Haley’s voters size up a scrambled presidential race

LANSDALE, Pa. — Nikki Haley had been out of the Republicans’ presidential race for more than a month when Linda Kapralick and 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 Haley’s voters’ time for choosing, as she was so fond of saying on the campaign trail, echoing a Ronald Reagan line.

Many of Haley’s most ardent supporters in her losing bid — moderate, college-educated Republicans and independents skeptical 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 reelection campaign. Vice President Kamala Harris’ acceptance of the Democratic nomination last month has changed the math.

“Neither one of these candidates is exactly a perfect fit for those voters,” Whit Ayres, a veteran Republican pollster, said of Harris and Trump. “The Haley voters, I think, are examining the Harris candidacy, and they are going to decide where they fall eventually.”

Haley, the former governor of South Carolina and the United Nations 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 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 criticized him as “unhinged” while she was still running, and once said of him that she felt “no need to kiss the ring.” Even after 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% of voters in Montgomery County, just north of Philadelphia, cast their ballots for Haley, including Kapralick and Barone. Both said they appreciated 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.

Barone, 57, a real estate agent, is planning to support Trump, prioritizing 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,” Barone said, adding that she did not trust Harris’s appeals to centrists.

Kapralick, 62, on the other hand, said she did not want Trump anywhere near the Oval Office again. She admired former Rep. Liz Cheney of Wyoming for standing up to him and had watched the speeches from prominent Republicans, including former Rep. Adam Kinzinger of Illinois, at the Democratic National Convention. She said she had been swayed by their message that a vote for 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.”

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 1 in 5 had a favorable opinion of Trump — and about 1 in 10 approved of 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 Harris seeing some significant early advantages. A New York Times/Siena College poll in July found Harris and Trump receiving boosts as the number of voters who disliked both candidates plunged to 8%, down from 20% 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.

Olivia Troye, a former top homeland security aide to Vice President Mike Pence who was among the Republicans to speak at the Democrats’ convention, said she had voted for Haley in the Virginia primary. She is now working with Republicans for Harris coalitions, she said, to help create a “permission structure” for other Haley voters and Trump-skeptical Republicans to cross the political aisle.

“A lot of them are people who align with the more conservative values that I align with as a lifelong conservative,” Troye said. “While party identity is certainly very real, I think part of this moment is to take a stand with our traditional Republican vote.”

The fight for Haley voters is especially heated in Pennsylvania, which candidates and surrogates from both campaigns have been crisscrossing in recent weeks. The Harris camp opened its 50th Pennsylvania office over Labor Day weekend. Sixteen of those 50 offices are in rural counties that Trump won by double digits in 2020.

In Montgomery County, Andrea Fellerman Kesack, a clinical pathologist, longtime 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.

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 Fellerman Kesack, contending that she found Harris — and not Trump — now in line with those values.

Trump campaign officials and allies describe their movement as unified. And they cite endorsements from Haley; former Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, a onetime Democrat; and Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who dropped his independent presidential bid last month, as evidence that they are picking up supporters.

Outside a grocery store in Lansdale, Pennsylvania, John Kohr, 73, a mechanical designer, accused Harris of “flip-flopping” between progressive and centrist stances, saying he did not believe she could do the job of president.

“I can’t say I particularly like Trump that much either, but I am a Republican, so I am going to vote for somebody who is a Republican,” he said.

Grilling hot dogs at his home in Hanover, Pennsylvania, 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 longtime fiscal conservative, he planned to vote for Harris.

Angered over the trillions Trump added to the national debt, Mack said that he would never again vote for him — nor for Haley, in 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.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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