Former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley was the last candidate standing up to former President Donald Trump in the Republican primary race. Eight months later, she is not standing beside him on the eve of the 2024 election.
While she publicly endorsed Trump, the former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations has not campaigned next to the former president. She has even publicly raised concerns that Trump’s bromance events, such as the one at Madison Square Garden, were turning off women and her voters.
Since Haley ended her presidential run in March after earning about 20% of the GOP vote, some of her 4.4 million supporters describe being left without a candidate: someone who represents a more centrist temperament and stances on social issues with traditional GOP views on American defense and diplomacy.
Hours ahead of the coin-flip election, Haley’s Republican supporters say they are politically homeless and are not in a rush to back Trump.
“Every opportunity that Trump has an opportunity to speak, it reaffirms that I’m not going to support him,” said Tom Woody, a Haley supporter who lives in Des Moines, Iowa. “It pushes me closer to a possible Harris-Walz vote.”
Vice President Kamala Harris’s campaign has appealed to these voters by forming “Republicans for Harris” groups in many battleground states for direct outreach and holding tailored events with former Rep. Liz Cheney and other prominent Republicans.
Haley has said Trump is the better choice because his policies outweigh any personal flaws. She wrote an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, published Sunday, intended to drive that point home with her supporters.
“I don’t agree with Mr. Trump 100% of the time,” Haley wrote. “But I do agree with him most of the time, and I disagree with Ms. Harris nearly all the time. That makes this an easy call.”
Whether her supporters will follow her lead could help determine the election, as the race could be won and lost on the margins. A line from Haley’s stump speech when she was running in the primary perfectly encapsulates why there’s a split in allegiance among those who supported her, as she warned about both candidates on the ballot.
“Chaos follows [Trump], and we can’t be a country in disarray and have a world on fire and go to four more years of chaos because we won’t survive it. You don’t defeat Democrat chaos with Republican chaos,” Haley said to voters at a January town hall in Iowa.
“And the other thing we need to think about: We can never afford a President Kamala Harris,” she said at the time, to a round of applause.
A national survey of Haley’s primary voters conducted in early October by the Democratic polling firm Blueprint found that while 66% of Haley primary voters supported Trump in 2016, that number dropped to 59% in 2020 and is expected to drop to 45% in this year’s election. About 36% indicated that they intended to vote for Harris.
The Washington Examiner spoke to five Haley supporters, several of whom have struggled for months in making their decisions. Here’s how they are planning to vote or have already voted.
‘Lesser of two evil candidates’
Alissa Baker, 52, who lives in northern Virginia, describes her decision to back Trump as “the seventh stages of grief,” but she said she eventually got to a place of acceptance since the Washington Examiner interviewed her last in July.
Baker, who volunteered on Haley’s Virginia leadership team, said she was swayed after Haley spoke at the Republican National Convention, describing all the reasons she was supporting Trump.
“I listened to her make her case and she’s right. A candidate is not a soulmate. You’ve got to choose the lesser of two evil candidates,” Baker told the Washington Examiner. “Maybe in 2028, we’ll get back to those aspirational and inspirational candidates.”
She decided to vote for Trump because he aligns more with her views and values, but she admitted that there is some “reluctance.”
“I think that sometimes he talks more broadly about the use of tariffs, and I don’t always agree that that makes sense,” she said. “He speaks about eliminating departments. I don’t really believe that he’s going to do some of these, eliminating the Department of Education.”
Cherie Kurland, 67, a lifelong conservative from Atlanta, said she voted for Trump in the last two elections and decided to vote for him once again after she heard previous statements Harris made during her brief stint running for the Democratic nomination in 2020.
“She said, ‘I have not changed my values,’ but then what started coming up about her values were far far left,” Kurland explained. “I’m definitely conservative, and I’m like, ‘Sorry, she’s not for me.’”
Kurland, who is Jewish, said she felt Trump was much stronger on Israel and was frustrated about the rise of antisemitism.
“That’s a very strong factor for me,” she added. “As much as I’m a lifelong Republican, I’m also a lifelong Zionist, and I’ve been following what’s been happening with Israel intensely.”
However, not all of Haley’s previous supporters were swayed by her endorsement of Trump. Woody, 35, the Haley supporter from Iowa, worries about the state of the country’s democracy if Trump is elected again. He describes himself as a Constitution-focused traditionalist who cannot get past the insurrection on Jan. 6, 2021.
“My thought is Donald Trump can’t be elected to office if we want to keep any sort of resemblance of a democracy,” Woody said. “My vote is going against any sort of MAGA agenda. I’m looking at the words he’s saying about political rivals, the statements he and his running mate are making against women’s rights and a lot of different rights in this country, it’s pushing me as a lifelong conservative into a position where I think I might truly vote Democrat this time around.”
As an act of defiance, Woody still has a Haley yard sign on his lawn that he will not take down. He believes there are many other Republicans who could be voting for Harris but are being silent about their choice.
“There are certain policies on both sides that I don’t agree with, but, you know, we’re dealing with the lesser of two evils, and I think that a lot of conservatives feel that way but aren’t necessarily going to be the most vocal,” he said.
Brenda Murray, 70, who lives in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, said it took her a while to decide to back Harris. After doing some research, she said she felt more comfortable backing the Democratic candidate after it appeared that the party was moving closer to the middle on some critical issues.
“The Democratic Party now has been more interested in pursuing and keeping our borders safe, which I think had initially been a Republican issue, but Democrats have taken it on a lot more strongly as well as the war in Israel,” Murray explained.
Murray, who teaches a nursing course at a junior college part-time, said she was most drawn to Harris because she believes the vice president will bring people together.
“Haley was very unifying, she wanted to be, she wanted to bring people together,” she said. “I see that in Harris.”
‘If Trump loses, it’ll be because of the Haley voters’
One thing the 2024 race has exposed is a big gender gap — early voting numbers have shown that women are outnumbering men at the polls. This trend could be exacerbated if Haley supporters break one way. If Trump loses his third White House bid, his approach to courting women could be among one of his campaign’s most scrutinized strategies.
Krista Moore, 62, from Wake Forest, North Carolina, said that after much consideration since the summer, she is unable to choose either candidate. She will leave the top of her ballot blank but will vote for downballot Republicans.
Moore, an executive coach and business consultant, said she was disappointed to see that Trump had made no overtures to her or other Haley supporters and has not campaigned with Haley even after she offered dates when she was available, according to reporting.
“I can’t believe that he’s not smart enough to realize that he needs the female vote and he’s not asking us for our vote and he’s not coming after us,” she said. “We’re this silent majority, and Republicans can win when they get the female vote.
“He’s just acting like he doesn’t need it,” she added. “He’s going after the male vote thinking he can make up the difference, and he’s got too much pride to even ask Nikki to come out and campaign with him.
“If Trump loses, it’ll be because of the Haley voters,” Moore added. “Shame on him for not bringing us in.”
