Kamala Harris creates small opening for a Nikki Haley comeback

The presidential window for former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley appears to be closed after her unsuccessful run for the 2024 Republican nomination.

But there is one development that could reopen it, if only slightly. 

Though Haley served under former President Donald Trump during his first term in the White House, she campaigned as a throwback to the pre-Trump GOP.

Haley’s Republican supporters appeared to be disproportionately made up of the most Trump-skeptical members, including outright Never Trumpers. Her crossover vote, which persisted long after she dropped out, appears to have been augmented by non-Republicans who simply wanted another opportunity to vote against Trump.

The Republican ticket of Trump and Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH) strongly suggests there is no going back to the party of former President George W. Bush. A poll by the Republican firm Echelon Insights found that Vance led a hypothetical 2028 primary field with 25% of the vote. Haley was in fourth place with 9%, which was better than a lot of other big-name Republicans but behind Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) and bunched in with her nemesis Vivek Ramaswamy. The top three, with nearly half the vote, were broadly populist, though Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) took just 2%.

Nevertheless, the Democrats may have done Haley a favor her own party hasn’t.

Haley repeatedly raised the specter of the Democrats replacing President Joe Biden with Vice President Kamala Harris, either before the election or in a second term. While Biden remains very much alive and in office, the Democrats have now done this switch.

The South Carolinian repeated her Trump endorsement at the Republican National Convention. Haley has also sent a cease-and-desist letter to a pro-Harris group using her name.

If Harris beats Trump, it won’t be Haley’s fault. Haley will be able to argue with a straight face that she did everything she could reasonably do to help Trump win. 

A Trump loss would cause Monday (or in this case, Wednesday) morning quarterbacks to question the Vance pick, wondering if an appeal to suburban women might not have been the smarter play.

A second consecutive Trump defeat would also prompt some Republican soul-searching. It’s the one event that might make the GOP rethink its populist transformation. It would certainly make them have second thoughts about their new reliance on lower-propensity voters.

At 82 and possibly in renewed legal jeopardy, would Trump run again in 2028? Would Republicans want him to?

Of course, the answer to both questions could be yes. Trump will have faced multiple prosecutions, an assassination attempt, and the Democrats switching out their nominee after the primaries. Republicans might be even more inclined to view this election as “rigged” after the fact.

Yet if Republicans were willing to move on, Haley would be a change and only 56 years old. Haley is younger than Harris. After three landslide losses with liberals in the 1980s, Democrats were ready to try something slightly different with Bill Clinton in 1992.

It’s true that Never Trumpers are angry at Haley for endorsing the former president. It’s hard to imagine this faction constituting a majority of the primary electorate again even if Trump loses this November.

Four years from now, Haley would have the best case for an “I told you so” candidacy since Trump sought a rematch with Biden.

“I told you so” candidacies don’t always work precisely because people don’t like being told “I told you so.”

There is also a decent chance Trump still wins the 2024 election and passes the baton to Vance in four years or some other fresh Republican face emerges in the interim. 

Even if Trump loses, it is possible the Republican Party will still not want to revert back to the way things were before he took his famous ride down the escalator in 2015. By 2028, Trump will have been the titular leader of the party for as long as the combined presidencies of Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush.

Right now, the odds are reminiscent of the scene in the 1994 film Dumb and Dumber when Lloyd Christmas asks Mary Swanson what his chances are of a romantic relationship with her. Were they one in a hundred?

“More like one out of a million,” she replied.

Instead of being deterred, Christmas, played by Jim Carrey, is happy and relieved: “So you’re telling me there’s a chance!”