Haley posts best month yet for fund-raising totals

Officials with Nikki Haley’s campaign said Monday that she had raised $16.5 million in January, her biggest monthly fundraising total to date, adding an infusion of cash to the $14.6 million her campaign brought into the new year to keep the nomination fight with Donald Trump going.

Public polling has shown that Haley, the former South Carolina governor, has made little progress in closing the gap with the former president, either in her home state, which holds its Republican primary election Feb. 24, or nationally.

But a burst of fund-raising and national publicity, including a surprise appearance on NBC’s “Saturday Night Live,” have tamped down chatter that she could withdraw from the race imminently. Her announced fund-raising numbers in January, which included $11.7 million from digital and direct mail outreach and 69,274 new donors, signaled a desire for her not to fold.

“We are going to have the resources to go the distance,” Betsy Ankeny, Haley’s campaign manager, said. “We will continue to fight as long as have we momentum and have the resources to do so.”

Ankeny freely admitted that Haley faced long odds but argued that she had outperformed public polling in the New Hampshire primary two weeks ago. Since then, Haley has barnstormed through South Carolina, while Trump has yet to hold a public event in the state since New Hampshire.

“This is a race to be the leader of the free world,” Ankeny said. “It should be hard.”

Ankeny pressed the case that if Trump won the nomination, public attention would shift to his liabilities, especially the four criminal cases pending against him, his propensity for temper tantrums, and the deep dislike that many voters hold for the former president.

Regardless of current polling, “we have seen this movie before,” she said, pointing to Republicans’ loss of the House in 2018 and the White House and Senate in 2020.