David M. Shribman

Jerry Brown and Gary Hart did it. So did Ted Kennedy and Hillary Rodham Clinton. Also Henry Jackson and Jesse Jackson. Nelson Rockefeller did it and — going way, way back — so did Oscar Underwood. There’s also Lyndon Johnson and Ronald Reagan, the only ones who eventually became president, though not the first time they tried it.

Now, conducting a presidential candidacy likely to move her into the honorable group of candidates who didn’t win the White House but who nonetheless hung in and fought is… Nikki Haley of South Carolina. 

Welcome, Madam Governor, to the assemblage of presidential candidates who continued to campaign, often inexplicably and mostly against insurmountable odds, relentlessly, bravely and consequently — and now we summon the signature motto of one of them, the Rev. Jesse Jackson — keeping their hopes alive.

Those presidential hopes are fading fast for Haley. Fervently but probably futilely, she’s campaigning in her native South Carolina, where she twice ran statewide (and won both times) but where former President Donald Trump is riding a wave of momentum from triumphs in three states that, together, give him victories in the Northeast (New Hampshire), Midwest (Iowa), and West (Nevada). Combine the three, and Trump has won states that comprise 2.98% of the population of the country.

It may not be fair that the 292,636 votes that Trump harvested in those three states should constitute momentum. But, as John F. Kennedy said, life isn’t fair. It’s also not fair that fumbling into the end zone results in a touchback for the opposing team, but that’s the NFL rule. Haley knew the rules; Trump exploited them. (Footnote: Trump’s team helped shape the 2024 rules, but that’s another column for another day.)

Hanging on — hanging in — is a political tradition, practiced in some election cycles but ignored in others. Former Sen. Bill Bradley of New Jersey dropped out in 2000, though not as quickly as Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida did last month. Hart had a legitimate chance of triumphing in 1984 when the campaign came down to the last primaries in New Jersey and California, and Ted Kennedy took his campaign all the way to the 1980 convention in New York, where in Madison Square Garden he gave perhaps the greatest convention speech since his brother unveiled the New Frontier in his 1960 acceptance speech in the Los Angeles Coliseum. 

Indeed, the younger brother’s campaign valedictory encapsulates the hope of all the contenders who fell out of contention:

“For me, a few hours ago, this campaign came to an end. For all those whose cares have been our concern, the work goes on, the cause endures, the hope still lives, and the dream shall never die.”

Haley likely won’t get to deliver a speech like that nor feel that sentiment, given that, with her new persona as an unforgiving critic of Trump, she now is an outlier in her own party. 

When she was elected governor in 2010, she was the very model of the Republican establishment of the time. Sen. John McCain of Arizona had been the party’s nominee two years earlier; by July 2015, Trump would savage McCain and demean his time in a Hanoi prison. Former Gov. Mitt Romney of Massachusetts would be the party’s nominee two years after Haley won the right to live in the governor’s mansion in the Arsenal Hill neighborhood of Columbia; Trump poured scorn on the Romney campaign, and Romney eventually would vote twice to impeach the 45th president.

The party for which Haley is seeking the nomination has a new establishment, and she is not part of it. Nor is she welcome in it. It’s Trump’s party. For the first time since William Jennings Bryan won the 1896 Democratic presidential nomination, a major American political party’s establishment is personified by an insurgent. 

This is all the more remarkable because, since the 1920s, the Republicans have been the party of quiet conformity, instinctive respectability, and impeccable manners. (Richard Nixon may have employed irresponsible tactics as a 1950s cold warrior, spoken in crude language on the 1970s White House tapes, and committed unforgivable acts in the White House, but he was a conventional Republican whose wife wore a “good Republican cloth coat.”) 

There are many, and good, reasons for Haley, who likely owns a good Republican cloth coat herself, to stay in the race.

She has the money, or at least enough to keep her afloat until Super Tuesday (March 5), when she has a fighting chance to win a couple of states — maybe Maine, maybe Massachusetts, both with female governors. She has a cause, though it is flickering in the Trump wind: the future of the Republicans as a mainstream party. 

She has found her voice: less the singsong of her early presidential campaign (Pachelbel’s “Canon in D,” appealing the first 15 times you hear it, cloying after that), more the surges of Smetana’s “The Moldau” (with elegance and majesty). In any case, it’s a distinct contrast to Trump’s “The Messiah,” a performance and persona he assumes each time he tells rallies he is being prosecuted for your sins.

Rockefeller went on to become vice president, and he and Henry “Scoop” Jackson persisted with their views long enough to become adjectives — Rockefeller Republicans, Jackson Democrats. Hillary Clinton went on to win the 2016 Democratic nomination and, though unforgiven in her party for losing to Trump, will be remembered as a ceiling-crashing figure for being the first woman to win a major-party nomination. Jesse Jackson, now ailing with Parkinson’s disease, earned a place in history as the first strong Black presidential candidate and will be remembered as a voice of diversity. And poor Oscar Underwood? He’s the answer to the ultimate political trivia question: Who was the last standing rival to John W. Davis on the 103rd ballot of the Democratic National Convention exactly 100 years ago?

Haley will do better than that. She’ll be remembered for being the lone figure standing between Trump and the GOP nomination and for asking whether the United States has to settle for an election between two old men. That may be reason enough for staying in, and legacy enough, too.

A Swampscott High School Class of 1972 member, David M. Shribman is the Pulitzer Prize-winning former executive editor of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.