Liberals In Open Primary States Should Vote For Nikki Haley

Brian's plea to New Hampshire voters

We’ll be out with a fresh episode of Politix tomorrow morning, where Matt and I discuss Ron DeSantis’ exit and whether policy matters in primaries. But as we await the results of the New Hampshire primary this evening, I wanted to share my argument for voters there to vote for Nikki Haley, even if they’re not Republicans. Upgrade to paid to hear tomorrow’s episode in full (including a too-hot-for-Twitter conspiracy theory), and if you enjoy the post below, I hope you’ll consider subscribing to Off Message as well.

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(Photo by Megan Varner/Getty Images)

In early 2016, a loose coalition of liberals and anti-Trump conservatives, along with more than a few Republican opportunists who simply feared Donald Trump would lose the general election, began pleading with independent and Democratic voters in states with open primaries, to cross over and cast their ballots for Marco Rubio. Trump was already running away with the nomination at that point, but the hope was that, with enough wind at his back, Rubio might be able to catch him. 

I was not a fan of this idea. Like most people I believed Trump would lose to Hillary Clinton. But I wasn’t cocksure, and that wasn’t really why I argued against it. It was more that intervening in GOP politics to help Republicans nominate a more electable candidate—in exchange for nothing—struck me as a poor bargaining proposition. Republicans wouldn’t and couldn’t offer Democrats anything to sweeten the deal, so the onus for denying him power should fall on them alone. They could either defeat him in the primary or do what was right for the country and sit out the general election. Bailing them out of their own mess cut against my sense of fair play. 

To be honest, it still does. Almost nothing leaves a worse taste in my mouth than Democrats paying ransoms to Republican hostage takers. But eight years later we don’t need perfect foresight to know Trump is electable, and how terrible his second term would be; we don’t even have the luxury of head-to-head polls suggesting Trump will lose the election handily. Which is why—much as I hate to admit it—I’d vote for Nikki Haley three weeks from now if I were an undeclared voter living in New Hampshire. I’d discourage national Democrats from trying to prop up Trump’s candidacy by gratuitously piling on his rivals. And I’d encourage Joe Biden to stop worrying and love the thought, however remote, of Donald Trump losing the GOP nomination.

Seven Years A-Slavering

I was kicking around a different version of this piece before the holiday, during which Haley (once again) disgraced herself by effectively absolving slaveholders and the institution of slavery for plunging the country into Civil War. 

Haley probably never stood a chance against Trump, even in New Hampshire where she’s managed to pull within a mere 19 points of him. (Lol.) But New Hampshire isn’t South Carolina, and her slavery apologetics may have doomed whatever slim chance she had.

Still, it’s hard to think of any legal means of stopping Donald Trump that aren’t worth pursuing, and voting for Haley in open or semi-open primaries is one of them. Haley is an unprincipled person driven by little more than pure ambition. Even when she showed a flash of humanity at the last GOP debate and called Vivek Ramaswamy “scum,” it rang hollow because she’s hitched a ride on the Scumbag Express for the past seven years. 

She would be a terrible president who would empower even worse people—people much like Ramaswamy, in fact—to undermine the country’s freedoms and punish its liberal enclaves, where most people live. In a just world nobody who’s too scared to stand up to neo-Confederates would ever hold any office. 

But she’s a person of higher character and more ethical purpose than Donald Trump. She’s running for president because she wants to win a big prize (a bad reason) not because she wants to stay out of prison (a worse reason). If she were to lose the election, she’d probably admit it, which is more than we can say about Trump who will once again insist it was stolen.  

To say Haley is of higher character than Donald Trump is no compliment! Haley is someone it would be very important to beat; Trump is someone we have to protect the country from. 

Rot, Kettle, Black

That isn’t to say Joe Biden or anyone else should give Haley a pass for omitting “slavery” from her list of causes of the Civil War. I thought Chris Christie’s response was very good. But there are ways to condemn her comments that implicate the whole GOP rather than Haley alone. For instance: She wouldn’t have made them if she weren’t keenly aware that succeeding nationally in Republican politics requires pandering to bigots. 

As I noted in the pilot episode of Politix, what she said indicts the party, not just herself. Other Republicans understood this, which is why they chimed in, like Tom Cotton, to contain the damage with party-line bad-faith trolling: Yeah, the Civil War was about slavery—Democrat slavery! They realize it reflects poorly on them when their leaders deny the country’s original sin altogether. 

But if you read between the lines of their messaging, Democrats seem eager to undermine Haley specifically. They seem inclined, as they have for many cycles now, to elevate the nuttiest Republican primary candidates and undermine their less-unhinged opponents, in the hope of drawing more beatable general election opponents. 

In 2022 I wrote for the New York Times about why, in the Trump era, this strategy was both intolerably risky and unnecessary. Risky because occasionally the crazies win! Unnecessary, because the whole GOP has stained itself with Trumpism, which means even “establishment” candidates are complicit and vulnerable to the Trump backlash.

All the Democrats have to do is tell the truth. Republican candidates run the gamut from people who participated in the violent insurrection of Jan. 6, 2021, to ones who supported it from afar to underdogs who will stand idly by and let Mr. Trump take another run at ending the American experiment in self-government.

This applies just as much in the GOP presidential primary now, and to Haley’s slavery gaffe. Her comments reflect her party’s deeper rot more than anything uniquely objectionable about her.

And they serve as a reminder that if she somehow wins the primary, Democrats will still have plenty to work with: They’d be able to attack her for pandering to Lost Cause mythologists, and for being against Trump, before she was for him, before she was against him again, before she was for him again. They might even get a leg up from Trump himself, who’d likely claim Haley stole the nomination from him, and turn his loyal supporters against her. 

The only reason to wonder whether he might accept defeat with a little more grace than usual is that his freedom would depend on her winning. She has promised to pardon Trump if she becomes president, providing Democrats a great wedge even if Trump turns on her. Perhaps she’d flipflop on that, too. 

For a long time now Democrats have been torn between their competing instincts to stop Trump at all costs and treat him as a foil. But after all the damage he’s done and all Republicans have done to enable him, it’s no longer such a pure binary. And in 2024, it’s clear which way that scale should tip.