The battle is on for Nikki Haley’s supporters

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 and Biden’s initial pitches to these voters couldn’t sound more different.

On his Truth Social platform, Trump wrote Wednesday that Haley, his former 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 range of key issues. 

What’s more, a Biden campaign official told NBC News the finance teams for Biden and the Democratic National Committee have recently done outreach to Haley donors, including efforts led by Hollywood mogul and Biden national co-chair Jeffrey Katzenberg.

“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 — Vermont and Washington, D.C. — in her longshot bid to unseat Trump atop the GOP. Her coalition was bolstered by crossover voters jumping into open primaries looking to stick it to Trump. And though they made up the minority in the GOP primary, 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 served as 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.”

But Trump and his allies have hammered home the idea that Haley’s voter pool is so chock-full of Biden supporters that it’s not worth paying much time to her coalition. And polling does show a significant number of her supporters are either likely to support Biden this fall or have done so previously.

NBC News exit polling on Super Tuesday showed stark divides between Trump and Haley backers on key questions. In Virginia and North Carolina, roughly half of Haley’s supporters said they approved of Biden’s job performance as president — higher than the public as a whole. On the other hand, virtually none of Trump’s backers approved of Biden’s performance.

A New York Times/Siena College poll released Saturday, which showed Trump winning a national general election match-up with Biden by 5 points, also showed nearly half of Haley’s supporters — 48% — voted for Biden in 2020, versus 31% who said they backed Trump then.

And as NBC News’ Steve Kornacki wrote, Trump’s poor performance with independent voters in early GOP primaries may be more the result of “resistance”-leaning independents being motivated to participate in them than a reflection of the opinions of independent voters overall.

Still, there may be a group of Haley voters now looking for a home who could prove pivotal to either candidate’s coalition — particularly voters who dislike both men or have concerns about their advanced age.

Over months of reporting in more than a dozen states where the former governor of South Carolina held campaign events, NBC News spoke with many Haley supporters dejected about a possible Trump-Biden rematch — yet already sure of how they would vote in that scenario.

The night before Super Tuesday, Steve Mirren, a Haley supporter in Texas, talked of his disdain for Trump’s comments from the infamous “Access Hollywood” tape in 2016 in which he said he could “grab” a woman “by the p—-” because he was famous. But Mirren was more upset over Biden’s handling of the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan.

David Grewe, a voter from Parker, Colorado, had the opposite take. He backed Trump in 2016 but not in 2020. “If that’s the choice I’m left with — Biden,” he said.

No one seemed particularly enthusiastic.

“I will not vote for Joe Biden, period,” Kay Anderson, a self-described lifelong Republican and Haley supporter from Michigan who voted for Trump in the last two presidential elections, said.  “But I will be forced to, probably, vote for Donald Trump.”

In Franklin, New Hampshire, Ron Brooks was initially for Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis but switched to Haley. Brooks said he was disturbed by Trump’s actions on Jan. 6, 2021, as he tried to overturn his loss to Biden. But Brooks is ready to vote for Trump this fall “if that’s what it comes down to.”

“I was just hoping he wouldn’t be the nominee,” Brooks said.

Where Biden and Trump go from here

The Biden campaign sees Haley’s primary vote as evidence that Trump has failed to make new inroads with moderate voters since his 2020 election loss. Biden advisers point to Trump’s performance in key suburban counties in battleground Michigan, including Oakland, Washtenaw and Kent, where he fared worse in the GOP primary than he did statewide.

“Donald Trump’s primary performances present a major warning sign for the GOP,” Biden campaign spokesman James Singer said in a statement. “He is weak with the voters who are going to decide this election, while these elections show an opportunity for President Biden to expand his coalition.”

Karoline Leavitt, a Trump campaign spokesperson, did not offer new insights when asked how the campaign might reach out to Haley voters, instead saying ahead of Haley’s exit that GOP voters “have delivered resounding wins for President Trump in every single primary contest and this race is over.” 

“Our focus is now on Joe Biden and the general election,” Leavitt said.

For weeks, Haley’s team has seized on Trump casting out her supporters, including when he said any donors who made contributions to Haley following his victory in New Hampshire earlier this year would be “permanently barred from the MAGA camp” — a sentiment Haley turned into campaign merchandise. At a rally in Virginia over the weekend, Trump said MAGA represents “96% and maybe 100%” of the GOP, adding, “we’re getting rid of the Romneys of the world.” 

“He’s pushing people out,” Olivia Perez-Cubas, a Haley spokesperson, said earlier this week. “And they’re the very people he needs to win in November.”

During a Tuesday interview with Fox News, Trump declined to say whether any peace deal with Haley could be made, saying his focus “is really at this point, it’s on Biden.”

“The answer is I want everybody to come together,” he said. “We’re going to have a unified party because our real opponent happens to be named Biden. … I wish Nikki the best. But she stood up and many, many times said ‘I’d never run against our president.’”

In the closing days of her campaign, Haley went as far as to say she believes Trump’s legal challenges should be “dealt with” before November, that he shouldn’t be able to claim presidential immunity and that she didn’t know if he would follow the Constitution as president. And as she left the race on Wednesday, Haley did not offer him an endorsement, though she congratulated him on his wide-ranging victory.

“I have always been a conservative Republican and always supported the Republican nominee,” she said before quoting former U.K. Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. “‘Never just follow the crowd. Always make up your own mind.’”

“It is now up to Donald Trump to earn the votes of those in our party and beyond it who did not support him, and I hope he does that,” Haley continued. “At its best, politics is about bringing people into your cause, not turning them away. And our conservative cause badly needs more people. This is now his time for choosing.”

Former Rep. Barbara Comstock, R-Va., told NBC News though that the Haley campaign has essentially given its supporters the “permission structure” to not vote for Trump this fall — something the self-described “never Trump” former congresswoman said could spell doom for the former president this fall.

“This has given a big permission structure across [her base], a lot of which won’t get back [to Trump] is the bottom line,” Comstock, who campaigned with Haley in Virginia, said. “It gives those of us who want to work on [Trump’s defeat] a much bigger canvas to work on.”