A USC Center for the Political Future panelist said Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley is staying in the race because “she’s a hater.”
“I think she recognizes that she will not win the nomination, but she is representative of a large constituency of people who do not like Donald Trump,” said Jane Coaston, a libertarian New York Times podcast host and Center for the Political Future fellow.
Coaston used sports to explain what she meant by Haley being a “hater”: no matter the successes that your rival has, you still hate them, she said.
“She understands that there is a constituency for her… she knows that for the eight people among the GOP who are going to vote for Trump, there are two who will never do so,” Coaston said about the former South Carolina governor and Trump’s ambassador to the United Nations.
She added that Haley is the first person who is responding to Trump “calling her birdbrain” and “making fun of her birthplace.”
“She is responding by saying, ‘no, I’m not going to just accede to this,’” Coaston said.
The USC Dornsife Center for Political Future hosted the annual Warschaw Conference on Practical Politics on Jan. 30 at USC. The four-panel event covering topics related to the 2024 presidential election was hosted jointly with POLITICO and Unite America. In the first panel, “Primary Colors,” panelists spoke about the presidential primaries with a focus on the Republican primaries.
Elle Turp, a Canadian who did a Master’s degree in American politics and attended all of the panels at the event, found this to be the most insightful moment of the panel.
“I thought it was such a great analogy… such a good representation of politics nowadays. And she explained it in a way that was so easy for people who aren’t necessarily interested in politics to actually understand, like people who like sports,” Turp said. “The second she said it, people understood.”
The first panel was moderated by Bob Shrum, the director of the USC Center for the Political Future. Joining Coaston, the other panelists were Chris Cadelago, POLITICO’s California bureau chief; John McConnell, a former presidential and vice presidential speechwriter; and Carissa Joy Smith, the vice president of FOX Government Relations.
Two Republican primaries had occurred as of the time of the panel: the Iowa caucus and the New Hampshire primary. In both of them, former president Donald Trump significantly won. McConnell added during the panel that the primaries are likely already over.
In an interview conducted afterwards, Cadelago noted the opposite of what was said at the beginning of the panel — that the primaries are far from over, using Joe Biden’s 2020 Democratic presidential primary campaign as an example.
“I think we have to really keep an open mind about what possibilities might be out there,” Cadelago said. “And not just think that because things are going one way right now that that will continue.”
Coaston said in an interview after the panel that she finds the primaries interesting because it shows “what people are valuing in their decision process.”
“I think too often we forget that politics is a process. What we’re trying to do is elect people who are going to do things that are good for people,” Coaston said. She elaborated using another analogy, this time with pancakes. “It’s like, I don’t really care how you make me pancakes, I would like pancakes. We focus too much on the process of making pancakes and not enough on pancakes.”