William of Orange was chief magistrate of the Dutch Republic when, during a seemingly hopeless defense against English and French attackers in 1672, he was offered terms he shouldn’t have been able to refuse: to capitulate in exchange for becoming its sovereign prince.
“He rejected it with the utmost Indignation,” wrote Daniel Defoe, “and when One of them ask’d him what Remedy he could think of for the Ruin of his Affairs, answer’d, He knew of One effectual Remedy, viz. to lie in the last Ditch; intimating, that he would dispute every Inch of Ground with the Enemy, and at last would die defending the Liberties of his Country.”
And that’s how it seems we got the phrase “the last ditch.”
Nikki Haley, too, is in her last ditch. As I write, it looks like Donald Trump will trounce her in the G.O.P.’s Michigan primary by an even wider margin than in his South Carolina victory on Saturday. The Koch network has withdrawn its financial support for her. Super Tuesday is next week, and chances are strong that Trump will sweep all 15 states in play, along with those he’s already won.
So why carry on?
Haley says she’s “doing what I believe 70 percent of Americans want me to do,” in reference to polls showing that most people don’t want a rematch between Trump and Joe Biden. Too bad only 27 percent of voters bother to participate in party primaries on average, according to a 2022 analysis, ceding the field to the most motivated partisans.
But there are better reasons for Haley to hang on.
The first is that Trump’s coronation procession may be heading for its own ditch in the form of one or more felony convictions. A conviction would not prevent Trump from running: Eugene V. Debs won nearly one million votes as a presidential candidate while serving a prison sentence for sedition in 1920. But it could make Trump unelectable in a general election.
Even in South Carolina, nearly one-third of Republican primary voters would not vote for Trump if he’s convicted, according to a Saturday exit poll from Edison Research. In swing states, the numbers for Trump are even more daunting: Fully 53 percent of voters in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin would not vote for Trump if convicted, according to a Bloomberg/Morning Consult poll from January.
Those numbers may not be politically fatal for Trump if he’s convicted on some of the more dubious charges brought against him by overtly partisan prosecutors, like the Stormy Daniels payoff case in New York. But they will cut Trump much more sharply in the election-interference case, assuming the Supreme Court declines Trump’s appeal. In that case, Haley’s electability argument against Trump might again resonate with Republican voters.
A second reason is that the 30 percent to 40 percent of voters who cast a ballot for anyone except Trump in the Republican primaries aren’t nothing. Even Trump probably understands that he will have to unite the party to win and even more so to govern, and the longer Haley holds out the more she will come to represent that disaffected G.O.P. minority.
Uber-Trumpians think otherwise: Haley “does run the risk of being viewed almost like a Liz Cheney type of character,” Mollie Hemingway, a Fox News contributor, said the other day, suggesting Haley might soon be run out of the G.O.P. much as the former Wyoming representative was in 2022. But Republicans who aren’t yet ready to turn their party into a cult also quietly admire Haley for refusing to turn herself into another toady like Tim Scott.
Defiance and self-respect are traits most people admire, however begrudgingly, and more so with the perspective of time. Haley will destroy her career if she abandons the Republican Party altogether or openly campaigns against its eventual nominee, but not if she fights for every last Republican vote.
Finally, there’s an ideological case. Haley embodies a strand of pragmatic, internationalist and pro-growth conservatism that once dominated the G.O.P. but has been pushed aside in favor of xenophobic, isolationist, zero-sum populism. Whatever liberals or progressives may think of Haley’s brand of conservatism, they surely must prefer it to Trump’s. Every politically healthy democracy requires a morally healthy conservative movement, and right now the United States doesn’t have one.
There’s a value in sticking to principle while making long-term bets. William of Orange staved off the French Army. Seventeen years later he became William III of England and accepted the Bill of Rights that elevated Parliament at the expense of the sovereign and served as the basis for the U.S. Bill of Rights a century later.
Haley may not turn out to be a world-historical figure, but she is at least standing up for a set of ideas that matter, in the face of an opponent who despises every restraint on his own power. To lie in the last ditch isn’t futile. It’s noble. It may give her the credibility she’ll need once Trump is finally gone.