LANSDALE, Pennsylvania – Mrs Nikki Haley had been out of the Republicans’ presidential race for more than a month when Ms Linda Kapralick and Ms Cathleen Barone cast their ballots for her in Pennsylvania’s primary, so eager were they for an alternative to former president Donald Trump.
With Trump as the nominee, now is Mrs Haley’s voters’ time for choosing, as she was so fond of saying on the campaign trail, echoing a Ronald Reagan line.
Many of Mrs Haley’s most ardent supporters in her losing bid – moderate, college-educated Republicans and independents sceptical of Trump – fell into what pollsters called the “double haters” camp: people dreading having to cast a ballot for Trump or President Joe Biden, before he ended his re-election campaign. Vice-President Kamala Harris’ acceptance of the Democratic nomination in August has changed the maths.
“Neither one of these candidates is exactly a perfect fit for those voters,” veteran Republican pollster Whit Ayres said of Ms Harris and Trump. “The Haley voters, I think, are examining the Harris candidacy, and they are going to decide where they fall eventually.”
Mrs Haley, a former governor of South Carolina and the UN ambassador under Trump, formally endorsed him in July at the party’s nominating convention, urging her supporters to set aside their disagreements and stand united as Republicans.
That same month, lawyers representing her presidential campaign sent a cease-and-desist letter to a political action committee that called itself Haley Voters For Harris. In a statement, she said that any attempt to use her name to support Ms Harris was “deceptive and wrong”.
Yet many of those who supported her in the race tend to be anti-Trump, and saw her candidacy as a principled stand against the former president and his transformation of his party. Though she herself never embraced the anti-Trump label, she sharply criticised him as “unhinged” while she was still running, and once said of him that she felt “no need to kiss the ring”. Even after Mrs Haley suspended her campaign in March, she drew notable percentages of independents, Republicans and moderate Democrats in primary contests.
In the Republican primary in April in Pennsylvania, 25 per cent of voters in Montgomery County, just north of Philadelphia, cast their ballots for Mrs Haley, including Ms Kapralick and Ms Barone. Both said they appreciated Mrs Haley for her more traditional Republican tone. Now, their divergent November plans capture the split that could help sway the results in their state and other battlegrounds.
Ms Barone, 57, a real estate agent, is planning to support Trump, prioritising her desire for conservative policies on the border, law enforcement and military issues.
“I don’t like either candidate, so I think you have to take out the person,” Ms Barone said, adding that she did not trust Ms Harris’ appeals to centrists.
Ms Kapralick, 62, on the other hand, said she did not want Trump anywhere near the Oval Office again. She admired former representative Liz Cheney of Wyoming for standing up to him and had watched the speeches from prominent Republicans, including former representative Adam Kinzinger of Illinois, at the Democratic National Convention. She said she had been swayed by their message that a vote for Ms Harris was a vote to protect democracy and did not make them Democrats.
“I’m too nervous about what he might do to our country,” she said of Trump. “I have three children. I want them to grow up in a democracy like we did.”
Mrs Haley’s voters were not all double haters, pollsters and strategists said. Surveys of her supporters from the Monmouth University Polling Institute found that, on average, one in five had a favourable opinion of Trump – and about one in 10 approved of Mr Biden’s job performance.
Still, there is overlap between the two camps, and recent polling suggests the new presidential field has greatly reduced the number of double haters, with Ms Harris seeing some significant early advantages. A New York Times/Siena College poll in July found Ms Harris and Trump receiving boosts as the number of voters who disliked both candidates plunged to 8 per cent, down from 20 per cent in earlier Times/Siena polls.
Harris campaign officials and allies said they were under no illusions that they could win the majority of Haley supporters, many of whom consider themselves Republicans first and have never voted for a Democrat. But they said they were nonetheless heavily courting the swing bloc, knowing that any difference could matter at the margins.
The fight for Haley voters is especially heated in Pennsylvania, which candidates and surrogates from both campaigns have been criss-crossing in recent weeks. The Harris camp opened its 50th Pennsylvania office over Labour Day weekend. Sixteen of those 50 offices are in rural counties that Trump won by double digits in 2020.
In Montgomery County, clinical pathologist Andrea Fellerman Kesack, long-time Republican and volunteer with the Harris campaign, said it had been “a hard slog” to sway members of her party. But she sees her mission as crucial to preserving reproductive rights and to stopping the erosion of democratic norms and the promotion of xenophobia.
Mrs Haley “was not dealing in racist epithets, she was not lying, she was presenting cogent, thoughtful arguments for the way forward and not airing past grievances”, said Ms Fellerman Kesack, contending that she found Ms Harris – and not Trump – now in line with those values.
Grilling hot dogs at his home in Hanover, Pennsylvania, Mr Harold Mack, who retired as a corporate officer of a seed company and now manages a honeybee operation and a winery, said that, as a long-time fiscal conservative, he planned to vote for Ms Harris.
Angered over the trillions Trump added to the national debt, Mr Mack said that he would never again vote for him – nor for Mrs Haley, in the light of her recent endorsement of the former president. “Right now, the Democrats have more conservative policies, and that is a sad state,” he said. NYTIMES
