Haley looks to fight on home turf, which her rival claims as Trump country

CHARLESTON, S.C. — A combative Nikki Haley brought her presidential campaign back to South Carolina on Wednesday after a disappointing defeat the night before in New Hampshire, and told a boisterous crowd in a cavernous ballroom in North Charleston that she would fight Donald Trump for the Republican nomination.

“The political elites in this state and around the country say we just need to let Donald Trump have this,” she told her supporters, who were jeering at the idea. “Listen. We’ve only had two states that have voted. We’ve got 48 more.”

Nowhere is more immediately important than South Carolina, where she served two terms as governor before being tapped to serve as Trump’s first ambassador to the United Nations. But just because it’s her home state does not mean it is friendly territory. As Haley looked to reinvigorate her campaign here on the ground, Republicans, as varied as local party officials and the chair of the Republican National Committee, stepped up the pressure on her to drop out. As she made her case for pressing on, the former president significantly consolidated his support.

While she spoke, the Trump campaign blasted out a fresh list of endorsements in South Carolina that now includes the state’s two senators, most of its House members, its governor and lieutenant governor, and much of its State House — more than 150 names in all.

“Welcome home to Trump Country, Nikki,” Austin McCubbin, Trump’s South Carolina director, taunted.

Some of Haley’s closest allies and confidants on Wednesday continued to insist that Haley had met her own expectations: She had winnowed the field and was now in the two-person contest she wanted, with time enough until the primary on Feb. 24 to spread her message to a broader electorate and draw contrasts between herself and Trump.

“For those of us in South Carolina, we have seen people doubt her, and we have seen her overcome those doubts,” said Kim A. Wilkerson, a retired president of Bank of America in South Carolina and chair of the board of trustees at Clemson University, Haley’s alma mater.

But those doubts appeared to be snowballing, and the drumbeat for her withdrawal only grew louder.

“Republican voters have sent a clear message — they want to see the GOP unite around our eventual nominee, which is going to be President Donald Trump,” the Republican Party chair of Georgia, Josh McKoon, and the state’s Republican delegates wrote in a joint statement Wednesday. “It is difficult to see how Ambassador Haley can secure the nomination.”

Even the chief strategist for Haley’s super PAC, SFA Fund, Mark Harris, acknowledged Wednesday she needed to expand her support state by state to remain viable, with South Carolina the next big target.

“We have to do better with Republicans; we have to do better with conservatives,” he said Wednesday. “We definitely have to grow in those key demographics to provide us a realistic path to the nomination.”

Harris said Haley and her super PAC would be in the race for the long haul. He pointed to the 17 Republican delegates she has amassed with the second-place finish in New Hampshire and third-place finish in Iowa. Until later in the process when the winner of most states will take all of that state’s delegates, Haley can continue to bolster her delegate count, giving her leverage to claim the nomination if circumstances, such as a criminal conviction on any of the 91 felony counts he faces, chase Trump from the race.

But Republicans in South Carolina and across the country worried that the strategy would only anger Trump and his supporters, effectively disqualifying her from consideration — this year or in the future.

Donors who don’t get in line could also find themselves at odds with Trump. In a post on Truth Social on Wednesday night, Trump vowed: “Anybody that makes a ‘Contribution’ to Birdbrain” — Trump’s nickname for Haley — “from this moment forth, will be permanently barred from the MAGA camp.”

Chad Connelly, a former South Carolina Republican Party chair who has stayed neutral in the race, was open about his concern: “Nikki is well liked here, and Trump is loved,” he said. “He’s going to roll her.”

History would tell Haley that the weeks before South Carolina Republicans vote can be rough. After Sen. John McCain of Arizona won the New Hampshire primary in 2000, he swept into South Carolina, predicting the state’s open primary would bring Democrats and independents streaming to his cause. Instead, a whisper campaign by supporters of George W. Bush, the Texas governor then, spoke darkly and falsely of a Black daughter fathered by McCain out of wedlock. (He and his wife had adopted a daughter from an orphanage in Bangladesh.)

McCain’s defeat in South Carolina put Bush back on track to win the nomination.

Trump on Tuesday night hinted at a brutal campaign to come.

“Just a little note to Nikki,” he said at his victory speech, as he mocked Haley’s dress. “She’s not going to win. But if she did, she would be under investigation by those people in 15 minutes, and I could tell you five reasons why already.”

Over the past few days, online influencers with close ties to the Trump campaign have begun posting misogynistic, highly sexualized videos and images of Haley on social media. One of the videos, produced by a group called the Dilley Meme Team, uses “deepfake” technology to put the sexual innuendo in her own voice. A second, released as New Hampshire voters were still at the polls Tuesday, brings up allegations of marital affairs that she has consistently denied but have dogged her since she was governor.

“The people of South Carolina are so much better than the politics of South Carolina,” Olivia Perez-Cubas, a Haley campaign spokesperson, said. “Nikki Haley has proven she fights and wins for the people, no matter what sort of garbage gets thrown at her from the political class.”

And Haley stepped up her own attacks on Trump’s mental faculties, his age and his courage.

“Get on a debate stage and let’s go,” she said at her rally. “Bring it, Donald, show me what you’ve got.”

On Wednesday morning, she delivered her standard stump speech via Zoom to the Republican Party of the U.S. Virgin Islands, where caucuses are scheduled for Feb. 8.

The Haley campaign posted two advertisements in South Carolina media markets, the first hitting Trump and President Joe Biden as “a rematch no one wants,” the second extolling her record as governor.

Meantime, the work of raising money to keep the campaign going against a tide of endorsements for Trump continued apace. A major fundraiser in New York City is planned for Jan. 30, whose co-hosts include billionaire financier Kenneth G. Langone and investors Henry Kravis and Stanley Druckenmiller. Another is on tap for Houston shortly thereafter.

Privately, however, her backers are dividing into two camps, according to donors, fundraisers and donor advisers who primarily spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe private conversations.

First there are those who are dutifully fulfilling obligations to fundraising efforts, despite believing that Trump’s nomination is all but assured and that she will likely back out within weeks.

And there are those — primarily donors whose resistance to Trump is absolute — who are still all in, believing that Haley needs the financial resources to wrest the nomination from Trump, or at least to keep her campaign alive in the event that something befalls him.

“Just keep her in this race,” said Fred Zeidman, a Texas businessman and one of Haley’s strongest backers. “She is the last one standing.”

© 2024 The New York Times Company