Nikki Haley isn’t wrong when she says it’s early in the GOP primary — less than 3 percent of delegates have been awarded so far.
But the rest of the states are coming fast, and the relative lull over the next four weeks before the South Carolina primary is followed by a sprint: Within four weeks after Haley faces former President Donald Trump in her home state, more than 70 percent of the delegates to the Republican convention in July will have been awarded.
That sudden acceleration could be whiplash-inducing for Haley, who already faces an unfriendly electorate in the upcoming states. The former South Carolina governor has been able to mount a challenge to Trump by investing significant time and money into individual states. And now she faces a primary calendar that requires a totally different approach.
It’s a structural problem, in addition to Haley’s political one: trying to turn out the moderates and independents who boosted her in New Hampshire in states where they are in shorter supply. The door is still technically open for her to dethrone the former president despite his victories in the first two states, but it’s going to close very quickly.
No, it’s not over yet. Haley can still win delegates.
The daunting path for Haley has prompted some Republicans — including the Republican National Committee chair, Ronna McDaniel — to proclaim the primary effectively over, despite the miniscule number of delegates awarded so far. There was even a half-baked effort to ask the 168 members of the committee to vote on whether to call Trump the presumptive party nominee. That was pulled when Trump himself disavowed it.
The term “presumptive nominee” is typically used when a candidate has won the majority of delegates but before those delegates have officially voted at the convention. In this case, Trump’s two initial victories have net him just a few delegates so far, nowhere close to what traditionally has triggered the title of presumptive nominee. But those early wins, combined with large polling leads in South Carolina and nationally, have cleared a wide path for his nomination.
The Haley campaign referred me to its Tuesday morning memo, in which campaign manager Betsy Ankney made the case for competing in Super Tuesday states. “Until then,” she wrote, “everyone should take a deep breath.”
Haley’s campaign and its allies insist the calendar offers them opportunities to turn things around quickly. They emphasize she twice won gubernatorial elections in South Carolina, including in 2010, when she emerged from a crowded and fractious primary to become the GOP nominee.
Her campaign is also optimistic about Michigan’s Feb. 27 primary. And there are some March 5 Super Tuesday states, like Minnesota and Virginia, with more favorable demographics and open primaries where Haley could be more successful.
Haley is about to run into a pretty big, Super-Tuesday-sized wall
Super Tuesday is particularly crucial this year, and Trump is far better positioned than Haley to gobble up most of the delegates.
A total of 16 states and territories will vote on Super Tuesday, accounting for some 36 percent of the total delegates available. (Compare that with 24 percent of GOP delegates in 2016, or 18 percent in 2012.) This year’s Super Tuesday also includes the two most populous states — and biggest delegate hauls — in the country, California and Texas.
Despite California’s liberal reputation, its Republican primary is only for voters already registered with the party, and registered Republicans heavily favored Trump over Haley in New Hampshire. Texas doesn’t have partisan voter registration, but its GOP primary electorate is generally quite conservative.
Even though neither California nor Texas is technically “winner-take-all” for delegates, both will likely function that way now that the race is down to two major candidates. In California, delegate allocation moves from proportional to winner-take-all if the winning candidate gets over 50 percent of the statewide vote — something that’s quite likely to happen with only two active candidates.
The California rule was pushed last year by Trump’s allies in the state party — and it’s very likely to benefit him when the state votes in March.
In Texas, the rule is similar: A candidate winning a majority of the vote would win the lion’s share of the delegates — including all of the at-large delegates — though the loser could still nab some by carrying any of the state’s 38 congressional districts.
It’s not just Super Tuesday: The rest of March is brutal for Haley, too
The Michigan primary in which the Haley campaign hopes to do well also comes with a major caveat. That primary, held the week before Super Tuesday, will award only a small fraction of the state’s delegates. Most will actually be awarded at an insular party convention on March 2.
That means even if Haley were to upset Trump in the primary, he could still end up winning more delegates from friendly party insiders.
All of it adds up to Trump potentially building a massive delegate lead by Super Tuesday. Nearly half of all delegates, 47 percent, will have been awarded at that point. And he could theoretically close it out — or come quite close — two weeks later, when other big states like Florida, Ohio and Illinois hold their winner-take-all primaries and the total number of delegates awarded rises to 70 percent.
To be clear, projections of Trump’s delegate dominance aren’t just based on his wins in Iowa and New Hampshire.
They’re mostly based on the polling showing him far ahead of Haley outside of the states that have already voted. A privately conducted poll, first reported Friday by The Messenger, showed Trump leading Haley by 27 percentage points in South Carolina.
And the national polling average — Super Tuesday is essentially a quasi-national primary — currently has Trump leading Haley by 56 points. That would mean a rout through most, if not all, of the states voting that day.
The campaign that can get Haley to South Carolina can’t get her past it
So how can Haley turn it around?
The four-and-a-half-week run-up to South Carolina allows her to follow a similar model to Iowa and New Hampshire, with traditional campaign stops and an advertising blitz funded by her well-stocked campaign (which started running ads the day after New Hampshire’s primary) and super PAC (which is launching its first ads next week).
But there isn’t enough time between South Carolina on Feb. 24 and Super Tuesday on March 5 to replicate that campaigning approach in the rest of the states, especially in large and prohibitively expensive California and Texas. To win, Haley would need the kind of major South Carolina victory that could give her some national momentum — attracting donations and headlines that can propel her in the breadth of states where she simply can’t currently spend time and money campaigning.
But that appears unlikely.
The more probable approach is a Super Tuesday campaign focused on places like Minnesota, the only state Sen. Marco Rubio (Fla.) carried in the 2016 Republican primary, in which he also won the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico. That would help Haley generate some positive headlines, but she’d be falling prohibitively behind in the delegate race.
In her concession speech Tuesday night, Haley noted that the race “is far from over.” That’s true mathematically, for now — but it could be soon.
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