If Nikki Haley Can’t Win in New Hampshire, She Should Quit

Photo: Joe Raedle/Getty Images

With the withdrawal of onetime front-runner and longtime top Trump challenger Ron DeSantis from the 2024 Republican presidential contest, surviving challenger Nikki Haley has what she so badly wanted: a one-on-one battle with the former president. Her backers have long argued that this scenario will test the theory that Trump won the 2016 and 2024 contests owing to a divided opposition in the GOP.

From one view of the “momentum” in the 2024 race, Haley has been building up a head of steam, finishing third in Iowa, running second in New Hampshire, and anticipating the primary in her own state of South Carolina, where she can finally knock Trump off his perch and begin consolidating an anti-Trump majority once the big-delegate primaries occur in March.

Anything’s possible, I suppose. But the more plausible way to look at the race is that Trump won a majority of the vote in Iowa, will probably win a majority in New Hampshire, and currently holds a majority in the polls in South Carolina. As the field has been rapidly winnowed in the past few weeks, it’s Trump who has gained strength more than Haley. He has been endorsed by DeSantis, by fourth-place Iowa finisher Vivek Ramaswamy, and by Haley’s own longtime ally and junior senator Tim Scott. The candidate who could have most helped Haley, Chris Christie, contemptuously refused to back her when he dropped out of the contest, calling her a coward publicly and suggesting on a hot mic that she would “get smoked” by Trump.

Polls pretty plainly suggest that while Haley is nowhere really close to beating the former president, she’s closest in New Hampshire, where Trump leads her by 17.4 percent in the RealClearPolitics polling averages (in contrast to his 30.2 percent lead in the RCP averages for South Carolina). So winning in the Granite State, with its large moderate independent voting bloc and its relatively low number of Evangelicals, is probably the only way Haley can climb back from the abyss to become competitive on her own MAGA-drenched home turf.

To be very clear, Haley’s campaign is in bad shape in South Carolina. Trump has been endorsed by both U.S. senators, the governor, the lieutenant governor, the attorney general, the state treasurer, the state house Speaker, and three members of the U.S. House. Haley’s most notable backer in the Palmetto State is Congressman Ralph Norman. She hasn’t been on the ballot in South Carolina since 2014; since then, she’s gone national in her political aspirations.

To look at the race from a historical perspective, if Trump wins in New Hampshire, he would be the first Republican presidential candidate since Gerald Ford in 1976 to win contested races in both Iowa and New Hampshire. No Republican in a contested race has lost both Iowa and New Hampshire and gone on to win the nomination. And it’s not like Trump would be bucking any sort of national resistance against his nomination. In the national RCP polling averages, he has recently soared to 66.1 percent, leading Haley by 54.6 percent. In scattered polling of the states that will massively dominate the contest right after South Carolina, Trump has big majorities in virtually all of them.

If she falls short in New Hampshire, Nikki Haley is going to have to take a long look at her career and decide if she wants to spend a solid month being humiliated in her home state before likely being dispatched from the race there by the 45th president. Even if she somehow wins South Carolina, she will, as Chris Christie predicted, inevitably get “smoked” in March, when a ton of primaries and caucuses arrive where she has no organization or pre-established base of support. Yes, she could limp to the very end of the trail hoping against hope that Trump implodes, even though we should know by now that gaffes never hurt him and setbacks in the legal system just strengthen him among Republican voters. But having survived to become the last remaining rival to Trump, she should find a dignified way to end her candidacy that does not put her under the same microscope as Ron DeSantis as an object lesson in political folly.