The people who voted against Donald Trump and for Nikki Haley in the G.O.P. primaries are weighing whether to support Kamala Harris. Either way, they could help sway a close election in swing states.
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After a heated primary, Nikki Haley endorsed former President Donald J. Trump. She spoke at the Republican National Convention in July.
Nikki Haley had been out of the Republicans’ presidential race for over a month when Linda Kapralick and Cathleen Barone cast their ballots for her in Pennsylvania’s primary, so eager were they for an alternative to former President Donald J. Trump.
With Mr. Trump as the nominee, now is Ms. Haley’s voters’ time for choosing, as she was so fond of saying on the campaign trail, echoing a Ronald Reagan line.
Many of Ms. Haley’s most ardent supporters in her losing bid — moderate, college-educated Republicans and independents skeptical of Mr. Trump — fell into what pollsters called the “double haters” camp: people dreading having to cast a ballot for Mr. Trump or President Biden, before he ended his re-election campaign. Vice President Kamala Harris’s acceptance of the Democratic nomination last month has changed the math.
“Neither one of these candidates is exactly a perfect fit for those voters,” Whit Ayres, a veteran Republican pollster, said of Ms. Harris and Mr. Trump. “The Haley voters, I think, are examining the Harris candidacy, and they are going to decide where they fall eventually.”
Ms. Haley, the former governor of South Carolina and the United Nations ambassador under Mr. Trump, formally endorsed him in July at the party’s nominating convention, urging her supporters to set aside their disagreements and stand united as Republicans. That same month, lawyers representing her presidential campaign sent a cease-and-desist letter to a political action committee that called itself Haley Voters for Harris. In a statement, she said that any attempt to use her name to support Ms. Harris was “deceptive and wrong.”
Yet many of those who supported her in the race tend to be anti-Trump, and saw her candidacy as a principled stand against the former president and his transformation of his party. Though she herself never embraced the anti-Trump label, she sharply criticized him as “unhinged” while she was still running, and once said of him that she felt “no need to kiss the ring.” Even after Ms. Haley suspended her campaign in March, she drew notable percentages of independents, Republicans and moderate Democrats in primary contests.
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