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Nikki Haley said on Wednesday that she’ll “be voting for Trump,” telling a Washington, DC audience that her priorities “as a voter” — including the national debt and border security — meant she couldn’t support President Joe Biden.
“Trump has not been perfect on these policies,” Haley said at the Hudson Institute, which she joined after suspending her own presidential bid in March. “But Biden has been a catastrophe.”
Haley had refrained from commenting on the presidential race since exiting it. Trump didn’t reach out to his former UN Ambassador after her suspension — a situation Democrats tried to take advantage of by buying ads that played back Haley’s criticisms of Trump and urged her voters to abandon him.
On Wednesday, Haley added little to comments made when she exited the race in March. Then, she’d told a hometown audience that Trump needed to appeal to her voters, and she repeated that line, emphasizing that she has won hundreds of thousands of protest votes since quitting the race.
“Trump would be smart to reach out to the millions of people who voted for me and continue to support me, and not just assume that they’re going to be with him,” she said.
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David’s view
Democrats never expected Haley to endorse Biden, and figured that she’d protect her viability in Republican politics by supporting Trump. The other alternative, pioneered by Liz Cheney: Liberal plaudits and total conservative irrelevance.
But Haley could have gone further toward Trump than she did on Wednesday. She said nothing about the Biden campaign’s appeals to unhappy Republicans, and repeatedly thanked the voters who kept supporting her defunct candidacy — a small but lingering source of embarrassment for Trump.
Her prepared remarks, which criticized some House Republicans for slow-walking aid to Ukraine, went after Biden for saying he’d withhold some weapons from Israel. But she previously said much harsher things about Trump (and Biden) in the closing weeks of her own campaign. Haley, the candidate who’d promised mental competency tests for elderly politicians, and called Trump’s insults about her family “unbecoming of a president,” had been replaced by a think tank senior fellow focused on policy goals.
Haley had a prime speaking slot at the 2020 Republican National Convention; she’s retreated into the background of this campaign. While the ex-candidate faintly praised Trump before a friendly audience — in Washington DC, one of two places she carried in the 2024 primary — she isn’t about to rally with him at a Manhattan courthouse. (She took no questions from reporters in the room, who would have asked for clarifications on some of this.)
The View From Democrats
“Nothing has changed for the millions of Republican voters who continue to cast their ballots against Donald Trump in the primaries,” said Biden campaign spokesman Michael Tyler, who said that Republican protest voters cared about democracy, “standing strong with our allies,” and rejecting “chaos” from Trump. “Only one candidate shares those values, and only one campaign is working hard every day to earn their support – and that’s President Biden’s.”