For Kamala Harris to win, are there enough Nikki Haley voters and other disaffected Republicans who will vote for her or sit this one out?
It’s kind of incredible that it might all come down to this group. The Haley voter obviously isn’t the whole story of the election; there are all kinds of voters moving in and out of the edges of the two parties now, from the people red-pilled by the Covid era to those voting first on Israel and Gaza. But if Donald Trump loses again, maybe it will be due to the same problem that has been there for him from the beginning — the Republicans who didn’t like him in the first place, those in the suburbs, the more moderate women.
Under the category of the Haley voter there are stability-minded, Constitution-focused traditionalists who can’t really get past Jan. 6, temperamental moderates who care about character and dislike chaos, for whom Mr. Trump has always been a tough sell, and — probably these people more than anything — just the kinds of voters, women especially, who voted a lot for Republicans before but on some deep, cellular level blanch at government now deciding abortion policy and the broader health complications that can be involved, regardless of how they feel about abortion itself.
Those voters, in particular, might be described as having a conservatism organized around privacy and intentions, specifically not trusting the government in a world where Texas passes a law that allows a neighbor to sue another for abetting an abortion or a politician can’t seem to understand why a 50-something woman would still care about reproductive rights.
What does some data tell us about Haley voters? In one of its weekly releases, Blueprint, a Democratic strategy firm, profiled the Haley voter based on a survey of nearly 800 Republicans and independents who voted for her in the primaries. It’s a small but notable group of people, with 59 percent who said they voted for Mr. Trump in 2020 but only 45 percent who said they would do so again in 2024. That slice of voters could decide a narrow election, and that’s not even taking into account the need for Ms. Harris to retain the Republicans who voted for Joe Biden in 2020 or the ones who are similarly inclined but didn’t bother voting in the Republican primaries this year.
Blueprint found that one of the “most persuasive” criticisms of the Republican Party for this group of voters was that it “opposes abortion too much” (with 42 percent saying that described the party “very well”). They cared about the economy, immigration and national security; they were worried that Ms. Harris would be too extreme and Mr. Trump too erratic. In Blueprint’s polling, Haley voters had a lot of remaining favor for George W. Bush and John McCain and liked Dick Cheney more than Liz Cheney, whose support was underwater with the group.
The constitutional traditionalists might be described as voters like the woman who recently told CNN she cared a lot about U.S. support for Ukraine and would vote for Ms. Harris. Some are probably like the Tampa, Fla., resident at a recent Univision town hall who asked Mr. Trump to “win back” his vote because he was still deeply bothered by Jan. 6 and the Covid response in 2020 and who looked deeply skeptical as Mr. Trump talked about Jan. 6 as a “day of love.” Those concerns align with the central ones of someone like Ms. Cheney, for instance.
A second group — temperamental moderates who might also be ideological conservatives — is the kind of Haley voter Ms. Haley interviewed on a slightly surreal recent episode of her podcast, in which she spoke to three undecided voters. She has endorsed Mr. Trump but made no real effort to talk her guests into voting for him; she just worked through with them how they thought about the election.
Ms. Haley’s guests were married women in different stages of their lives (a young Georgian who liked JD Vance in the debate, an independent from Pennsylvania in her 40s with a house and young children and an empty-nester in her 50s from North Carolina who described herself as more moderate). They discussed the economy, respect, character and abortion; Jan. 6 didn’t come up.
“Pinning either one of their policies to the wall is like pinning Jell-O to the wall. They’re all over the place, and so if I can’t actually get what I think is true on the policy front, well then what is their character?” the youngest of the three said about Ms. Harris and Mr. Trump. She didn’t trust Ms. Harris, but seeing Mr. Trump get “rattled” scared her. Asked by Ms. Haley how she’d vote, the Georgian said that although she planned to make a decision, if forced to do so that day, “I’d probably skip it, and I’d vote down ballot.”
The Pennsylvania independent said she really struggled with what she felt was the vagueness of Ms. Harris’s policy proposals, Mr. Trump’s complete indifference to the national debt and the overall detachment of the election from solutions to what she knew were widespread economic problems. “I’m having a really hard time balancing politics and character, and so I may not vote for the president at all, which is huge,” she said. Ms. Haley offered, “I’ve heard so many people say they’re just not going to vote because they’re so conflicted.” The voter said she wrote in a candidate twice before and might do it again.
“I’m the only one in my family, even in my extended family, I’d say, that is undecided,” said the North Carolina woman in her 50s, who mentioned she wished Roe hadn’t been overturned. She wasn’t sure what she would do about her vote. “My sister is definitely voting for Kamala. I have parents who are kind of upset that I’m even undecided at this point and are definitely pro-Trump.”
They all sounded like people who are surrounded by Republicans, who want to vote for Republicans and who kind of just are Republicans with the same old Republican concerns but who seemed deeply unhappy with the current state of affairs.
None of them said abortion was their top issue. The youngest woman described herself as pro-life, feminist and happy with the Dobbs framework, though she lamented that the only two political options were “carte blanche, do whatever you want” on abortion from Democrats and the “heinous rhetoric of completely jailing women that want abortions and misinformation for the doctors.”
That even the woman who approved of state-based governance of abortion cited that kind of language and confusion spoke a bit to a third group of voters, even if she isn’t one of them.
Two years ago, after the midterms, Republican consultants told Politico about focus groups they’d done in Arizona: When a moderator asked the participating women, all Republicans and independents, if they or someone they knew had an unplanned pregnancy or abortion story, all of them raised their hands. “If they are demanding control here, where does it end?” one Republican participant asked.
A Republican consultant told Politico that every woman who has been in a relationship “has experienced the ‘being late’ moment.” She added, “Every woman can relate to that, but it’s an intangible that’s hard to explain to men” — a sentiment that also describes the ping of awareness that can come from reading nightmarish stories about doctors nervous about providing help to a woman likely to miscarry her wanted pregnancy.
The G.O.P. has changed a lot over the last decade in ways that can feel subtle in motion but stark when Robert F. Kennedy Jr. campaigns for Mr. Trump and Ms. Cheney campaigns for Ms. Harris. This shift has been talked about for years, and a lot of these voters are the same kinds who always had problems with Mr. Trump, with this added potential acceleration of Dobbs. He could easily win, and maybe it will be because a bunch of Haley voters just didn’t break toward Ms. Harris in the end or the ones who did were outnumbered by other, bigger shifts in voting patterns.
It’s easy to see a world where Tucker Carlson and Steve Bannon are triumphant and Ms. Cheney is despondent and somewhere “Jamie’s Cryin’” by Van Halen is playing and Mr. Trump is president.
But the longer the Trump era goes on, it’s hard to listen to these voters at the Univision town hall and the Haley voters on her podcast — fairly anguished adults living their normal lives — and not see the possibility that a fundamental shift is happening and, win or lose, changing both parties.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
