South Carolina's Primary and the Giant Cobra in the Room

Dixie Traveller

South Carolina politics is often hard to understand, but never boring. In the Palmetto State’s storied history, she had given us such unique and talented statesmen as Charles C. Pinkney, John C. Calhoun, James H. Hammond, Robert Barnwell Rhett and Wade Hampton. In the 20th Century she didn’t disappoint, giving us such larger than life personalities as “Pitchfork” Ben Tillman, “Cotton” Ed Smith and Strom Thurmond.

Calhoun’s “gallant little State” has also given us some entertaining moments in political history. Whether it’s Congressman Preston Brooks caning the repulsive Charles Sumner on the floor of the U.S. Senate, Governor Mark Sanford releasing pigs onto the floor of the Statehouse to protest “pork” in the budget, or Congressman Joe Wilson shouting “YOU LIE!” at President Obama during the 2009 State of the Union Address.(Time would vindicate the Charleston-area Congressman when it was revealed that Obama DID lie when telling Congress that illegals would not be eligible for ObamaCare).

This Saturday, voters in the Palmetto State will go to the polls to vote in the Republican Presidential Primary. Barring a massive shift in opinion, former President Donald Trump will easily defeat former South Carolina Governor Nimrata “Nikki” Haley. Despite this embarrassing loss in her home State, which would end the Presidential hopes of most candidates, it is not a foregone conclusion that Nikki Haley will drop out after her loss in the State she governed for six years. After all, she’s been soundly beaten in every Caucus and Primary so far, hasn’t she? Where does one go once they lose their home State Primary, on the heels of getting trounced by “None of the Above” in Nevada?

Haley may well suspend her campaign after Trump trounces her on Saturday. But why she’s stayed in the race long after it was obvious she had no chance may say a lot about Haley-and the people still backing her.

The year was 2010, and South Carolina’s race for Governor was wide open. Outgoing Governor Mark Sanford, whose administration was ending in a sex scandal, was term limited and unable to run again.(Though this scandal would not stop Sanford, two years later, from being elected to Congress). Despite this embarrassment for the South Carolina G.O.P., they stood heavily favored to hold on to the Governor’s Mansion. South Carolina had leaned Republican for decades, and the unpopularity of President Obama in the State as midterms approached was palpable. Initially, the favored candidate to win the Republican nomination for Governor was Gresham Barrett, a former Congressman from the Upcountry. Indeed, when back-bench legislator Nikki Haley of Lexington County(near Columbia) told a former South Carolina Republican party chairman that she intended to run for Governor, the man told her to instead run for State Treasurer; with time, he could make her State Republican Party chair. However, the stars were already in her eyes and Haley pointedly told him “I’m going to be Governor.”

The former Party Chair then promised all the support he could, but time was short. Most of the Palmetto State’s donors had lined up behind Barrett or South Carolina Attorney General Henry McMaster. But Haley had two important allies-disgraced outgoing Governor Mark Sanford and his now-estranged wife, Jenny. Nikki Haley leaned heavily on Sanford, despite the ongoing investigation into his activities, to push ReformSC, a PAC used by Sanford, to fund her race. Though Sanford later apologized to Henry McMaster for the ads, ReformSC poured over $400,000 into Nikki Haley for Governor ads touting her-somewhat disingenuously-as a Tea Party favorite. With this image created and Haley gaining traction in GOP Primary polls, it was time to bring out the Big Guns.

The Haley for Governor campaign had courted failed Vice-Presidential Candidate Sarah Palin earlier, but not until Haley’s numbers began to rise did the Palin people agree to endorse her. On May 14, 2010 Sarah Palin stood on the steps of the South Carolina Statehouse and declared “She is a fighter and a winner.”

All of a sudden, the media was giving Nikki Haley the attention she knew she always deserved. Nikki Haley was the new rock star of the South Carolina Republican Party, covered by all manner of news media. But of course, with fame, skeletons started coming out of the closet.

In a sworn affidavit, Larry Marchant, an aide to Lt. Governor Andre Bauer, swore that he had an affair with Haley while she was a member of the South Carolina Legislature. The next day, almost as if on cue, State Senator Jake Knotts referred to a “raghead”, presumably Haley, on a local radio show.

The timing couldn’t have been better for Haley. Taking a play out of the left-wing playbook, she denied the affair and denounced anyone as “sexist” for spreading the rumor about a female candidate. (Never mind that the outgoing male Governor was ruined by the revelation of his extramarital affair).

With Palin’s rockstar power and the sympathy vote behind her, Nikki Haley barely needed a runoff to secure victory in the GOP Primary. That Fall, she defeated Democrat Vincent Sheheen 51-47%. On January 12, 2011, Nikki Haley was sworn in as the first non-White Governor of South Carolina.

