Pro-Haley super PAC relaunches as ‘Haley Voters for Biden’

The News

A super PAC that urged non-Republicans to cast primary votes for Nikki Haley is pivoting to November, urging Haley’s voters to support President Joe Biden. Starting today, Primary Pivot will become Haley Voters for Biden, and urge anyone who supported Haley in a swing state to stick with the president in November.

“This is an effort from people who have actually supported Nikki Haley to try to guide as many of them as possible toward the candidate that respects democracy, even if they may disagree with him politically,” said Primary Pivot co-founder Robert Schwartz.

In a statement, Primary Pivot said it would focus on Haley voters in states where they could be counted — nearly 300,000 in Michigan, and nearly 250,000 in North Carolina. The super PAC, which started by urging New Hampshire Democrats to temporarily switch their registrations, spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to activate potential Haley voters in South Carolina and Super Tuesday states.

It wasn’t enough to deliver a win, outside of Vermont, where Haley picked up votes from non-Republicans in the state’s open primary. Schwartz hoped that Trump’s reaction to that — a Truth Social post denouncing “the fact that Democrats, for reasons unknown, are allowed to vote in Vermont” — would fuel the new campaign.

“We wanted to start this effort as soon as possible to lock in that kind of resentment toward the way Trump and MAGA have treated Haley voters,” he said.

David’s view

Haley’s decision to quit the race, but not endorse Trump, was encouraging for the Biden campaign, especially as Trump continues to denigrate her. “There is a place for them in my campaign,” the president said in a statement on Wednesday, suggesting common ground on protecting democracy, encouraging civility, and maintaining America’s NATO commitments.

Plenty of her voters went to the polls to protest Trump, unhappily confident that the former president was going to beat Haley anyway. But Schwartz really wanted Haley to win, seeing Trump as a unique threat and Haley as a rallying point for a united front to stop him.

That was Plan A, and it didn’t work. Plan B starts with the Haley voters who told exit pollsters that they did not want to support the GOP nominee if their candidate lost. On Tuesday, that was 48% of Haley’s supporters in California, 62% in North Carolina, and 76% in Virginia.

“Voting for Haley today meant I can vote twice in 2024 against Trump,” Bill Kristol posted on X, describing the vote as a “temporary re-embrace of my ex-party.”

Covering Haley last month, I met a decent number of voters who took Primary Pivot’s advice — or agreed with it but weren’t actually contacted by the PAC. Some Haley voters, said Schwartz, were Democrats who didn’t really need a new push from them. But some were Republicans who needed to be convinced to switch sides this year, which was Schwartz’s new mission.

“We’ll be able to get their voter files, their location in these states, their education level, their income level — whether they live in the suburbs, their voting history, all of that,” he said. “We’re going to micro-target these people as much as possible.”

Room for Disagreement

There’s a lot of skepticism about how many Haley voters are truly swing voters. In New York Magazine, Ed Kilgore looks at the polls and sees evidence that Trump-skeptical Haley supporters “are not flippable swing voters Trump would sacrifice, but may instead be 2020 Biden voters who weren’t really on the table for Trump at all, from the get-go.”

Notable

The New York Times spoke with dozens of Haley voters about what comes next. They found many fell into the “double hater” camp — disliking Trump, but also unenthusiastic or hostile towards Biden.