Washington, Jan 31: Nikki Haley, the fiercest challenger to ex-president Donald Trump in the GOP 2024 primary, banks on the most unlikeliest of ally, Democrats, who might flip, to vote for her on her home turf South Carolina, to stop Trump’s bull run in the presidential race.
Nikki Haley, the former UN ambassador appointed by Trump himself, will try to slow down Trump’s seemingly inevitable march toward the GOP nomination. Haley is banking on a bloc of home state voters she’s never needed to court before, the Democrats, media reports said.
Trump’s absolute dominance in the Iowa primary, narrow win in New Hampshire, seems to have instilled an aura of invincibility around his primary campaign. Haley hopes to pierce that and salvage an sense of viability past South Carolina, and she is planning 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, NBC reported.
The political maths is being made more complicated by the incentive for Biden and Democrats to generate a “monster turnout” after making South Carolina the party’s first sanctioned nominating contest, and there is less evidence of any cross 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.”
Haley says she does not “have to win” her home state of South Carolina but needs “momentum”. 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 rejected. 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.”
Some Republicans feel there are still three weeks between the Democrats’ primary on Saturday and the Republicans’ February 24 primary that creates a unique opportunity for Haley to pick up voters who might not ordinarily vote in a GOP primary.
In South Carolina, people can vote 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, NBC said. (IANS)
