Nikki Haley needs a miracle to win but her decision to stay in the presidential race is strategic
With the Super Tuesday mega-primaries this week, The Australian travelled through Reagan Country in southern California to see what voters think. The answers don’t bode well.
Ronald Reagan is buried high on a hill overlooking his beloved Simi Valley in California, a place once known as Reagan Country, the former heartland of the Republican Party. Every day, devotees of “the Gipper” file through his presidential library and read his famous words about it being “dawn in America” and the “shining city on the hill” before bowing their heads at the 40th US president’s tomb.
Even decades after his death Reagan keeps drawing crowds because his sunny brand of American conservatism – a fervent belief in the goodness of human aspiration through low taxes, free trade and immigration combined with a muscular global presence – has been a beacon for old-school Republicans for more than four decades.
This coming week, the last, lonely flag-bearer of Reagan’s America, presidential aspirant Nikki Haley, will make her final stand against impossible odds when Republicans across 15 states, including California, vote in the Super Tuesday presidential primaries on Wednesday AEDT. The result almost certainly will be a crushing series of victories for Donald Trump, effectively anointing him as the presumptive Republican nominee to confront Joe Biden in November’s presidential election.
It will be a watershed moment in US politics. It marks an astonishing against-the-odds political renaissance by Trump after his election defeat in 2020, his role in the subsequent invasion of the Capitol building and the pending 91 felony charges against him.
But more than that, for the dwindling number of traditional Reaganite Republicans, Trump’s second coming enshrines his populist MAGA movement as the beating heart of American conservatism. Suddenly Trump’s victory in 2016 and his chaotic one-term presidency were not the one-off aberration they had hoped.
Trump has surged back from the dead to grab the Republican Party and mould it into a mirror image of himself. Like Napoleon Bonaparte, Trump will place his own crown upon his head. Those conservatives who object will risk joining Haley in exile. The GOP, which once preached free trade, immigration and global policing, is now dominated by a maverick populist who fights protectionist trade wars, builds walls and threatens to turn his back on Ukraine, Taiwan and NATO. Reagan is surely turning in his grave.
“I’m an old-style Republican and I remember the days when it was not so divisive and we would vote on actual issues,” interior designer and lifelong Republican Gail Coleman says as she buys a coffee at Starbucks in Thousand Oaks, north of Los Angeles. “I prefer Nikki Haley to Trump because she is more moderate, less antagonistic and more factual. I’m not a big Trump fan, he speaks like a third-grader, acts like an elementary school student and is divisive. But let me tell you what – Haley has no chance in this contest and I’ll still vote for Trump over Joe Biden, who is just awful.”
The past week Inquirer travelled through Reagan Country in southern California to ask what voters thought about Trump’s looming coronation.
California, which once delivered the state’s electoral college votes to Republicans such as Reagan, Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford and George HW Bush, is now a Democrat stronghold and will send its electoral votes to Biden in November. But those remaining Republicans in the state have mostly turned their backs on Reagan’s GOP and Haley, despite her preaching a more traditional conservatism about the need for the US to stay engaged in the world, to balance the budget and minimise government. Polls predict Trump will win 73 per cent of the California Republican vote on Super Tuesday, compared with just 20 per cent for Haley, delivering him all of the state’s 169 delegates.
California is one of 15 states to vote on Super Tuesday and if the polls are right Trump will win every state, putting him in a position by the end of this month to win the 1215 delegates he needs to secure the Republican presidential nomination at the party’s convention in Milwaukee in July.
“I loved Reagan but it’s a different world now and Trump is today’s man and he is making his comeback,” Jim Langley says as he strolls through the Reagan Presidential Library. “I believe in a politician who makes promises and keeps a promise, and that’s what I saw in Trump. I like the fact he followed through.”
Langley, who once ran the LA Sanitation Bureau, switched from being a Democrat to a Republican in the 1970s and is a rusted-on Trump voter. “Trump has an excellent chance of being president again so long as he gets a fair election because the last election was definitely not fair,” he says. “Trump won it without a doubt.”
The Trump voters interviewed by Inquirer say they are anguished about the state of the country, citing Biden’s inability to control the border, rising prices and cost of living, crime rates, identity politics, America’s unnecessary involvement in Ukraine and the Middle East, and Biden’s age and encroaching senility.
