Kari Lake won’t win moderates by bashing Nikki Haley
Kari Lake continues her campaign to appeal to moderate Republicans, offering this heartfelt sendoff early Wednesday to Nikki Haley:
“Reports: Nimrata Haley will suspend her campaign today after more humiliating, landslide loses on Super Tuesday,” Lake gloated on social media.
I’m not sure why Lake would use Haley’s given name, which is actually Nimarata, unless it’s to somehow make her seem foreign.
And I’m really not sure why she would go out of her way to take the low road, further alienating Haley supporters.
Did she learn nothing from her 2022 post-primary win pronouncement, when she gloated that she “drove a stake through the heart of the McCain machine?”
Haley supporters are the moderate Republican and right-leaning independent voters Lake must win over in order to defeat Democratic Rep. Ruben Gallego and win a spot in the U.S. Senate.
They are the type of voters who have helped decide recent presidential races.
Also, a certain gubernatorial election in Arizona.
Maybe Lake just figures those voters have nowhere else to go now that independent Sen. Kyrsten Sinema has bowed out of the race.
Lake talks of unifying the Republican Party, but it seems more a script than a genuine understanding of what it will take to win over those voters she so well and thoroughly alienated.
She is racking up Republican endorsements from outside of Arizona.
But she hasn’t yet won the endorsement of former Gov. Doug Ducey (aka the cartel doormat, to quote from Lake’s 2022 campaign) or the endorsement of her previous opponent, Karrin Taylor Robson (aka the gold digger), or former Sen. Jon Kyl or a host of other establishment Republicans in the state.
Haley, in her gracious concession speech on Wednesday – yes, some politicians actually do concede when they lose – offered up some advice that Lake would be wise to take to heart.
Haley said Trump will have to earn her vote.
“I have always been a conservative Republican and always supported the Republican nominee,” Haley said. “But on this question, as she did on so many others, Margaret Thatcher provided some good advice when she said, quote, ‘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. 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.”
It is also the time of Kari Lake’s choosing.
She can reach out or she can slap those voters smack in the face.
Again, that is.