Former President Donald Trump doesn’t appear to be stressed by Nikki Haley‘s continued success in GOP presidential primaries more than two months after she dropped out of the 2024 race.
In an interview with Scripps News on Thursday, the former president dismissed perceptions that Haley, a former U.S. ambassador to the U.N., posed a serious threat to his reelection campaign.
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“Well, she got very few voters relatively, I mean, I got almost, I guess, close to 90%,” Trump told Charles Benson about Haley’s success in Wisconsin. “She got very few voters. And those voters are all coming to me. And you may have a lot of Democrats in there because they have a very tricky little system.”
“We just did a poll where we’re leading Biden by a lot in Wisconsin,” Trump continued.
Although Trump handily won Wisconsin’s primary last month at 79.2%, Haley showed a decent standing by pulling 76,841 votes or nearly 13% of the vote despite no longer running for president.
Haley’s votes were far more than the nearly 21,000 votes that propelled Biden to defeat Trump in Wisconsin during the 2020 election.
She has continued to get double digits in other state primaries, including in this week’s races in Nebraska, West Virginia, and Maryland.
Haley won 20% of the GOP primary in Maryland, compared to Trump’s 80%. In the reliably red state of Nebraska, Haley won nearly 18% of the vote, while Trump won 80.2% of the vote. In West Virginia, Haley won a little over 9% of the vote as Trump won 88.4%.
In other battleground states such as Pennsylvania, Haley pulled in more than 158,000 votes, or 16.6% of the vote, a sign that her supporters could cost Trump the 2024 race if he doesn’t bring them into the GOP tent.
Trump’s quotes on Haley are notable given President Joe Biden’s attempts to persuade Haley voters to back his campaign.
In late April, the Biden campaign announced a 30-second “If You Voted For Nikki Haley…” ad, part of a six-figure ad buy to court Haley supporters.
“Our campaign has been clear from the beginning that we welcome anyone who knows that four more years of Trump would destroy our freedoms and devastate our country,” Biden campaign communications director Michael Tyler said in a statement at the time.
After this week’s primaries, the Biden campaign again taunted Trump’s problem with protest voters.
“Donald Trump, his barely existent campaign, failed record, and toxic agenda lost tens of thousands of Republican voters to Nikki Haley — who dropped out 69 days ago,” Biden spokesman Ammar Moussa said in a statement Tuesday night. “Trump enters the general election as a weak candidate, unable to build the coalition needed to win 270 electoral votes.”
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Trump and Haley have not spoken since she exited the race one day after Super Tuesday. Haley has also not endorsed her former boss and Trump does seem eager to welcome Haley into his good graces after he nixed a report that she was being considered as his running mate.
Haley “is not under consideration for the V.P. slot, but I wish her well! DJT,” he posted on Truth Social over the weekend.
