CHARLESTON, S.C. — Nikki Haley’s campaign is over, but the fight to win over her supporters has just begun.
With former President Donald Trump and President Joe Biden essentially set in stone as their parties’ respective presidential nominees, the Haley voting bloc — those who previously cast ballots for Trump and those who previously cast ballots for Biden — will now have to come to terms with a choice many wished they wouldn’t have to make.
And Trump’s and Biden’s initial pitches to these voters couldn’t sound more different.
On his Truth Social platform, Trump wrote Wednesday that Haley, who was his ambassador to the United Nations, “got TROUNCED” on Super Tuesday “in record setting fashion,” adding, “Much of her money came from Radical Left Democrats, as did many of her voters, almost 50%, according to the polls.” Later, he said he “would further like to invite all of the Haley supporters to join the greatest movement in the history of our Nation.”
Biden, meanwhile, praised Haley in a statement for having the “courage” to run against Trump and for “speaking the truth” about her rival, expressing hope that the two “can find common ground” on a variety of key issues.
What’s more, a Biden campaign official told the finance teams for Biden and the Democratic National Committee have recently done outreach to Haley donors, including efforts led by Biden national co-chair Jeffrey Katzenberg, the Hollywood mogul.
“Donald Trump made it clear he doesn’t want Nikki Haley’s supporters,” Biden said in the statement. “I want to be clear: There is a place for them in my campaign.”
Haley won just two contests — those in Vermont and Washington, D.C. — in her long-shot bid to unseat Trump atop the GOP. Her coalition was bolstered by crossover voters who jumped into open primaries looking to stick it to Trump. And though they made up the minority in the GOP primary campaign, strategists on both sides acknowledged that a segment of her supporters could prove key in close battlegrounds like Pennsylvania and Michigan.
“That’s the $64,000 question, right?” said David Urban, a Republican strategist who was the architect of Trump’s winning 2016 effort in Pennsylvania, mulling over how Haley voters will break in the fall. “A third will come home for sure, a third will have to be persuaded, and a third is just never, ever, ever going to vote for Trump.”
“If you get enough of the third of those [persuadable] people back in an election like Pennsylvania and Michigan and the states that are so close,” Urban added, “I think it’s important.”
