When Nikki Haley summoned the national media to Greenville, S.C., on Tuesday, she did something that was strikingly unusual even in this most bizarre of campaigns. She devoted an entire speech to explaining why she was not dropping out of the presidential race.
Hungry for attention, and fed up with fielding questions about why she wasn’t reading the room and the polls, her team had billed the event, tantalizingly, as a “State of the Race” speech. Speculation abounded among Republican strategists that she might finally be coming to terms with reality. Maybe, the theories went, Ms. Haley now understood that without some unforeseen act of God, there was no mathematical path for her to win enough delegates to wrench the Republican nomination from Donald J. Trump.
“Some of you — perhaps a few of you in the media — came here today to see if I’m dropping out of the race,” Ms. Haley said. “Well, I’m not. Far from it.”
Her smile said it all. Ms. Haley was enjoying herself, finally able to say what she has long thought about Mr. Trump and seemingly delighted that she had focused national attention on her message. She looked like a woman without much to lose, which people close to her said was about right.
Ms. Haley says she wants nothing from Mr. Trump. After serving as the ambassador to the United Nations, she would not be lured by any cabinet role into cutting a deal with him to end her quixotic campaign.
“Some people used to say I was running because I really wanted to be vice president,” she said in her Tuesday speech. “I think I’ve pretty well settled that question.”
It’s hard to find a Republican lawmaker or operative who isn’t privately speculating about Ms. Haley’s ulterior motives. Is she hanging on as a Plan B candidate in case Mr. Trump dies or goes to prison? Is she positioning herself as the woman to lead a post-Trump Republican Party — the soothsayer who warned that Mr. Trump would lose again, so she can return in 2028 and say “I told you so”?
Ms. Haley dismissed such speculation on Tuesday: “If I was running for a bogus reason, I would have dropped out a long time ago.”
She said that she was “used to people questioning my intentions” and that she was “fighting for what I know is right.”
Her friends and allies say that the doomsayers have unusually little effect on her. Her history of winning long-shot races means she’s used to being counted out and proving people wrong. Ms. Haley sometimes campaigns in a T-shirt emblazoned with the slogan “Underestimate me. That’ll be fun.”
She was a young, first-time candidate lagging far behind in the polls and in fund-raising when she beat a nearly 30-year incumbent for a South Carolina State House seat in a come-from-behind victory that shocked her state’s political establishment. Years later, in 2010, she beat a slate of the state’s political heavyweights in her race for governor: Henry McMaster, a former state attorney general who is now governor; Gresham Barrett, then a popular congressman; and André Bauer, then the state’s lieutenant governor. That same establishment is now, almost to a person, lined up against her in support of Mr. Trump.
One of those vanquished former rivals, Mr. Barrett, said in an interview on Tuesday that Ms. Haley appeared before many of the “movers and shakers” in the Spartanburg, S.C., area this week at a fund-raiser and “made no qualms” that she was in the race for the long haul.
“I don’t think any supporter left there last night thinking this was a short-term thing,” Mr. Barrett said, adding that her donors expressed a willingness to stick with her through Super Tuesday — and until the end, whenever that may be.
Ms. Haley has told donors and friends that the personal attacks she has received from Mr. Trump and his allies have only hardened her resolve. The far-right activist Laura Loomer, who joined Mr. Trump on his plane for a recent trip to South Carolina, has viciously attacked Ms. Haley’s 22-year-old son, Nalin, even questioning his parentage.
At a recent rally, Mr. Trump wondered aloud why Ms. Haley’s husband, Michael, wasn’t with her on the campaign trail. Ms. Haley snapped back that her husband was serving overseas in the military — an act of service that Mr. Trump had never performed and could never understand. The emotional aftershocks came through in her speech on Tuesday. Ms. Haley choked up as she said how much she wished she and her children could be with him.
Ms. Haley presented her decision to stay in the race as a matter of principle. She pointed out that most Americans are unsatisfied with both of their likely choices in the fall. She said that the country deserved better than these two old men and that she was determined to give voters that choice. To quit so early in the process, she said, would consign Americans to the longest general-election period in history — one that would result in a chaotic future for the country, no matter the outcome.
A spokesman for Mr. Trump, Steven Cheung, said in a statement to The New York Times that “Nikki ‘Birdbrain’ Haley still can’t name one state they think they can win.” He said Ms. Haley had become “the candidate of choice for Democrats and Never Trumpers still afflicted with Trump Derangement Syndrome.”
During the Trump era, Ms. Haley was not exactly known for taking principled stands against the former president. She had made clear in the 2016 campaign what she thought of the man. She considered him morally unfit for the presidency — “everything we teach our kids not to do in kindergarten.” But then she voted for him, served under him and praised him extravagantly. She even went so far as to claim that his childish insults of Kim Jong-un of North Korea — Mr. Trump called him “little rocket man” — were effective.
After the Jan. 6 riot, Ms. Haley flirted with abandoning Mr. Trump again. “He went down a path he shouldn’t have, and we shouldn’t have followed him, and we shouldn’t have listened to him,” she told Politico. “And we can’t let that ever happen again.”
Two months later, she said she would stand down and support Mr. Trump if he ran again in 2024. People close to Ms. Haley said she simply didn’t believe he would run again. Soon after he announced his candidacy, she went back on her word, saying that the country had only slid downward and that its survival was “bigger than just one person.”
For much of this campaign, Ms. Haley has gone easy on Mr. Trump. So easy that until early in the new year, Mr. Trump was seriously considering her as a potential running mate, according to three people with direct knowledge of his deliberations. Ms. Haley and her allies spent nearly all their energy and money destroying Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida and clearing the rest of the field for a two-person race against Mr. Trump.
In recent weeks, Ms. Haley has finally let loose on Mr. Trump.
She has portrayed him as a sycophant to President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia and challenged him to say that Mr. Putin was responsible for the death of the dissident Aleksei Navalny in a remote prison. She has criticized Mr. Trump for spending more time and money in court than on the campaign trail and has assailed him for tightening his grip on the Republican National Committee, claiming he intended to use it as “his piggy bank for his personal cases.”
Each day, her campaign sounds more and more like the stridently anti-Trump campaign run by Chris Christie, the former governor of New Jersey, who bashed and taunted the front-runner at every opportunity. After Mr. Trump released his latest moneymaker — Trump-branded gold sneakers — Ms. Haley’s campaign trolled the announcement, posting an image on social media of a white sneaker adorned with the Russian flag.
Whatever her motivations, there are other, more prosaic justifications for keeping the fight going a little longer, through Super Tuesday on March 5.
Kevin Madden, a former Republican strategist who worked on Mitt Romney’s 2012 and 2008 presidential campaigns, said this campaign helped Ms. Haley elevate her national profile and build transferable infrastructure, relationships and “muscle memory” should she decide to try again. He argued that not even a Haley endorsement of Mr. Trump would “completely undo her” because voters have short memories.
There is one final factor. Ms. Haley has benefited from a self-replenishing assembly line of rich anti-Trump donors who are happy to continue financing what some privately concede is a futile effort.
“Candidates don’t run out of reasons to run,” Mr. Madden said. “They run out of resources.”
Ms. Haley has plenty of those.
