She should stay in the race anyway.
Former President Donald Trump won the New Hampshire primary, making him the first Republican candidate in an open primary to win Iowa and New Hampshire in almost 50 years. As of Jan. 24, the only other person left in the race for the Republican nomination is former Ambassador to the United Nations and South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley. The accepted wisdom surrounding Haley’s campaign is that she needed to win New Hampshire to even have a chance of defeating Trump in the primary. Needless to say, she did not — and in the modern era of Republican politics, there is no such thing as a strong second place. Haley has absolutely no path to securing the nomination, barring divine intervention, but that does not mean that she should drop out of the race. On the contrary, the best thing she could do for the country right now is to continue campaigning for the Republican nomination.
For the past three years, ever since the failed coup on Jan. 6, 2021, Trump has been relatively absent from the public eye. He was banned from Twitter and Facebook, and while he has been invited back onto both platforms, he has avoided them in favor of remaining on his incredibly unpopular right-wing social media site, Truth Social. Major news outlets like CNN have stopped carrying his rallies. His actions and words no longer dominate every news cycle, and while that has been undoubtedly good for Americans’ collective blood pressure, it also means that many voters have simply forgotten what it was like to have Trump as president. They have forgotten the reality of the chaos and instability that marked his term in office. On top of that, they are not being exposed to his current behavior and rhetoric. He quoted Hitler in December and said that he would be “a dictator on day one.” These statements, along with his apparent mental decline — confusing Nikki Haley and Nancy Pelosi, claiming Jeb Bush started the Iraq War, saying that he beat President Obama in a presidential election — are easy to miss when they are not on Twitter or the news.
This is why Nikki Haley should stay in the race. As long as she runs against him, as long as she is making speeches and appearing on cable news shows and paying for digital and television advertisements, people are getting at least some exposure to the reality that Trump is running for office again, and his time out of the spotlight has not reformed his character. Haley’s hits on the former president highlight his unfitness for office, remind people that he is running for president again and provide a necessary contrast between Republicanism and Trumpism. Her persistence in this primary, doomed as it is, could actually do a service to the American people.
If Trump is going to be defeated in November, then people need to be reminded of his character now. The current nebulous, “well, maybe he wasn’t that bad” attitude held by many members of the electorate is not going to cut it. People need to know that he poses a real and present danger, and Nikki Haley’s continued efforts against him could be an effective avenue of reminding them.
