras. You’d be hard-pressed to find a more prototypical standard-bearer: conservative but pragmatic, fiscally conscious, hawkish on issues like Russia and Ukraine, and uninterested in the right wing’s almost-singular focus on provocation.
Haley declined to try to reinvent herself even when it was clear her approach wasn’t working. And while she got grief from Never Trumpers and the left for not adopting their approach, that at least left us with a truer test of where the GOP stands.
“I am not anti-Trump; I am for America, and the direction America can go,” she told CNN’s Dana Bash on Friday.
Her primary losses showed the direction the GOP wanted to go, and it wasn’t Haley’s, Bush’s or Reagan’s. Apart from winning Vermont and D.C. and taking around 40 percent or more in New Hampshire, South Carolina and Utah, she was generally around just one-quarter of the vote. She got 27 percent in the Michigan primary last week and averaged 26 percent across 15 states on Super Tuesday.
The party’s voters broke down extremely predictably. Haley’s voters were overwhelmingly those who didn’t like Trump and were more moderate, educated and suburban; Trump’s were overwhelmingly people who falsely denied the 2020 presidential election results and cared most about a candidate who would “fight for people like me.”
It was a choice between traditional conservatism and emotion, and emotion won in a landslide.
As tellingly, Trump dominated among actual Republicans, almost always taking at least 70 percent of them. That went up to around 8 in 10 in both North Carolina and Virginia on Super Tuesday.
The message was clear: Trump’s vision has surely taken over the conservative movement, but more than that, it has taken over the Republican Party proper..
Haley’s voters are, at least in part, necessary for the party to win. But her version of Republicanism isn’t really Republican anymore — not as the party is currently constituted.
Proving her party has left her and Reagan behind wasn’t Haley’s goal in the 2024 campaign. But it will be its legacy.
Haley’s moments — and lack of momentum — by the numbers
A few stats that stood out from the campaign:
1st: With her wins in D.C. and Vermont, Haley became the first woman to win a GOP primary contest. The closest before her was former senator Margaret Chase Smith (R-Maine), who won 25 percent of the vote in the 1964 Illinois primary. (Very few women have run significant GOP presidential campaigns, with others being Michele Bachmann in 2012 and Carly Fiorina in 2016.)
12: The number of contests in which Haley eclipsed Smith’s showing in Illinois.
89: The number of delegates Haley has won, according to The Post’s delegate tracker. Trump has won more than 10 times as many (995) and is just more than 200 delegates from technically clinching the nomination.
68 percent: The average share of Haley voters in Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina who said they wouldn’t support Trump in November, according to a Fox News/AP voter analysis.
32 points: Haley’s deficit in the symbolic Nevada primary, in which she lost more than 2-to-1 to “none of these candidates.” (Trump wasn’t on the ballot, instead running in the state’s caucuses.) The results reinforced that Haley wasn’t a viable option for much or most of her party. Many late polls showed only around have of primary voters liked her.
3: The number of members of Congress to endorse Haley. Sens. Susan Collins (R-Maine) and Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) joined Rep. Ralph Norman (R-S.C.) on Friday. The lack of support from the GOP’s institutional wing epitomized its members’ fear of alienating Trump and his base.
A telling moment from six years ago
A moment that has always stuck with me when it comes to Haley’s relationship with her party came in early 2018.
Appearing at an event hosted by Turning Point USA, a group geared toward young conservatives, Haley pleaded with the high-schoolers present to avoid an own-the-libs mentality.
She asked whether those present had “posted anything online to, quote-unquote, ‘own the libs.’”
“I know that it’s fun and that it can feel good, but step back and think about what you’re accomplishing when you do this — are you persuading anyone? Who are you persuading?” Haley implored the audience. “We’ve all been guilty of it at some point or another, but this kind of speech isn’t leadership; it’s the exact opposite.”
She added: “Real leadership is about persuasion; it’s about movement, it’s bringing people around to your point of view — not by shouting them down, but by showing them how it is in their best interest to see things the way you do.”
It was a pretty remarkable attempt to steer her party’s youth in a different direction. And it was notable not just because the activist group she was addressing has trended further to the fringe, but because her then-boss, Trump, was very much defined by an own-the-libs approach.
Six years later, it’s clear Haley’s plea has gone unheeded. The party wants its standard-bearers to be in your face.