Why is Nikki Haley suddenly talking as if she were just another aggrieved victim in the left’s Evils of White Supremacy Parade? There is apparently a method to her madness.
On Saturday, Politico offered a significant clue as to why Haley, although she calls herself a conservative, has hardly been talking like one. On Monday, I wrote a column here at PJM, detailing how the Never-Trumpers’ favorite claimed that she faced racist taunting “every day” while growing up in South Carolina in the post-segregation 1970s. Even more fancifully, she claimed that she had been denied a place in a beauty pageant because organizers didn’t know whether to classify her as black or white. A segregated beauty pageant? In the 1980s? Come on, man! Why has Nikki Haley morphed into Elizabeth Warren?
The far-left rag began its explanation of what could be behind all this by taking a swipe at the man they love to hate. “At a rally in New Hampshire this week,” the article began, “Donald Trump railed against liberal efforts to ‘infiltrate’ the state’s upcoming Republican primary, accusing Democrats and Never Trump conservatives of conspiring to elect Nikki Haley.” This time, however, Bad Orange Man might have had a point: “On its surface, it sounded a lot like another of Trump’s conspiracy-laden tirades — but in reality, the former president wasn’t entirely off the mark.”
As it turns out, “left-leaning groups have popped up across New Hampshire with the goal of persuading the state’s ‘undeclared’ voters — who make up 42 percent of the voting population and are eligible to vote in either party’s primary — to back Haley.” So that’s it! If Haley sounds enough like a Democrat, she could attract enough of these people to beat Trump, or at least to make a good enough showing to stay in the race and make his renomination anything but certain.
Politico explains that one of the leftist pro-Haley groups, Primary Pivot, is run by one Robert Schwartz, whom it identifies as “a liberal activist who has spent his career countering democratic backsliding in countries across Latin America.” His worries about “democracy” there, you see, have led him to oppose Trump in order to save “our democracy,” i.e., leftist hegemony. If he really cared about “democracy,” of course, he would be worried about the Biden regime’s efforts to convict and imprison its principal foe and criminalize opposition to its sinister policies, but he hasn’t thought this through. “We only care about damaging Donald Trump,” Schwartz explained, as if we didn’t know that. “For better or for worse, the only thing you can do if you really want to stop Trump is to vote for Haley.”
Schwartz asserts that “almost all the undeclared voters that I have talked to — and I talked to a lot of Democratic-leaning voters — are considering voting in the Republican primary.” He said that his group has spent “$2,000 to send text messages to 38,000 people, and 3,500 Democrats switched to undeclared.”
However, his group has focused on New Hampshire’s “130,000 undeclared voters who voted in the 2020 Democratic primary, because they’re high-propensity voters in the primaries, and they can easily switch to vote in the Republican primary. We’ve already spent over $500,000 on the undeclared voters.” He added: “A couple of people who wanted to stop Trump saw our efforts, and they have given us $650,000.” With all this money, they’re trying to convince these voters that Haley “can make a difference and stop Trump.”
Related: Gimme a Break: Haley Claims That in the South, She Was ‘Teased Every Day for Being Brown’
This is where Haley whining about racism comes in. Schwartz said that testing had revealed a “very effective message” comparing Trump to Haley: “how they approach racism and hatred in this country.” So was Haley sending out a veiled appeal for these leftists’ votes when she claimed, however fancifully, to have suffered as a “brown girl” growing up in South Carolina? The Tuesday results from New Hampshire will tell.
In the meantime, Schwartz’s efforts to get Democrat and undecided voters in New Hampshire to become Republicans, if only for a day, so that they can vote for Nikki Haley, are against everything for which he claims to stand. For all his professed concern for “democracy,” he is working on a profoundly undemocratic initiative: if he gets his way, Republicans in New Hampshire are not even free to choose their preferred candidate. Democrats will do that for them. That, for the left, is a perfect world.