If Trump Falls, Nikki Haley Won’t Be the GOP’s Plan B

Photo: Allison Joyce/Getty Images

Barring some fresh polling from South Carolina showing that Nikki Haley has significantly reduced Donald Trump’s massive lead in her home state, which holds its GOP presidential primary on February 24, the case for Haley’s ultimate victory depends on a very hazy scenario. There’s no real evidence that Haley has a prayer against Trump in any, much less all, of the 28 states that will hold nominating contests in March. This is especially true in delegate-rich places like California, where Trump leads by 68 points in the FiveThirtyEight polling averages; Florida, where Trump is up by 69 points; and Texas, where Trump is up by 64 points. So Haley is by necessity playing a very long game, as the Washington Examiner explains:

While Haley’s pathway to the presidency faces long odds, polls suggest the Republican Party is open to an alternative if Trump is convicted as he faces 91 indictments across four criminal cases. If Haley has enough funding to keep up her White House run, public sentiment could shift more in her favor.

“The Republican Party is facing the possibility that former President Trump could be convicted before Election Day,” said David Darmofal, a professor of political science at the University of South Carolina. “If he is and is sentenced to prison, the Republican Party could face a situation that no major party has faced and that a prominent party hasn’t faced since the Socialist Party’s Eugene Debs ran for president from prison in 1920 while serving a 10-year sentence for violating the Sedition Act of 1918. From this perspective, it might be helpful for the Republican Party to have an alternative candidate in Haley.”

Let’s be clear about this: The odds are very high that Trump will win the 1,215 pledged delegates necessary to clinch the nomination in March, before there’s any chance of him being convicted of a crime, much less marched off in leg-irons to the penitentiary (which won’t happen soon anyway because of the appeals he will have available in both federal and state proceedings). After March 15, winner-takes-all primaries will be common, allowing Trump to quickly augment his majority.

Yes, it is possible that the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee could take the extraordinary, unprecedented action of “de-pledging” Trump delegates, as the Associated Press has explained:

Bound delegates must vote for a particular presidential candidate at the convention based on the results of the primary or caucus in their state. As in past years, every state party must bind its delegates to vote for their assigned candidates during at least the first round of voting at the national convention, with limited exceptions for a small number of delegates. A candidate wins the nomination if they clinch a majority, which is 1,215 delegates.

At next year’s convention, which starts July 15 in Milwaukee, there will be opportunities to tweak the rules when they are adopted or to suspend them, which can require two-thirds of delegates to approve on a vote.

And even the convention cannot override the laws in 14 states that require delegates on penalty of criminal indictment to vote for the candidate to which they are pledged, sometimes for multiple ballots.

But here’s the real death knell for Haley ’24: Virtually all of these pledged delegates will be Trump supporters. Even if they become convinced that they have to dump their lord and master to avoid a general-election apocalypse, or (even less likely) that he won’t be available to campaign because he’s incarcerated, they are not going to turn to Nikki Haley — whom Trump calls “Birdbrain” and who is currently the darling of Never Trumpers — as a plan B. The convention will be stuffed with politicians who have been loyal to Trump for years. Some might even be attractive general-election candidates in a pinch. None of them will have lost a long list of caucuses and primaries to Trump unless Ted Cruz or Marco Rubio attempts a 2024 convention comeback.

The bottom line is that Haley is going to have to force herself on the GOP as a nominee by beating Trump in a significant number of primaries and caucuses. A respectable but losing showing like she posted in Iowa and New Hampshire won’t cut it, nor will she become plan B for the GOP if her appeal is mostly limited to independents and Democrats. Yes, going forward, her immediate problem is to convince donors to keep bankrolling a campaign with no viable path to the nomination, which is likely why she is currently running around the country raising money when she really ought to be mending fences in South Carolina, where it’s hard to find Republican elected officials who are supporting her despite all her boasts about her gubernatorial tenure there. But Trump’s party will look far and wide for a substitute leader if somehow the 45th president abruptly succumbs to his many excesses.