Haley’s Political Future Is Nonexistent - The American Spectator | USA News and PoliticsThe American Spectator

Nikki Haley’s most enthusiastic supporters all voted for Joe Biden. That’s why she never gained much traction and dropped out yesterday.

She did better than all of the Republicans not named Donald Trump, and she represents a constituency within the party, so the former president damages himself every time he succumbs to the impulse to bash her. He needs every vote he can get. One wonders if Tuesday’s speech emphasizing foreign affairs was his way of offering an olive branch.

“Joe Woos Nikki’s Supporters,” editorial cartoon by Tom Stiglich for The American Spectator, March 6, 2023. haley's

Pundits wonder about Haley’s future within the party. It does not exist. This in the minor part stems from overstaying her welcome in the primaries. It primarily owes to her championing ideas that no longer animate Republicans.

She ran as the George W. Bush–John McCain–Mitt Romney candidate. That won votes two decades ago. Just as she won the presidency of Vermont, Haley won the presidency of Republicans with calendars stuck in 2004. It’s 2024, and the Green Mountain State represents the furthest thing ideologically from the Republican mainstream of any state.

Guess what? Bimetallism does not mount a comeback within the Democratic Party, and George W. Bush’s muscular Wilsonianism does not recapture the GOP. That reality keeps Haley from ever becoming the party’s presidential nominee.

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Daniel J. Flynn, a senior editor of The American Spectator, is the author of Cult City: Harvey Milk, Jim Jones, and 10 Days That Shook San Francisco (ISI Books, 2018), The War on Football (Regnery, 2013), Blue Collar Intellectuals (ISI Books, 2011), A Conservative History of the American Left (Crown Forum, 2008), Intellectual Morons (Crown Forum, 2004), and Why the Left Hates America (Prima Forum, 2002). His articles have appeared in the Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, Boston Globe, New York Post, City Journal, National Review, and his own website, www.flynnfiles.com.