Nobody can blame Nikki Haley for continuing her not-a-chance-in-heaven campaign for president — she has nothing to lose and lots of money to gain — but it’s helpful to remember that if not for the media’s white-hot hatred for Donald Trump, they would have absolutely razed her life and family months ago.
Literally, the only reason she’s even still able to show her face in public is because the media know her candidacy is of zero consequence. She’s not a threat, she’s not popular and her sole contribution to the 2024 election cycle has been to give moms on a midday wine buzz something to chat about.
She’s utterly useless. She’s not even hurting Trump, which is what the media count on Republicans like Haley to do. At the start of the year, the former president was averaging 51 percent support nationally among GOP voters. Since then, there have been three primary contests. He dominated them all and his support increased by 10 points.
By contrast, Haley’s support among party voters has so far maxed out at less than 20 percent at the end of January and has trended downward since. As of Tuesday, she’s down three points.
If there were a single scenario in which the media could envision Haley earning even just one electoral vote for president in a general election, there would be a flood of front-page news articles “investigating” whether she’s an adulteress, endless cable news segments about the freewheeling online activity of her children and, time permitting, some coverage framing her as a would-be black slave owner who will force women to endure life-threatening pregnancies.
If they took her seriously, we would still be talking about Haley’s mind-numbing description of the Civil War as “basically how government was going to run the freedoms and what people could and couldn’t do.”
She didn’t say slavery and racism! She must be a white supremacist! A brown one, no less!
If they took her seriously, her professed belief that frozen embryos are “babies” would have been all they needed to spend the next nine months crafting Handmaid’s Tale metaphors that would no doubt have Haley begging for forgiveness. That’s the type of person she is.
Her campaign serves no external purpose. The media’s lack of interest in her, both politically and personally, proves it.
