Haley overshadowed by Trump
Doesn’t see ‘waste of time’ even as path to victory narrows
LOS ANGELES — Nikki Haley had barely taken to the makeshift riser Wednesday at the Wild Goose Tavern in Costa Mesa when the interruptions started.
“You already lost, Nikki!” a Donald Trump supporter shouted, prompting security to shuffle the man outside. As the saloon door opened, a blast of chants and boos from Trump protesters outside filled the room.
“Don’t ever get upset at people like this,” Haley said over the noise, sidestepping the incident with the practiced comfort of a politician who has navigated similar situations before. “My husband is deployed right now. And they sacrifice their lives every day for us to have the ability for them to do that — to have freedom of speech. So we should never be upset at that.”
The crowd of about 100 people cheered and Haley gracefully moved on with her stump speech. But as Haley toured California this week, drumming up votes and donor dollars, the incident highlighted challenge of overtaking former President Trump. And in California, which is expected to handily deliver Trump all of the Republican delegates in its March 5 primary, the question looms: Why would Californians support Haley?
“It feels like a waste of time because she’s not going to be the nominee,” said Jared Sichel, who watched the incident unfold. As co-founder of the Republican marketing firm Winning Tuesday, Sichel keeps a close eye on electoral politics, and he said the Republican Party is “Trump’s party now, for better or worse.”
While the former United Nations ambassador has endured the longest in the race against Trump, she has so far been unable to mount a significant challenge.
“In my mind, the big question is whether or not she stays in,” said
Jon Fleischman, former executive director of the California Republican Party. “She’s saying that she’ll stay in the race through Super Tuesday, but it just seems to me that it’d be an awfully hard pill to swallow to get really trounced by Donald Trump in the state that elected you governor.”
Unless she manages to pull a major upset Feb. 24 in her home state of South Carolina, she is expected to continue losing to Trump through the remainder of the primary season.
“Why are they supporting her?”
Jon Gould, dean of the School of Social Ecology at UC Irvine, said of California voters. “Number one: Protest. Protest against Trump. Two: Hope that maybe there’s a chance that she can pull it off. And three:
The backup plan, because I think there’s still a number of people who are wondering whether he will be the candidate by September, given … whether some of the criminal cases end up in a conviction for him.”