Haley is Trump’s last opponent for the Republican nomination and she has vowed to stay in the race despite losing to the former president in primary races in Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada and Michigan as well as her home state of South Carolina. To Trump’s annoyance, Haley has refused to fold in the same way as his other primary opponents did.
Haley began her campaign by being cautious in her criticism of Trump, but as the contest has progressed she has upped her attacks on Trump, portraying him as an unhinged and insecure toddler who throws “temper tantrums”, is “too chicken to debate” her and too old to be president.
“We don’t anoint kings in this country,” she says. “He’s so obsessed with his own demons from the past, he can’t focus on delivering the future Americans deserve.”
Haley adopts a Reagan-like view that America needs a robust global presence and she has repudiated Trump and his isolationist wing of the Republican Party for advocating the abandonment of US aid to Ukraine.
“It’s not ‘America First’ to withdraw from the world, it’s not ‘America First’ to praise dictators who want to kill Americans,” she says. But the reality is that Haley’s belief in a globally engaged America is fast becoming an anachronism among MAGA Republicans.
As former conservative radio host Charlie Sykes puts it: “Every time I hear her speak, I think she gives the perfect Republican speech for 2015.”
Haley needs a mathematical miracle to win, but her decision to stay in the race despite almost certain defeat is a strategic calculation unrelated to her minuscule chances of victory. Explaining her decision to persevere, she says: “They have the right to a real choice, not a Soviet-style election with only one candidate. And I have a duty to give them that choice.”
But Haley’s choice to keep fighting gives her two advantages that outweigh, for now, the ignominy of constantly losing to Trump. The first is that continuing to run gives her a national profile that sets her up for the 2028 presidential campaign when there won’t be a populist svengali such as Trump to compete against. The second is that by continuing to run, Haley establishes herself as the default Republican candidate in the event that Trump’s legal woes see him convicted, or even jailed, during the presidential campaign. Haley is positioning herself to be the Steven Bradbury of US politics if Trump falls over before November.
Haley is clinging to the fact that even though Trump is cruising to victory in this primary contest, a solid minority of Republicans do not want him to be their candidate. She points out that Trump, despite his big lead, has won only 60 per cent of the vote in contested primaries so far – an outcome that she says speaks to deep division among Republicans and is likely to see Trump lose to Biden in November.
Trump said after his 20 percentage point win in the South Carolina primary last month that he had never seen the Republican Party so united, but the truth is there remains a sizeable minority of Republicans who do not want Trump to have a second term in the White House. Haley argues that Republicans would be making a grave mistake in nominating Trump because he would lose to Biden.
“I’m doing what I believe 70 per cent of Americans want me to do,” she says, referring to polls showing seven in 10 Americans want an option other than Trump v Biden this year. “You have to see the writing on the wall, you have to see the hole in the ship,” she says. “And if you don’t see the hole in the ship, we’re all going to go down.”
Haley also points to polls that show she would have a much greater chance of defeating Biden than Trump would. The latest Marquette Law School Poll national survey had 58 per cent of registered voters supporting her and just 42 per cent supporting Biden, while Trump had only a bare 51 per cent to 49 per cent lead over Biden.
But the Trump voters who spoke to Inquirer dismiss Haley as a lightweight and a spoiler who enjoys more support among Democrats than Republicans.
“Nikki should be getting out of the race, she’s got no chance and she’s in Trump’s way – he will wipe her out on Super Tuesday,” school worker and father of four Corey Buschell says as he stands outside his Simi Valley home under a Trump flag. “There are so many reasons why we need Trump back. Crime is through the roof, illegal immigration, inflation, the economy, there are wars we shouldn’t be in, we don’t need to be in Ukraine, we should not be involved in everyone’s business. Why Trump resonates with people is he is an outsider, he is not part of our broken system, he is fighting for us.
“Biden, next to (Barack) Obama, is one of the worst presidents in history. He’s a bumbling idiot who can’t put a sentence together and I don’t like any of his policies. They are more fixated on transgender and the sexualising of kids than focusing on real issues.”
Curtis Robertson, an unemployed construction worker who lives in his car with his two dogs, voted for Biden in 2020 but says he regrets it and will vote for Trump this year, mostly because of the high level of illegal immigration. “I voted Democrat in 2020 but Biden has not done anything for people like me,” Robertson says as he sits with his dogs in a park. “Instead he has dropped the ball, he has opened up the borders and illegal aliens are everywhere. My car got rear-ended by an unlicensed driver under the influence who couldn’t speak English. I just think Trump would clean this country up.”
