Nikki Haley, the former South Carolina governor and US ambassador to the United Nations, has been the last remaining challenger to Donald Trump for the Republican Party’s presidential nomination since Ron DeSantis dropped out of the race on Sunday 21 January, just before the New Hampshire primary.
She has faced intense pressure to follow his example ever since but has doggedly refused to do so, earning her the enmity of the Maga wing of the GOP.
Having finished third in the Iowa caucuses, Ms Haley went on to come second in New Hampshire, picking up 43.2 per cent of the vote to Mr Trump’s 54.3 per cent, prompting the frontrunner to express his irritation after she delivered an upbeat address to her supporters rather than admit defeat and bow out.
The former president has tried everything, from labelling her with belittling nicknames (“Birdbrain”, “Tricky Nikki”) to threatening her donors with excommunication from his movement and taunting her over her husband’s absence from the campaign trail (Major Michael Haley is deployed overseas with the South Carolina Army National Guard), but nothing has so far worked.
No matter how many times Trump allies like Marjorie Taylor Greene, Vivek Ramaswamy and Tim Scott take to the cable news channels to publicly call for her to step aside, she simply will not do it.
Losing in humiliating fashion to the “none of these candidates” box on Nevada ballot papers earlier this month did not weaken her resolve, nor has consistently disappointing polling, the latest example of which from Suffolk University/USA Today forecasts her losing again to Mr Trump in her home state of South Carolina on Saturday by 63 per cent to 35 per cent, or two-to-one.
Few candidates tend to survive a trouncing on their home soil, conventional wisdom will tell you, but Ms Haley has insisted that, even if that does happen, she is in it for the long haul, rejecting the defeatism surrounding her and pointing to the fact that still only three of the 50 states have voted.
“Why would I give up when 70 per cent of Americans have said they don’t want Trump or Biden in this election?” she argued at a rally over the weekend.
“Why would I give up when 59 per cent of Americans say Donald Trump is too old and Joe Biden is too old?”
On Tuesday, she held a surprise press conference at Clemson University in Greenville, South Carolina, which had some speculating that she might announce the curtailment of her campaign.
Instead, she took to the lectern and declared: “South Carolina will vote on Saturday. But on Sunday, I’ll still be running for president. I’m not going anywhere. I’m campaigning every day until the last person votes.”
Ms Haley told her audience that she was sticking around so that the contest did not become “a Soviet-style election where there’s only one candidate and he gets 99 per cent of the vote”.
“We don’t anoint kings in this country,” she said. “We have elections. And Donald Trump, of all people, should know we don’t rig elections!”
She also claimed that party members “privately dread” Mr Trump but are afraid to say so publicly, whereas she feels “no need to kiss the ring… And I have no fear of Trump’s retribution. I’m not looking for anything from him. My own political future is of zero concern”.
Whatever comes to pass in South Carolina, she has pledged to march on to Michigan on 27 February, where her team has just spent $500,000 on a new series of television commercials, while her campaign has previously insisted she would hold out until at least Super Tuesday on 5 March, when 15 states and one territory go to the polls, placing more than a third of all Republican delegates up for grabs.
“There is significant fertile ground for Nikki,” her campaign manager Betsy Ankey said of Super Tuesday in a memo published in late January.
“Eleven of the 16 Super Tuesday states have open or semi-open primaries. Of the 874 delegates available on Super Tuesday, roughly two thirds are in states with open or semi-open primaries.
“Those include Virginia, Texas, Maine, Massachusetts, Minnesota, North Carolina and Vermont, all with favourable demographics.”
Ms Haley has already begun laying the groundwork for that all-important date by campaigning in California and Texas, two of the biggest states in the union, while her post-South Carolina travel schedule will see her make 11 separate stops in seven days across Michigan, Minnesota, Colorado, Utah, Virginia, Washington DC, North Carolina and Massachusetts, her itinerary also including at least 10 high-dollar private fundraising events.
Should she ultimately decide that she has no path to victory after all and step aside, however, this is what would happen.
Mr Trump would find himself the Republican Party’s unofficial nominee-presumptive as both the front-runner with the most delegates and the last candidate standing.
That being so, the states that have yet to stage their primaries or caucuses would nevertheless be required to hold them anyway, even if only as a matter of formality.
There would be no doubt about the outcome and voter turnout would almost certainly be low, given the greatly reduced stakes, but the people of those states would at least have had an opportunity to cast a vote and have their say, even if the whole affair effectively amounted to a victory lap for Mr Trump (a situation roughly comparable to this year’s parallel Democratic primaries, in which President Biden is ambling to the nomination, almost without challenge).
Mr Trump would still not officially become the GOP’s presidential nominee until his coronation takes place at the Republican National Convention, which is being held this year in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, from 15 to 18 July.
However, if Ms Haley only “suspends” her campaign, rather than ending it outright, she will hang on to the delegates she has earned so far and potentially be able to re-enter the race in the event that something unforeseen or untoward happens to Mr Trump in the interim (if he were to be taken ill, for instance).
Despite Ms Haley’s spirited showing so far, Mr Trump’s pursuit of the nomination looks all but certain to end in victory, with conservative voters apparently undeterred by the fact that his first term ended in a deadly insurrection at the US Capitol and a second impeachment, his long-touted Mexico border wall remained unfinished, nor the fact that he has four criminal indictments and 91 felony charges hanging over him and has already this year been ordered to pay $83.3m in defamation damages to sexual assault accuser E Jean Carroll or $354.9m to the state of New York after being found guilty of engaging in fraudulent business practices for the better part of a decade.
At the time of writing, Mr Trump has 63 delegates to Ms Haley’s 17 and his campaign has cockily declared that it expects him to pass the magic 1,215-delegate mark required for victory as early as 12 March when Georgia, Hawaii, Mississippi and Washington hold their primaries.
So why is his challenger resisting the apparently inevitable? Is she hoping to stake a claim for the leadership of what remains of the Reaganite wing of the Republican Party in anticipation of some post-Trump GOP civil war? Is she setting herself up for another presidential run in 2028?
The Independent’s Eric Garcia argues: “At this point, it’s fairly clear that Haley is simply waiting out Trump, hoping that his legal affairs get the better of him and that she could be seen as a viable alternative to him if or when he becomes engulfed by the lawsuits and criminal cases against him.”
She effectively admitted as much herself recently when she said of Mr Trump: “He’s going to be in a courtroom all of March, April, May and June. How in the world do you win a general election when these cases keep going and the judgements keep coming?”
Betting all her chips on Donald J Trump, one of the most volatile and scandal-ridden public figures in American history, finally having to face the consequences of his actions and ending up a convicted felon come Election Day? Stranger things have happened.