Burn the GOP to the Ground

My parting, probably fanciful wish for Nikki Haley as she bows out of the presidential race

Republican presidential candidate, former President Donald Trump speaks at an election-night watch party at Mar-a-Lago on March 05, 2024 in Palm Beach, Florida. (Photo by Joe Raedle/Getty Images)

Up until yesterday, former president Donald Trump had been winning solid victories, though they were wins one would expect from a strong frontrunner in a contested primary. But in the voting on Super Tuesday, especially across the South, Trump’s margins looked more like what one would expect from an incumbent president—70 points in Alabama, 66 points in Oklahoma, 60 points in Texas, 58 points in Arkansas and Tennessee, 51 points in North Carolina.

In winning the GOP nomination, Republican voters across most of the country will be getting what they want. But it’s really Republicans from the states of the former Confederacy who have seized control of the party. One of several ironies of American politics at our moment can be found in the fact that the Southernification of the GOP has reached its apotheosis with a billionaire real-estate developer from Queens, New York.

Nikki Haley hails from far below the Mason-Dixon line, but the overwhelming majority of Republicans from her part of the country want nothing to do with her. In Iowa, New Hampshire, her home state of South Carolina, and Michigan, she won within a few points of 25 percent of Republicans. (When her final tallies ran higher, that was because of crossover votes from independents and Democrats.) But she did considerably worse than that on Super Tuesday across the South, reaching only the mid-to-high teens in several states.

The exceptions to Haley’s struggles were the state of Vermont, which became the first state she managed to win outright (by 4 points), and the northern Virginia suburbs of Washington DC, where she won well over 50 percent of the vote. This follows her victory in the DC primary two days earlier. Another irony: Haley is running a campaign fueled by the fading fumes of Reaganism, which was founded, in part, to shrink the federal government—but her strongest base of support is Republicans who live and work in the nation’s capital and its suburbs.

You’ve Got to be Kidding

This post will be published just a short time before Haley announces the suspension of her campaign. Calling it quits makes sense. It’s great that she’s now won a state, but she has no conceivable path to the nomination—and even if Trump’s campaign ended up being sidelined by a medical event, the party would never hand the nomination to a candidate with a demonstrated record of extreme unpopularity among Republican voters across much of the country. In this respect, Haley has badly damaged her standing in the GOP by getting herself on ballots and staying in the race long enough to test her viability. Now we know the rank and file just aren’t buying what she’s selling.

Oh, how I wish she would take a different message from this result than the one she appears to be taking (at least publicly). The message she claims to have received is this: I may not be the Republican present, but I am its future. Trump may win the nomination this year, but he will lose to Joe Biden. And then the voters will come to their senses, realize that candidates like me are the key to victory at the national level, and make me a leading contender for the presidency in 2028. I’ll be back!

To which I can only reply: Seriously? You think the party positively thrilled by the prospect of renominating a hateful, moronic, demented, conspiracy-addled, coup-plotting, multiply indicted would-be dictator will turn on a dime to rally around a daughter of Sikh immigrants from India who espouses a policy agenda suited to a member of George W. Bush’s Cabinet? The same voters who are rewarding Kari Lake for losing her winnable race for Arizona governor in 2022 by nominating her for the US Senate in 2024? The same voters who sent to Congress the 147 Republicans who voted to overturn the 2020 election results? The same voters who on Tuesday made a Holocaust denier who mocks children killed in school shootings the party’s nominee for governor in the state of North Carolina? Nikki Haley will be the leader of that party four years from now?

I’m sorry, but are you out of your f*cking mind?  

The End of an Era

It is long past time for the Reaganite remnant to move on. You had a very good run! Thirty-six years (1980-2016) is an eternity in political time. Nicely done! You changed the ideological make-up of both parties, forcing Democrats to move rightward for more than a generation. You should feel good about that—even if, as in Haley’s case, you were born too late to enjoy all of its fruits.

But that’s over now. Staying put no longer makes any sense. Haley’s campaign has done something very useful: It has given us knowledge. Now we know that in most places her brand of yesterday’s Republicanism wins about a quarter of the GOP. In a lot of places, it appeals to even a smaller portion of the party. That means it’s done for at the national level.

And an even bigger purge is coming. Trump and his personally installed nepo babies at the Republican National Committee have made this clear. They want the Haley voters out of the party, just as Lake explicitly asked supporters of the late Arizona Sen. John McCain not to vote for her two years ago. That led directly to Lake’s loss, just as the same move this year could help to ensure that Trump’s third bid for the presidency sinks.

My Plea

Please, Nikki Haley: Give Trump his wish. Make it happen. Lead your supporters on a mass exodus out of the Republican Party. And not out into the nowheresland of the third-party wilderness, but into the Democratic Party. You need not love Joe Biden. You need only say what is true: That a party led by Donald Trump and the thugs he’s surrounded himself with have no business wielding power at the highest levels.

Take Trump’s narrow polling leads over Biden in the crucial swing states, subtract all the people who voted for Haley and give them to the Democrats, and the result would be a decisive defeat for the rump Republican Party of the rabid Trumpists.

Light the fire that burns the GOP to the ground.

Stop fantasizing of a restoration of Reagan-Bush conservatism in the Republican Party. It isn’t going to happen. If you want to have an influence on our nation’s politics, it can only happen in the Democratic Party. Yes, there are Democrats on the left wing of the party you can’t stand. But they yell louder than they punch. And you’d be bringing a lot of voters with you—enough to pull the party noticeably to the center and anchor it there for a generation. Let “the Squad” rant and rave. Their faction is tiny compared with the throngs of formerly Republican suburban voters who will be accompanying you on your cross-partisan journey.

Look at it this way: Trump can only win in November if your unhappy, grumbling supporters hold their noses and resign themselves to voting for Trump despite knowing better. Don’t let them do this! At least not with a clear conscience. Tell them why it would be a mistake. Tell them that, whatever policy disagreements they have with Biden and the Democrats, at least they are still a normal political party, not a cult of personality built around a conman Mussolini cheered on and enabled by a bunch of grifters and aspiring fascists. The Dems will at least work with you, cut deals with you, compromise with you. The Trumpists will just turn you into their bitch and then leave you bleeding in the gutter.

Please, Nikki Haley: Have the self-respect, the civic-mindedness, and the courage to say out loud what you must be thinking. Trump is an abomination who must be stopped, and the only way to accomplish that goal is to ensure his party’s decisive defeat in November. You have it within your power to help make that happen. Don’t flinch from the task. Embrace it. Own the moment. Be the catalyst who sends the GOP the way of the Whigs.