When Nikki Haley dropped out of the 2024 presidential race in early March, she withheld endorsing Donald J. Trump and extended a pointed invitation for him to court her and the political coalition she constructed. “This is now his time for choosing,” she said then.
It has been nearly three weeks. He has not called.
There has never been very much magnanimity in the MAGA movement.
But as Mr. Trump prepares for a rematch against President Biden that is expected to offer little margin for error — the last race was decided by fewer than 50,000 votes across three states — the question is whether Mr. Trump’s decision to bypass any sort of reconciliation with Ms. Haley after a brutal and personal primary will matter.
Even out of the race, Ms. Haley has continued to pull in a significant number of voters in ongoing primary contests. Across the five swing states that have held primaries so far — Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, North Carolina and Nevada — a total of about 750,000 people cast ballots for Ms. Haley.
Those five states were decided by a combined roughly 250,000 votes in the 2020 general election.
Some of Ms. Haley’s votes have come from supporters who cast their ballots before she exited the race. But the votes she has drawn are from some of the most critical demographic and geographic swing blocs in the nation.
“I think I speak for many people in that we’re extremely frustrated that we have Biden and Trump to pick from,” said Irma Fralic, a co-chair of Women for Nikki who lives in the swing state of Pennsylvania and who is undecided about whom to vote for in November. “The risk for Donald Trump would be that people would not vote because they’re not happy.”
