Chris Rauen is a self-described “Reagan Republican” who has never voted for a Democrat in his life. He had never even considered it – until now.
After Donald Trump’s refusal to accept his defeat in the 2020 election and his conduct during the January 6 attack on the Capitol, Rauen determined he would not – could not – vote for him again.
In March, he was among the hundreds of thousands of Californians who cast a primary ballot for Nikki Haley, Trump’s former United Nations ambassador-turned-bitter Republican rival. But after coast-to-coast Super Tuesday losses, she bowed out, and Trump marched to the nomination.
Now Haley says she will vote for Trump, despite warning just months ago that he would be “an unsafe president”. Rauen will not follow her lead. Instead, he is leaning toward a once-unthinkable prospect: casting a ballot for Joe Biden.
“There’s four-and-a-half million of us that are all looking for a home in November,” Rauen said, a rough count of the votes Haley has won across the primary states, despite her departure from the race. “That’s more than enough to swing an election.”
Last month, he participated in a virtual meeting between members of the Haley Voters Working Group and the Biden campaign, part of its continuing effort to mobilize Republicans who share the president’s belief that his predecessor poses a grave danger to the nation.
But winning their votes won’t be easy. Many of Haley’s voters are conservatives deeply uncomfortable with the idea of voting for a Democratic president, especially one they have come to view as “weak” and too amenable to the demands of his progressive base. The president’s domestic initiatives, investing trillions of dollars to provide pandemic relief and combat climate change is anathema to small-government conservatives, many of whom also condemn his military withdrawal from Afghanistan and handling of the US-Mexico border.
But, as Haley stressed during the primary, Trump hardly governed as a fiscal conservative, while a shrinking-but-still-existent band of establishment Republicans have expressed alarm over Trump’s isolationist approach to foreign policy and his persistent attacks on democratic institutions.
And while Trump’s felony convictions on 34 counts by a New York jury last week appeared to only strengthen his support among the Republican base, there were signs it could nudge some anti-Trump voters toward Biden.
“In order for our democracy to be preserved, it’s quite simple: Biden has to win more votes than Trump in the swing states,” said Robert Schwartz, co-founder of the working group. “The way to do that is pretty clearly to win over as many Haley voters as possible.”
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Long after leaving the race, Haley has continued to draw notable support. In Pennsylvania, her ghost campaign won nearly 17% of the vote, and 13% in Wisconsin and Georgia. Much of her support came from the suburbs, where Trump is weakest. In Arizona, Haley won roughly one in five Republican primary voters in Maricopa county, which encompasses the Phoenix suburbs.
In a potentially worrying sign for Trump, Haley, the former South Carolina governor, has showed particular strength with suburban women, college-educated moderates and independents. According to exit polls, overwhelming majorities of her supporters said they would be dissatisfied with Trump as their nominee and believe he would unfit for the presidency if convicted of a crime.
“Haley voters are not as much up for grabs as most people think,” said Henry Olsen, a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center thinktank in Washington DC. Among her supporters, Olsen said the majority were partisan Republicans for whom a vote for Biden would be a “bridge too far”. Those who can’t bring themselves to cast a ballot for Trump are more likely to support a third party candidate or leave the top of the ticket blank than vote for Biden, he said.
Entrenched partisanship means many Haley voters, like Haley herself, will likely end up rallying behind the Republican nominee.
But, according to one recent survey of Republican and independent Haley voters, as many as a quarter say they are unsure yet of how they would vote, while nearly one-fifth say they would support Biden. In a three-way race, Robert F Kennedy Jr, the independent candidate, slices into both Trump and Biden’s support, taking nearly one in four Haley voters. Meanwhile, a new Reuters poll found 10% of Republicans are less likely to support Trump following his conviction by a New York jury.
In an election likely to be decided by tens of thousands of votes in a handful of states, some Haley supporters – as well as Biden’s campaign – are betting these Republican dissenters could make a difference.
To that end, Schwartz is running a super Pac, Haley Voters for Biden, that plans to target swing state Haley voters with messages that play up Biden’s support for policies that have angered progressives.
“Most conservative voters far underestimate Biden’s level of bipartisanship and interest in border security and energy independence,” Schwartz said, citing an internal messaging survey that showed they found Biden more palatable when informed of these parts of his record. “When you actually look at concrete aspects of what he’s done, those perceptions can potentially shift a bit in a direction that is helpful to Joe Biden.”
