“Lose our number”: Nikki Haley Suddenly Needs Black Voters in South Carolina

“African-Americans weren’t buying what Nikki Haley was selling as governor, and we won’t now. We will not bail her out of this trouncing by Trump.”

(Composite / Photos: GettyImages / Shutterstock)

AFTER LOSING TO DONALD TRUMP IN NEW HAMPSHIRE by 12 points, Nikki Haley laid out her road map: She would have to consolidate her position in South Carolina in order to make it a real race.

“I need to show that I'm stronger in South Carolina than New Hampshire,” Haley told Meet The Press on January 28. “It certainly has to be close.”

There was a logic to this: Haley hails from South Carolina and she’s its former governor. Republicans in her home state have been pulling the lever for her for nearly twenty years. They know her. If there were any state where she’d have the chance to challenge Trump, South Carolina was it.

But Haley’s plan has gone to hell: Polls show Trump is leading Haley by 30 points—more than twice his New Hampshire margin. It turns out that in South Carolina, with the people who know her best, Haley is doing worse with both Democrats and Republicans.

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One of the components of Haley’s “success” in New Hampshire was doing well with both Democrats and independents who voted in the primary. Six percent of the voters in New Hampshire were Democrats and Haley won them 86 to 5; 44 percent of the voters were self-identified independents and Haley won them 58 to 39.

In South Carolina, Haley’s campaign is trying to reach out to Democrats and independents via mail and blast text messages. (The state, like New Hampshire, has an open primary system that allows Democrats and independents to vote in the Republican contest.)

That outreach, however, could be backfiring on Haley.

“Nikki Haley on behalf of all of us, lose our number,” a South Carolina Democratic voter named Debari Barber posted Friday on Facebook.

That post touched a nerve among fellow black voters, Democrats, and independents, prompting 2,100 favorable shares and 530 supportive comments before Barber made it private. The volume of the response was unexpected for Barber, a 41-year-old banking analyst who told The Bulwark she just wants the Haley spam to stop. Barber said she keeps replying “stop” to the messages and blocks the number, only to have a new phone number text her more pro-Haley content.

“My cousin’s son is only 12 and he keeps getting text messages and he started asking ‘Mama, who is Nikki?’ It’s just aggravating,” she said. “Take us out the group chat. We don’t want to be in it.”

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Barber, a lifelong Democrat from Rock Hill, said she never voted for Haley as governor and voted for President Joe Biden in 2020. She said she mistakenly missed voting again for Biden in the state’s February 3 Democratic primary—which isn’t surprising. Turnout was so low in that only 131,000 people cast ballots, down 74 percent from the  total Democratic vote in 2020. This low turnout has freed up a large pool of potential anti-Trump voters for Haley to draw from.

About two-thirds of the voters in South Carolina Democratic primaries are black, and among the least likely voters to cast ballots for Republicans. That makes the Haley camp’s outreach to African Americans in a Republican primary stand out all the more.

“We’re going to get every vote and harvest every vote we can,” said Katon Dawson, a Haley backer and the former chair of the South Carolina GOP. “And it’s working.”

Dawson said he’s seeing “150 to 175 people who had never voted in a Republican primary showing up. She’s growing the party.” He estimated that, because of the low turnout in the Democratic primary, there are about 3.2 million voters up for grabs in the Republican contest, including Democrats and independents.

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Today Haley will give a “state of the race” speech in South Carolina. When word first leaked about this, there was speculation that she might be withdrawing. Dawson said that isn’t happening. Further, he believes Haley will do better against Trump than polling suggests and that she intends to stay in the race through Super Tuesday on March 5. 

That said: No one who supports Haley is able to tell me what state they think she will win. In addition to the Haley campaign’s efforts, the pro-Haley SFA Fund super PAC is mailing Democratic voters to remind them that they can still vote for Haley if they didn’t cast a ballot in the Democratic primary.

“Nikki is attracting a wide range of voters,” her campaign spokeswoman, Olivia Perez-Cubas, said in a written statement. “If you go to her events, you see conservatives, independents who feel they don’t have a home in either party, and Reagan Democrats who are frustrated with Biden’s policies. Trump lost races we should have won in 2018, 2020, and 2022. If Republicans want to start winning again, we need to be a story of addition, not subtraction.”

But there’s only so much support Haley can earn from South Carolina voters like Danny Davis, a 36-year-old chef from Rock Hill who also never voted for Haley and said she never will.

“The text messages are very weird,” Davis told The Bulwark. “She has texted me more than Biden. It’s very asinine that she’s texted people she was supposed to represent but she didn’t do a good job doing it when she was in office. It’s pandering at best. She didn’t really care about Black people before.”

Dawson dismissed that last remark as unfair and pointed out that Haley, as governor in 2015, removed the Confederate flag from the South Carolina State House, which Haley referenced on Monday during an event in Sumter.

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Putting Haley’s record aside, she would struggle with turning out black voters or any group traditionally not aligned with Republicans in a Republican primary, said Scott Huffmon, a pollster and political scientist at Winthrop University in South Carolina, who released a survey last week showing Trump beating her 65–36 percent in the state.

“The best Haley can hope for with crossover voters is to lower the margin of victory for Trump,” Huffmon said. “Losing her home state to Trump in 2024—especially if Trump were to lose the general election against Biden—would not necessarily hurt her chances in 2028 because she could say, ‘I warned you.’ But losing by such a massively large margin to Trump in a state where she was previously supported is not a great look. Additionally, trying to cut into Trump’s margin of victory in a Republican primary by trying to turn out independents and Democrats is not a great look.”

A Washington Post-Monmouth University survey of the South Carolina primary released at the beginning of the month also showed Haley badly trailing Trump—except among independent and Democratic voters.

But pollster Patrick Murray said there aren’t enough of those voters to make enough of a difference, regardless of Haley’s text message campaign.

“It would take an unprecedented, miraculous turnout of Democratic and independent voters in the Republican primary to change the results significantly,” Murray said.

In New Hampshire last month, Haley did perform better than her polling indicated against Trump, but the state doesn’t really resemble South Carolina, Murray said, because “New Hampshire is its own beast. Its electorate is more engaged. It’s much more moderate than South Carolina.”

Wes Donehue, a Republican consultant who worked for Vivek Ramaswamy’s presidential campaign this year and Sen. Marco Rubio’s in 2016, put it more succinctly: “The only way Nikki Haley cannot get her ass absolutely crushed is to turn out Democrats. And that ain’t happening.”

Former South Carolina State Sen. Marlon Kimpson, a Biden campaign surrogate, said black voters aren’t supportive of Haley, don’t like her record, and shook their heads when she stumbled over a question about whether slavery caused the Civil War. He said many disliked Haley for attacking Barack Obama and Kamala Harris, the first black president and vice president, respectively.

“Black voters would be a lot more sympathetic to Nikki Haley if she had a track record of embracing African-American issues as governor. But she didn’t,” Kimpson said. “African Americans weren’t buying what Nikki Haley was selling as governor, and we won’t now. We will not bail her out of this trouncing by Trump.”