Keep fighting

Haley should keep fighting for all the Americans who don’t want Trump

This primary isn’t over. At least that’s what the Nikki Haley campaign said after finishing second to former President Donald Trump in the New Hampshire primaries on Tuesday.

SE Cupp

While conventional wisdom, political analysts, talking heads and the Trump campaign insist this race is over, and that former Trump is the inevitable Republican nominee, it bears pointing out that nearly half of New Hampshire voters chose someone other than Trump. In Iowa last week, 49% of voters in Iowa chose someone other than Trump.

The only accurate way of describing the state of this race is that the voters in the Republican primary are divided, and have not, in fact, coalesced around Trump as he’d have us believe. That’s not a great way to go into a general election, with so many voters explicitly saying, as they did to CNN field reporters, that they were over Trump. That might change over the course of the primary, but if New Hampshire offers us a snapshot in time, the picture is of a fairly weak frontrunner. As the Haley campaign told me earlier on Tuesday, it’s almost as if a bunch of Republicans have left the party because of Trump … and Nikki is bringing them home.

Can the former South Carolina governor bring them all the way home? The map gets harder for her from here. But Haley has a $4 million ad buy starting Wednesday in South Carolina, and the campaign is looking ahead to Michigan, which votes a few days after her home state, as another place she can give Trump a run for his money.

For independents, moderates and disaffected Republicans, Haley represents an all-too-important candidate in this race: the woman standing between Trump and the White House. For everyone – including the Biden campaign – declaring this race over, she owes it to those voters to stay in and not succumb to Trump’s inevitability posturing, or Biden’s eagerness to face a weaker candidate. She’s earning votes to stop Trump, and that’s what she must continue to do.