Nikki Haley is the former Republican governor of South Carolina but, to try to slow Donald Trump’s seemingly inevitable march toward the GOP nomination, she might need a bloc of home state voters she's never needed to court: Democrats.
Trump’s dominating wins in Iowa and New Hampshire further instilled an aura of invincibility around his primary campaign. If Haley hopes to pierce that and salvage any sense of viability past South Carolina, she will likely need to expand her coalition beyond anti-Trump Republicans and independent-minded voters — a task that would almost certainly include at least small pockets of Democrats not sold on re-electing President Joe Biden or those willing to switch sides to try to stop Trump from getting the GOP nomination.
That already difficult political math is further complicated by a huge incentive for Biden and Democrats to generate monster turnout after making South Carolina the party’s first sanctioned nominating contest, and the fact that there is little evidence of any significant appetite for crossover voting in the Palmetto State.
"Democrats do not vote in Republican primaries here, just like Republicans won’t vote in Democratic primaries," said former South Carolina Republican Party Chairman Katon Dawson. “We tried and tried and tried, I spent money doing it. We found there was not much there.”
In both New Hampshire and Iowa, Haley faced criticism from opponents that she was targeting Democrats to offset her disadvantage with Republican primary voters, an idea her campaign has pushed back on. Officials have not, however, disputed that they are trying to expand the Republican base.
"The Republican Party has to be a story of addition again, not subtraction. Trump lost races we should have won in 2018, 2020 and 2022," Haley spokeswoman Olivia Perez-Cubas said. "If Republicans want to start winning again, we have to start bringing in new voters, including conservatives, independents and Democrats who are fed up with Joe Biden."
Still, some Republicans argue that the fact that there are three weeks between the Democrats' primary on Saturday and the Republicans' Feb. 24 primary creates a unique opportunity for Haley to pick up voters who might not ordinarily vote in a GOP primary.
In South Carolina, voters can choose to take part in either party's primary. So if a voter does not cast a ballot in the Democratic primary, Haley’s team will have three weeks to crunch the numbers and come up with a plan to target the exact set of voters who have yet to vote in the state.
“Haley should absolutely look to turn out every voter possible in the primary, and with the democratic Presidential Primary being held three weeks prior, there should be ample time to identify those who did not vote in the primary and encourage them to vote in the Republican Primary,” said Alex Stroman, a former executive director of the South Carolina GOP.
He said South Carolina not requiring party registration “gives us the best candidates to win general elections.”
“Haley needs to juice turnout among those independents, moderates and true Republicans to improve on her results in New Hampshire and launch her into Michigan and then Super Tuesday states,” Stroman added, referring to the March 5 round of primaries in 16 states.
Jay Parmley, executive director of the South Carolina Democratic Party, said they have heard from some Democrats who are planning to vote for Haley.
“Yeah, we have heard that is happening. It might be smart for Haley, but it’s stupid for Democrats to vote in the Republican primary,” he said. “She is just as bad as Donald Trump. My call to Democrats is, ‘If you didn’t vote for her for governor, why would you vote for her as the nominee?’”
“We are doing everything we can to talk to Democrats and get them to vote. Now we have some saying they may vote for Haley to try and stop Trump,” Parmley added. “That’s just stupid.”
Haley has defined herself as a politician eager to take on the establishment in both political parties, an opportunity she may now have in her home state.
Both the Biden and Trump camps have sent signals they want her to drop out so that they can turn their focus to a general election matchup they view as already set. On the night of the New Hampshire primary, Biden said in a statement that it is "now clear" that Trump will win the GOP nomination.
Democratic strategists say they expect many of their party's voters to cast ballots for Biden on Saturday, making them ineligible to participate in the Republican primary three weeks later. Moreover, there's little love lost between Haley and Democrats in the state she governed from the political right.
“There is no major effort of Democrats to vote for Nikki Haley. She was not good for us when she was governor. So there’s no need to think she would be good for us as president,” said Clay Middleton, a longtime Democratic operative who is serving as a senior adviser to the Biden campaign in South Carolina.
“Our goal as a campaign is to make sure that we contact voters and show them, remind them, what the president has done for South Carolinians and for African Americans, in particular, and show that appreciation by voting on Feb. 3.”
Middleton noted that Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris and “a slew” of top surrogates have visited the state in recent weeks, a group that includes Democratic National Committee Chairman Jaime Harrison, a South Carolina native, California Gov. Gavin Newsom and Rep. Ro Khanna, D-Calif.
Biden spoke at a “First in the Nation” dinner Saturday in Columbia, which highlighted his decision to make South Carolina’s primary the opening contest on the party’s calendar.
At the national level, the Biden campaign brushed off any idea that Haley can appeal to Democratic primary voters because of her position on abortion and her inability last month to include “slavery” in an answer to a question in New Hampshire about what caused the Civil War. She later clarified that “of course” the Civil War was about slavery, but the political damage had already been done.
“We’re pretty confident Democratic voters in South Carolina firmly reject banning abortion after 6 weeks and can say without hesitating that slavery caused the Civil War,” said Lauren Hitt, a senior spokesperson for the Biden campaign.
South Carolina has seen a huge population growth in recent years. By percentage, it was the fastest growing state in the country last year, and there are 400,000 people who have registered to vote in the state since 2016, the last time Republicans held a competitive primary in the state. That could provide pockets of opportunity for Haley, or at least add a layer of uncertainty to the mix.
“Those voters have never voted for Trump or Haley here,” Dawson said Dawson. “Those are the voters we could see swinging to Nikki Haley. They are conservative-to-moderate, and pro-life with exceptions.”
The state’s fastest growing areas, though, were overwhelmingly supportive of Trump in 2020. Horry County, home of Myrtle Beach, was the fastest growing county in the state last year and gave Trump 66.1% of the vote in 2020, his fifth-highest percentage among South Carolina’s 46 counties.
Despite the influx of voters who have never seen Trump or Haley in a competitive primary contest in the state, nearly all public polling has Trump up by major double-digit margins. The most recent polling on the state released by Ryan Tyson, a Florida-based GOP pollster who helped run Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ failed presidential campaign, had Trump up by 27 percentage points.
“Any good pollster is going to pick up that new population, so we should be seeing it,” Richland County GOP Chair Tyson Grinstead said. “She is going to have to play takeaway and win over Republicans who are probably now in Trump’s camp. She is not going to get there under the false notion that Democrats are invading the Republican primary.”
With Trump’s so far unbreakable domination over GOP primary voters, it also sets up the same question Haley faced in the first two nominating contests: What does a “win” even look like?
“She needs to do well here,” Grinstead said. “We have 20-30 days to figure out what well means, but politics changes by the minute, so who knows?”
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