Construction worker Anthony Di Ruscio says he is desperate for Trump to regain power. “It is Trump all the way for me,” he says as he stands in his front garden. “When he was president the country was much safer, better off financially, the economy was fantastic, the borders were secure, gas was half of what it is now, food also and we were safer from all other countries.” He says the 91 felony charges against Trump are “a kangaroo court and a lot of hogwash”.
‘No one has ever been charged for anything like this before in this country, whereas the Democrats have their own set of rules, they don’t get arrested for anything.” He believes Trump can defeat Biden in November but fears Trump will be assassinated. “They’re going to kill him – mark my words, they don’t want him in there again. Have you ever seen a country turn against a president the way they did? We should be ashamed of ourselves, especially the far-left Democrats. I mean they are a bunch of communists, they want to arrest us for having an opinion.”
Many Democrat voters interviewed by Inquirer nominate democracy as their most important issue, fearing that Trump will trash the country’s democratic institutions and traditions if he wins.
“We need to concentrate on saving our democracy,” says Joni Siegel, a horse owner who runs a natural products business. “It is a completely different party these days. I used to love to hate the Republican Party because they were an admirable opponent and now I hate to hate them because they are dangerous in their lack of education and awareness. There is a gullibility in my Republican friends who believe all these lies about the election and they have a righteousness about them that terrifies me.”
Kiren Dosanjh Zucker, a college professor in business ethics, says as a Democrat she “misses the days when I just worried about policies. Now it is something far more serious – it is a contest for the heart and future of the nation, about whether our great experiment in American democracy is going to work or fail. The GOP no longer exists because Trump has a stranglehold on it.”
Trump’s vice-like grip on the party has become only stronger as he sweeps his way towards the Republican nomination. He didn’t even bother debating his early primary opponents because his lead in the polls was so vast. When Florida Governor Ron DeSantis and entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy dropped out of t–e race they quickly endorsed Trump. Haley is now almost the lone prominent critic of Trump in the Republican Party.
Rather than campaign against Haley in South Carolina, Trump instead spoke at the Conservative Political Action Conference, which has become a centrepiece of the MAGA movement. Trump’s daughter-in-law Lara Trump will even become the Republican National Committee co-chairwoman as Trump and his team seek to control the party in the lead-up to the November presidential election.
The party’s acceptance of Trump is so complete that his most inflammatory comments – such as suggesting Russia invade NATO countries that don’t pay enough for their defence, or likening himself as a political victim to murdered Russian dissident Alexei Navalny – barely draw even mild rebukes.
Aerospace industry worker Krista Fish plays with her sons Hunter, 4, and Cayne, 10, under a “F--k Biden” flag and says she will be voting for Trump because of the pain she experiences every time she shops at the supermarket. “Just going to buy groceries is like $100 a trip and then there is the gas and all that,” Fish says. “Inflation is killing us. Biden has done this. And he let all those people in at the border. We are being murdered by people from other countries. Crime is out of control. I’m voting for Trump.”
Mark Nichols and his sister Kathy Korner are sitting metres away from Reagan’s grave arguing about Trump. “I’m a Democrat,” says Korner. “But the Republican Party today is the opposite of what it was under Reagan. The Republicans had principles in those days but today it is all about money and greed, in my opinion.”
Nichols shakes his head. “I think a lot of Reagan’s ideas are in the Orange Man, such as strength, deterrence and less government.”
Cori Burke, who owns horse stables near Thousand Oaks, says she will vote for Trump because she needs good news in her life. “I want some optimism,” she says as she rides a white horse around a horse pen. “I want something positive, something to look forward to. The world is so miserable now with Ukraine and Gaza and what is happening in America with the economy. Somebody needs to make a difference and I think that somebody will be Donald Trump.”
But Democrat Dan Tempelis says he is so nervous about Trump’s revival that he is not sure he will stay in the US if Trump becomes president again.
“Trump is a knucklehead, he is fully self-consumed, it’s going to be what he can get to benefit himself and his family, not our country,” he says. “Honestly, I think if he wins I will move to Australia.”
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