Nikki Haley’s team is warning voters that the Republican Party’s electoral record on former President Donald Trump’s watch has amounted to too much losing.
Haley campaign manager Betsy Ankney says Republicans are in for a rude awakening this fall if they fail to recognize that Mr. Trump is electoral kryptonite for the independents and suburban women voters whom the party needs to make gains up and down the ballot.
“He will not defeat Joe Biden in November and he will drag the entire Republican ticket down with him,” Ms. Ankney told reporters Friday on a conference call. “History and the polls show that Trump cannot win, and thinking that Trump can somehow cobble together the winning coalition that propelled him to victory in 2016 against enfeebled Joe Biden is just a pipe dream.”
Ms. Ankney said voters must look at the sheer distaste the broader electorate has for Mr. Trump. She said voters were willing to give Mr. Trump “a pass” when he ran against Hillary Clinton, but that since then, independent voters and suburban women “grew sick of the name-calling, sick of the chaos and they revolted at the ballot box.”
That, in turn, led to Democrats flipping the House in 2018, as well as the Senate and The White House in 2020.
Two years later, she said his handpicked Senate candidates lost winnable races in Nevada, Georgia and Pennsylvania. Republicans also barely seized back control of the House after underperforming expectations.
“And 2022 was the first midterm election since 1934, in which the incumbent president’s party, the Democrats, did not lose a single state legislative chamber or incumbent senator,” she said.
The problem for the Haley campaign is that the message has failed to break through with GOP primary voters who appear to have put Mr. Trump on a glide path to the party’s nomination. Mr. Trump notched big wins in Iowa, New Hampshire and Nevada.
He appears poised to score another sizable primary victory Saturday in Ms. Haley’s home state of South Carolina, where she served as governor — a result that inevitably would raise more doubts about her viability and intensify the pressure on her to exit the race.
Ms. Ankney said Mr. Trump has “always denied reality” when it comes to the various polls showing Ms. Haley is “clearly the strongest general election candidate” against Mr. Biden.
“He has done and said nothing that is going to bring back the demographics that our party has lost. They know who he is, and they don’t like him,” she said.