Under most circumstances, Nikki Haley would’ve probably passed into history rather quietly. Her first term was devoted to rather garden variety Southern G.O.P. policies-taking credit for South Carolina’s economic growth, aggressively opposing unions, and laws targeting anti-Israel boycotts. On the strength of this and another anti-Obama midterm wave, Haley easily won a rematch with 2010 opponent Sheheen in 2014.

But on June 17, 2015, an event occurred in South Carolina that would catapult Nikki Haley into a national rockstar. That’s the evening that 21-year old Dylan Roof walked into the Emanuel A.M.E. Church in Charleston and gunned down 10 parishioners (nine died) in a crime that reverberated throughout the State and the nation.

As an aside, I remember talking with a good friend a day after the shooting. After stating our astonishment that anyone would be capable of such and act, I recall saying that “two things will take the blame for this: guns and white Southerners.” At the time, I fully believed the gun-grabbing Obama administration would latch onto the horrific shooting as another justification for gun control. But when images of shooter Dylan Roof in front of a Confederate flag started flooding CNN and MSNBC, it was obvious they were after bigger game.

Initially, like most Southern Republicans, Nikki Haley was indifferent to the Confederate flag on the South Carolina grounds, merely responding to an economic boycott over the flag by saying that not a single CEO had reached out to her concerned about its presence on Capitol grounds. However, by June 19, two days after the shooting, she was doing what most Southern Republicans do-sounding wish-washy, saying “we’ll see where the conversation goes.”

But where a true leader might have welcomed discussion on the massacre, provided context and explained that all of South Carolina(including those who loved their Confederate ancestry)mourned with the parishioners in Charleston, stars once again got in Nikki Haley’s eyes. In her eyes, this was her chance to be a southern John McCain, a Republican even liberals liked, the chance to rise above being an accidental Governor of a backwater Southern State and become a national figure. By June 22nd Haley was siding with those who blamed the flag and those who loved it for the massacre:

“These grounds are a place that everyone should feel a part of . What I realized now more than ever is people were driving by and felt hurt and pain. No one should feel pain…”There is a place for that flag, but it’s not in a place that represents all people in South Carolina”.

Withing two weeks, at Haley’s urging, the South Carolina Legislature voted to haul down the Confederate Battle flag from the State’s Confederate monument, where it had stood since the “compromise” that brought it down from the Capitol dome fifteen years earlier. Despite the promises that the flag would be retired with dignity, the furling was attended by a group of left-wingers jeering, cursing, and chanting “na-na-na, na-na-na. Hey,hey,hey, goodbye!”

The flag was gone, and the symbolism of its demise was felt throughout Dixie. In Alabama, Governor Robert Bentley(soon to be chased from office by a sex scandal of his own) ordered the Flag at the Alabama Capitol lowered as well. Across the South schools banned the Battle flag from being displayed on shirts and belt buckles, and Amazon eBay, Etsy and Wal-Mart banned sales of the flag and items with its likeness. Not to be outdone, all streaming services banned shows like the Dukes of Hazzard which favorably feature the Confederate Battle flag from being shown. But the most prominent result of Haley’s actions during the summer of 2015 are still with us: the destruction and melting down of monuments of to the Confederate dead, the calls to dynamite the carving on Stone Mountain and the renaming of everything from streets to military bases are part of the culture the South Carolina Governor greenlighted.

And what was Haley’s reward for these actions? Being named to the highly coveted spot as the Republican responding to President Obama’s State of the Union Address the following January. The “Party of Lincoln” who had no better friend than the Southern white male, was impressed by Nikki Haley’s bashing of their core voters- and the fact that as a non-white, she played against Republican stereotypes.

Among other garden variety Republican topics in the response, Haley proudly touted her anti-Southern credentials: “we removed a symbol that was being used to divide us , as we found a strength that united us against a domestic terrorist and the hate that filled him” Presumably “we” meant South Carolina, except the South Carolinians who did not blame the flag for the massacre and still revered it as a sacred hereditary symbol, but hey, they voted Republican anyway, so they didn't count.

The Republican Party was generally impressed with Haley’s January 2016 Response to Obama’s State of the Union. She was even on a list of potential 2016 Vice-Presidential candidate in the eyes of many. But she was about to bet on the wrong horse.

Haley frequently criticized then-Candidate Trump during the primaries and thereafter. She vehemently opposed Trump’s proposal to build a Border wall stating that “Republicans need to remember that the fabric of America came from these legal immigrants.” Ahead of South Carolina’s early Republican Presidential Primary, Haley stated that Trump was “everything a Governor doesn’t want in a President” and endorsed Florida Senator Marco Rubio.(In spite of Haley, Trump easily won the Palmetto State’s Primary) When Rubio dropped out, Haley endorsed Texas Senator Ted Cruz as an alternative to Trump.
By Fall, Haley reluctantly admitted she intended to vote for Trump, though she was “not a fan”. Within weeks of his surprise election victory, Haley was contacting Trump’s transition team about a Cabinet appointment. By December Nikki Haley was named U.S. Ambassador to the U.N.

