Ex-Haley voters rally behind Harris: ‘I picked the side that had the least issues’
After the former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley dropped out of the Republican primary earlier this year, some conservatives across the US continued to vote for her in subsequent primaries, casting ballots that indicated dissent within a party that has otherwise fully embraced Donald Trump.
When Haley finally announced that she would be supporting the ex-president in the upcoming election, she said that it was on him to mobilize her loyalists.
“Trump would be smart to reach out to the millions of people who voted for me and continue to support me, and not assume that they’re just gonna be with him,” Haley said.
But it was the Biden campaign, not Trump’s, that actively began engaging Haley voters. “I want to be clear: There is a place for you in my campaign,” Joe Biden wrote on Twitter/X alongside an ad targeting Haley voters.
With the president out of the race now, some of those former Haley voters have organized behind Democratic candidate Kamala Harris in a political action group called Haley Voters for Harris.
Craig Snyder, the campaign director for the Haley Voters for Harris Pac, told the Guardian that the impetus for the group came after seeing how other Haley supporters continued to support her even after she was no longer a candidate.
“When we cast our votes in the primaries we weren’t really voting for her as an active candidate,” he said. “But we wanted to send a message that this was not the kind of Republican party that we wanted, that Trump’s period as the spirit-bearer of the party needed to come to an end.”
Snyder wondered what would become of Haley voters in the general election, and homed in on those who have made the decision, however reluctantly, to support Harris.
“For those of us in this group, our feeling has been that while we may disagree with the Democratic party on certain policy issues, the better choice is to continue our opposition to Trump by voting Democratic,” he said. “When President Biden made the decision to withdraw, we made the decision to continue along those lines and to support Vice-President Harris.” [Continue reading…]