Will Nikki Haley Be the Last Non-Trump Candidate Standing?

Hoping to bolster Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley’s support among swing voters, a group of five wealthy businesspeople is launching the Independents Moving the Needle PAC, according to ABC News. Its founders include George W. Bush’s cousin, Jonathan Bush, and billionaire scientific research executive Frank Laukien. The super PAC is particularly interested in swaying independents in New Hampshire, where Haley, the former UN ambassador and governor of South Carolina, has earned considerable support.

The state is uniquely suited for independents. Undeclared voters, which account for about 40% of New Hampshire’s electorate, have the option to take part in Republican or Democratic primaries. That could be a key constituency for Haley, who is seen as a more moderate option as compared to Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis, her top primary rivals. In second place, Haley is already polling well among Republican voters—a recent CNN survey tallied her support at around 20%—but still trails Trump by more than 20 points.

To overcome that deficit, Laukein, a New Hampshire resident, said his group will have to persuade voters outside of the partisan binary. “We think we’ll have the resources to do what we set out to do, which isn’t some tug of war with another Republican candidate over that one vote that goes to one or the other,” he told ABC News. “This is really for the majority of New Hampshire voters [who are] independent and unaffiliated.”

While the PAC and its rosy appeals to nonpartisanship may provide some advertising assistance to her candidacy, the Trump campaign could also muster useful ammunition out of Haley’s association with another Bush. (For reference, recall the total political annihilation visited on the last Bush who tried Trump in a Republican primary.)

Haley, meanwhile, has other partisan problems to contend with, like becoming the last-standing non-Trump Republican. Currently, sizable portions of the non-Trump vote in Iowa and New Hampshire—the venues for the two first GOP contests, respectively—are partial to DeSantis, former New Jersey governor Chris Christie, and entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy. And despite her recent gains, Haley sits in third place in Iowa, where DeSantis remains the favorite non-Trump candidate.

In South Carolina, where the primary’s third contest will be held, Haley has solid command of second place. But her home state is something of a Trump stronghold. He leads her by nearly 30 points, a gap she wouldn’t bridge even if DeSantis, Christie, and Ramaswamy’s supporters all pulled behind her tomorrow.

Nonetheless, Wall Street and the GOP establishment appear to fancy Haley as the best and last hope in their yearslong odyssey to rid the party of Trump. On Wednesday, JPMorgan chief executive Jamie Dimon all but crowned her the anti-Trump candidate, urging Democrats, including “very liberal” ones, to support the former governor during an interview at the New York Times DealBook conference. And on Tuesday, Americans for Prosperity Action, a Koch auxiliary force, gave her an imprimatur, saying she “offers the best opportunity to improve the lives of all Americans.” The group plans to spend millions on her campaign’s ground operations, according to ABC News.

Of course, like the Bushes, Trump and his media allies have sought to turn the Koch name into something of an anti-American pariah, tying it to globalism and mass migration. “I was never in the running because I’m all about Making America, not the outside World, Great Again!” Trump wrote in a Wednesday post marking Haley’s Americans for Prosperity endorsement. “These losers have fought me from 2016 to the present.”

Though allied with Trump’s party foes, Haley has resisted attacking the former president directly—likely fearing that doing so will alienate Republicans who are reflexively suspicious of those who oppose him. In any case, if Haley does somehow muster the momentum to turn the primary into a real struggle over the GOP’s future, the Trump campaign will have no shortage of material for attack ads.