OPINION:
Wherever she is in the five stages of grief, former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley has not yet reached the “acceptance” stage.
Perhaps this is not surprising, considering that after each of her four crushing, double-digit losses to former President Donald Trump in the GOP primary cycle, she delivered some kind of wack-a-doodle “victory” speech.
After a humiliating third-place loss in the Iowa caucuses — 32 points behind Mr. Trump — Ms. Haley suffered delusions of victory.
“I can safely say tonight Iowa made this Republican primary a two-person race!” she declared.
Again, she came in third. And she claims to be some kind of accountant.
By the time her campaign limped into New Hampshire, she was in full hallucination.
“Now we’re in New Hampshire. You can look at the polls in New Hampshire,” she said. “We’re a stone’s throw away from Donald Trump, and so we’re going to continue to work really hard.”
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis — who bested Ms. Haley in Iowa — would soon drop out, leaving Ms. Haley with her fantasy of a two-person race. But she would lose New Hampshire to Mr. Trump by 11 points — even with a healthy assist from independents and Democratic voters playing in the GOP primary.
Particularly humiliating about her loss in New Hampshire was the amount of time and effort she had put into the state. By her own reckoning, she had spent 11 months campaigning in New Hampshire and did over 75 town halls.
It’s not like Ms. Haley can claim that the people of New Hampshire did not know her.
The only place where voters know her better would be her home state of South Carolina.
But first, she would endure yet another humiliating defeat in Nevada, where she signed up for the wrong election and then went on to lose that wrong election by a double-digit margin. To “none of the above.”
Riding into South Carolina, Ms. Haley had set several goals for herself — none of which included actually winning.
Primarily, she set out to lose to Mr. Trump in her own home state with less terrible numbers than she had lost to Mr. Trump in New Hampshire.
Well, by every measure, she failed.
Not to mansplain the math to a lady accountant, but Ms. Haley lost her home state by 20 points. She collected 40% of the Republican primary vote to Mr. Trump’s 60%. (It is worth noting here that 15% of those voting in South Carolina’s GOP primary were Democratic voters, the vast majority of whom played in the Republican race so they could hurt Mr. Trump by casting ballots for Ms. Haley.)
Anyway, back to the math.
Ms. Haley got just 40% of the vote in South Carolina, down 3 percentage points from her performance in New Hampshire. And she nearly doubled the margin of her loss to Mr. Trump from 11 points to 20 points.
So, any way you measure Ms. Haley’s trajectory, it is headed for zero.
As she herself declared the other day: “I am not going anywhere!”
Indeed, though even in that brief moment of clarity, Ms. Haley clung to her delusions. For her, “not going anywhere” meant she was staying in the race.
Some people can never get enough humiliation.
• Charles Hurt is the opinion editor at The Washington Times.
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