This week a group of Haley voters involved with the working group applauded Biden’s executive order designed to deter illegal border crossings.
Amanda Stewart Sprowls, an Arizona Republican, called the action a “huge win for Haley voters” while Emily Matthews, a Georgia Republican, said it was “politically smart” and the “right thing to do”. Both Stewart Sprowls and Matthews participated in the call last month with the Biden campaign last month, during which the group stressed that his border policy could shape their vote this November.
Yet as Biden searches for Republican votes, he is also working to shore up support among his base. Discontent over the economy and disapproval of his support for Israel have hurt his standing with young people as well as Black and Hispanic voters.
But there are issues that resonate broadly across both groups, including threats to democracy, support for Ukraine and especially abortion rights, said Tara Setmayer, a senior adviser to the Lincoln Project, a Republican-led anti-Trump group.
“Haley voters need a permission structure to vote for Joe Biden,” she said. “Now is the time for the Biden camp to not only tout their accomplishments, but explain fully what the binary choice is and what’s at stake in this election.”
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When Haley left the race in March, Biden, who has emphasized bipartisanship throughout his career and centered Republican supporters during his 2020 campaign, moved quickly to welcome her voters. Earlier this year, his team launched a $30m ad campaign in battleground states that highlighted Trump’s attacks on Haley and explicitly asking her supporters to “join us”.
With the help of Republican surrogates and grassroots groups, the Biden campaign is building an outreach program that will eventually include dedicated staff to help mobilize Haley voters in battleground states. It is also working to secure support from influential Republicans, though public endorsements will likely be announced closer to the election when more voters are tuned in, and will focus on what they believe is at stake in November rather than their support for Biden.
Haley, meanwhile, has yet to formally endorse Trump. In remarks disclosing that she would vote for him, Haley also encouraged the former president “to reach out to the millions of people who voted for me and continue to support me and not assume that they’re just going to be with him.”
Trump had previously indicated he did not need – or want – the support of Haley voters, who he once described as an “unholy alliance” of “Rinos” and “Never Trumpers”. He also threatened her donors, saying they would be “permanently barred from the Maga camp”.
There is little evidence that he is trying hard to win these voters back. His campaign did not respond to a request for comment.
But Haley’s admission that she would support him appears to have dissolved some of the bitterness between the one-time rivals. It also suggests Trump, famous for nursing grudges, sees value in reconciling with Haley, a staunch conservative once seen as a rising star in Republican politics.
In a recent interview, Trump suggested he was open to bringing Haley onto his team “in some form”. Speculation has swirled that she could emerge on a short list of Trump’s vice-presidential contenders, though he previously ruled her out as a running mate.
What role Haley intends to play this election remains unclear. Tying herself too closely to Trump threatens a rupture with her coalition of independent, moderate and anti-Trump Republicans. But failing to formally endorse Trump risks permanent alienation from the party’s Maga-fied base.
In public appearances, Haley has cast her decision to vote for Trump as a matter of policy.
“When you look at the policies of the two, I very much am on one side. It’s not even close,” Haley told reporters during a trip to Israel last week. She added: “If I thought either one of them was great, I wouldn’t have run. I ran because I thought I could do a better job. But at the end of the day, it is what it is. It’s not personal for me.”
David Hale, a 25-year-old conservative Republican in Atlanta, began the election season hopeful that Trump would not be the party’s nominee. He initially supported the Florida governor Ron DeSantis, but then moved to back Haley when it became clear she was the most viable Trump alternative.
Hale considers himself “pro-life” and dislikes the way Democrats have branded opposition to abortion as “Maga extremism” even though it’s been a central plank of the conservative agenda for decades. He’d like Biden to take more aggressive action at the border and to reign in federal spending.
“I’m a conservative. I don’t really want any of Biden’s policies,” said Hale, who runs an Twitter/X account named “Country First Republican”. “But I also think that Trump is an existential threat to the continuance of our system of government.”
Biden won Georgia by less than 12,000 votes in 2020 while Trump has been charged as part of a broad criminal conspiracy to overturn his loss in the state. With polls showing an extremely close race in Georgia and other swing states, Hale is strongly considering voting for Biden.
“This guy has called for terminating the constitution. Conservatives are supposed to believe in the constitution,” he said of Trump, adding: “If he wins, I don’t want to be hyperbolic, but I am not totally confident we will have elections in the same vein that we have always had in this country.”
