The News
On Wednesday morning, as Nikki Haley ended her presidential campaign, Robert Schwartz was racing the clock. He’d stayed up late calculating how many votes Haley had won on super Tuesday; his super PAC, Primary Pivot, was about to relaunch as Haley Voters for Biden. He barely had time to finish the announcement. “It was a much shorter speech than I anticipated,” Schwartz told Americana. But he had his new mission — instead of convincing Democrats to temporarily become pro-Haley Republicans, he’d be urging hundreds of thousands of swing state Haley supporters to vote for the president. This is an edited transcript of the conversation.
Q&A
Americana: What did you make of Haley’s speech, ending her campaign? Was it helpful?
Robert Schwartz: We’re pleased that she followed this through to Super Tuesday, despite the writing on the wall. She exposed some real fissures in the Republican Party. In our communication with Haley voters, across the political spectrum, there was a deep kind of anger and resentment towards the way Trump and MAGA treated them.
Nikki Haley is probably, eventually, going to endorse Trump. But as we saw from the statistics coming out of Iowa, and South Carolina, and even North Carolina, just because Nikki Haley will eventually support Donald Trump, that doesn’t mean her supporters will go with her. This is an effort, from people who supported Nikki Haley, to guide as many of them as possible toward the candidate that respects democracy — even if they may disagree with him politically.
Americana: What makes you think she’ll eventually endorse Trump?
Robert Schwartz: She didn’t talk about Biden winning over her voters. She talked about how she’s always been a Republican, and how it’s the job of Donald Trump to win over her voters. I think that indicates where her loyalty lies. She started by talking about the threat of socialism, which sounds like she’ll eventually attack Joe Biden and the Democrats for being socialists. When she says, “we’ve got a country to save,” she’s not necessarily talking about saving our democracy. She’s talking about saving our country from the path that it’s currently on. If she wants to be in the conversation in 2028, ultimately, it’s good for her to be seen as a loyal Republican. But we’d love it if she doesn’t endorse him.
Americana: What resources are you starting this effort with, in terms of mailing lists, money — basic campaign tools?
Robert Schwartz: We started Primary Pivot with no money, but of the original $1 million that we raised, we have a significant amount that was set aside for Georgia, if she stayed in. We can spend that elsewhere. We’d reached out to voters in nine different states and sent 2.1 million mailers and text messages to over 1.1 million unique individuals, many in Michigan, North Carolina, and Georgia. We’ve already been aggressively reaching out to these people. We bought voter files in all of these states, and we focused on people who had voted in a previous Democratic primary. If they ended up voting in the Republican primary, they almost definitely voted for Nikki Haley.
Americana: How do you communicate with them for the next eight months?
Robert Schwartz: We really see three groups of voters. The first group is Biden supporters who pulled a Republican ballot. We can reconfirm their support, but they should be Biden supporters in November anyway — we don’t need to aggressively recruit them. The second group of voters that we targeted was the Biden skeptics, the ones that thought he was too old, the ones in New Hampshire that were considering Dean Phillips. Those are people we and the Biden campaign will have to aggressively court.
The third group of voters, which is going to be the most important and the most difficult to reach, is conservative, Republican Haley supporters. We call them the genuine Haley supporters. Many of those people have not previously voted in the Democratic primary. We are going to hyper focus on them, and we have a number of Republicans and former Republicans on our staff that will kind of flip our message away from “you may disagree with Nikki Haley on abortion or climate, but at least she respects democracy…” to “you may disagree with Joe Biden on abortion and climate change, but at least he respects democracy.” We’ll emphasize the foreign policy issues that Biden and Haley agree on.
Americana: Did Haley herself do enough to win over these anti-Trump, pro-democracy voters? I met some people who were tempted to support her, but stopped themselves, because she said she’d pardon Trump.
Robert Schwartz: If Nikki Haley had gone the full Chris Christie route, or the full Liz Cheney route, which was where many Democrats wanted her to go, I think the results would have been obvious. We wanted Nikki Haley to win the nomination, not just make a point. So, we felt that she strategically navigated those issues in a way that allowed her to not tank her support among conservative voters, who are now going to be essential in building a broad Biden coalition. I do think there are questions as to whether her campaign would have survived as long as it did without our efforts to bring in independent and left-of-center voters.
Americana: What did you make of the Biden campaign’s reaction to her leaving the race?
Robert Schwartz: It was a great first step. There have been all these outreach efforts by the Biden campaign to reach these uncommitted voters in Michigan. There were about 100,000 uncommitted voters in Michigan — but there were 300,000 Haley voters. Those uncommitted voters don’t have anywhere else to go, except to stay home and throw the election to somebody they absolutely despise. Haley voters are incredibly important in places like Michigan, and North Carolina, and Georgia and the Biden campaign should be aggressively courting them, and we expect they will be doing the same type of voter outreach that we are, but with a different message.