In typical Nikki Haley fashion, she was a loyal Cabinet member to President Trump-until she wasn’t. While supporting most of his policy positions, Haley gave credence to the Russia hoax, stating that “when a country can come interfere in another country’s elections, that is warfare”. Haley also at least expressed a willingness to believe the endless train of women accusing Donald Trump of sexual harassment, none of which have been substantiated. Haley resigned her position with little comment in 2018, but stated during her book tour the next year that “In every instance I dealt with him, he was truthful, he listened and he was great to work with”. Two years later would be a different story.

On a cold, cloudy January day in 2021, thousands of Americans crowded into Washington D.C. to protest irregularities in the 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. Without going into gory detail, the official narrative is that several stormed into the U.S. Capitol and briefly occupied it. In the ensuing chaos that followed, Capitol police killed U.S. Air Force veteran Ashli Babbitt, one of the Americans who had entered the Capitol.

Despite the fact that outgoing President Trump had urged the crowd to proceed “peacefully” to the U.S. Capitol, establishment Republicans rushed to blame him for the attack. The political winds were shifting, and nobody knew how to shift better than Nikki Haley.
“I think he’s lost any sort of political viability he was going to have….he’s fallen so far….We need to acknowledge he let us down”.

By late 2021, Haley had reconsidered stating that she would support her former boss if he ran for President in 2024. But by 2023, no candidate had emerged in the G.O.P. as an “anti-Trump” alternative and Nikki Haley again had stars in her eyes. By September, she was announcing her candidacy for President of the United States.

Haley started out poorly, barely polling in single digits in early States like Iowa and New Hampshire. But in December 2023, the billionaire community started rallying around Haley as the “never Trumper” candidate. Left-wing LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman chipped in $250,000. JPMorgan and Chase CEO Jamie Dimon followed suit and urged business leaders who were “liberal Democrats” to support the Haley campaign. Finally, Republican Megadonor Charles Koch’s SuperPAC endorsed Haley, bringing on board other billionaires such as Home Depot founder Ken Langone. With this bankroll behind her, Nikki Haley got out of the basement in the GOP Primaries and managed a close third in the Iowa Caucuses (despite Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’ constant presence in the Hawkeye State, he only narrowly edged out Nimrata)

Yet, all the money in the world can’t save Nikki Haley from the occasional gaffe. Questioned a couple of months ago about the cause of the “Civil War”, Haley, realizing she had to win at least a few of the “rednecks” she bashed on her way to fame in order to win the South Carolina Primary, stumbled and said something about “how government was supposed to run-the freedoms and what people could and couldn’t do”. Immediately the media pounced, especially “conservative” media who worship Lincoln, Grant and Sherman.

She further erred when asked about Texas secession, stating that “it can if the citizens decide to do so”, quickly adding that Texas “isn’t going to”. Neoconservative media loved her if she was bashing Southern whites, but quickly turned on her when she said things, well, like a South Carolina Governor would.

Sensing danger, Nikki Haley quickly did what a liberal does: she played the race card. On the eve of the New Hampshire Republican Primary, Haley told NBC Sunday about being "the only Indian family in our small Southern town. I was teased every day for being brown" and "how hard it was to grow up in the Deep South as a brown girl". In Nikki Haley's eyes, she might lose some of the friends and neighbors she had growing up in Bamberg, South Carolina, but New Hampshire Yankees might eat this garbage up.(luckily, they didn't)

Thus stands the case of Nimrata Randhawa a.k.a Nikki Haley in February 2024.

After February 24th, there will be only one rationale for a Nikki Haley candidacy-the hope that Donald Trump will either die or be convicted of a felony before the Republican National Convention in July. I doubt the first will happen, but look closely for the second. When and if Donald Trump is convicted on felony charges(fraudulent as they might be), the RNC, seeing that Trump’s convicted felon status bars him from the ballot in numerous States, may be able to deny him the nomination even with a majority of delegates. According to the Associated Press "longstanding party rules allow the RNC to free a State" from delegate-binding rules "if compliance is impossible". Being barred from numerous State ballots for being a convicted felon would seem to fit the bill. This would be a test of how much power RNC Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel(niece of Mitt Romney) has. This could throw the RNC to an open convention, where the edge will go to the candidate who by far had the next highest amount of delegates-none other than ex-Gov. Nikki Haley. And if you believe that the Republican Party would never do such a thing, afraid a demoralized Party will re-elect Biden in the Fall, remember that there is a small, but powerful minority of them who would do just that rather than allow a second Trump term.

All things considered, I’m entering this weekend with a pretty positive attitude, convinced that South Carolina will redeem herself and correct a terrible, if understandable mistake. Like most in the Southern heritage world, I will continue to enjoy Nimrata’s State-by-State humiliation.

But I will never underestimate the ability of Nikki Haley to slither her way into positions of power. It’s what she does.