Nikki Haley exited the presidential race on Wednesday with a final challenge for former president Donald Trump: to bring her more moderate and independent supporters into the MAGA fold.

To do so, GOP strategists say Trump will have to turn down the temperature of his rhetoric. It remains to be seen whether he will — or even can.

Haley said it is now on Trump to “earn the votes of those in our party and beyond it who did not support him, and I hope he does that.”

“At its best, politics is about bringing people into your cause, not turning them away. And our conservative cause badly needs more people. This is now his time for choosing,” Haley said, an apparent reference to Trump’s having said he would “permanently” ban anyone who donated to Haley from the MAGA camp.

But while Trump made an appeal for party unity in his speech on Tuesday, he showed little concern for bridging intraparty divisions in a post on Truth Social on Wednesday: “Nikki Haley got TROUNCED last night, in record setting fashion, despite the fact that Democrats, for reasons unknown, are allowed to vote in Vermont, and various other Republican Primaries.”

He did ultimately go on to extend a gracious invitation to Haley’s supporters to “join the greatest movement in the history of our nation.”

GOP strategists told National Review this message is the exact opposite of the approach Trump should be taking.

To court these voters, Trump should focus on two things, says an adviser to a super PAC that supported Haley: make a concerted effort to prioritize reining in government spending and to generally soften his tone, as his rhetoric has harmed the Republican brand and turned off voters in key swing states.

“Whatever it is that he has to do, I think he is completely unwilling — and in many instances unable — to get himself to do what it takes,” the adviser said.

GOP strategist Alice Stewart similarly suggested that Trump has had a difficult time getting out of his own way when trying to broaden his appeal.

“You have to look at what attracted Haley supporters to her, and a big part of that is the fact that she advocated for less drama and less chaos,” she said. “And that’s what Donald Trump needs to recognize.”

On this issue, Trump could stand to take a page out of President Biden’s book: The Democrat issued a more even-keeled appeal to Haley’s voters in a statement on Wednesday.

“Donald Trump made it clear he doesn’t want Nikki Haley’s supporters. I want to be clear: There is a place for them in my campaign,” he said.

He added: “I know there is a lot we won’t agree on. But on the fundamental issues of preserving American democracy, on standing up for the rule of law, on treating each other with decency and dignity and respect, on preserving NATO and standing up to America’s adversaries, I hope and believe we can find common ground.”

In further evidence that Democrats have their sights set on Haley’s supporters, a super PAC that advocated for non-Republicans to support Haley in the GOP primary contests will now shift its focus to urging Haley’s voters to support Biden in November, Semafor first reported.

“This is an effort from people who have actually supported Nikki Haley to try to guide as many of them as possible toward the candidate that respects democracy, even if they may disagree with him politically,” Primary Pivot co-founder Robert Schwartz told Semafor. The group will now become Haley Voters for Biden and will focus on Haley voters in key states including Michigan and North Carolina.

This appeal is a smart one, says Republican strategist Lorna Romero-Ferguson, who believes Biden absolutely has a chance to pull in some of these voters.

“The message that President Biden issued this morning was spot on and it was the right tone,” she said.

Also smart was Biden’s decision to run against Trump from the very beginning, the Arizona-based strategist adds. Though Trump did in fact face more formidable primary challengers than did the current president, he spent more time than he should have attacking Haley rather than attacking Biden, she suggested, contributing to the uphill battle Trump now faces to bring in Haley voters he may have alienated.

“My fear is that they’re going to take those voters for granted, that they’re going to make the assumption that they will all just come home at the end of the day and support Trump, which we’ve seen in previous election cycles since 2016 that that hasn’t necessarily played out for Republicans who have run a Trump-type campaign,” she said.

Meanwhile, the super-PAC adviser warned that many people are “in denial” that Trump has a problem among Republican voters. “People will point to the fact that it’ll be like, oh, independents or Democrat voters or former Biden voters were the ones voting for Haley,” the adviser said. “What we don’t have is any indication of how many people or how many of those people are former Republicans, and so there are a lot of Republican or potential Republican voters that Trump needs to be successful that he has a problem with.”

NR’s Noah Rothman predicts that Haley voters will in fact come home to the GOP candidate in the fall, “so long as their candidate gives them a reason to.” However, Republicans will be in trouble if they convince themselves that the anti-Trump vote in the primaries is attributable only to “resistance libs,” or if they suggest those who are skeptical of Trump’s candidacy are “welcome to leave” the party, as Trump’s daughter-in-law Lara Trump, the incoming co-chair of the RNC, recently said.

But in a strong sign that even Trump’s GOP detractors will fall in line, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell finally endorsed the former president on Wednesday despite the pair’s strained relationship.

And Stewart says Trump is poised to benefit from having faced only a short primary challenge, giving him more time to line up with the RNC and merge resources to take on Biden, a benefit that is “immeasurable.”

Ben Domenech:

In the end, the lesson of Nikki Haley’s run is that Donald Trump defeated every wing of the Republican Party along the way to becoming its champion. In 2016, he beat the avatar of Tea Party constitutional populism in Ted Cruz. In 2024, he bested the reformist culture war version of himself in Ron DeSantis, and then dispatched the post-George W. Bush-era form of suburbanite compassionate conservatism in Haley, who speaks in a combination of defense-industry jargon and Bible verses. He even brought the older era of Chamber of Commerce Federalist Society Reaganite to heel, with Mitch McConnell endorsing him today. Trump’s dominance over the GOP is total.

The problem Trump has, of course, is that he can’t win just with that authoritative GOP support. He needs a certain portion of Nikki Haley’s demographic in the six or seven key swing states that will make the difference in this election. That demographic has a strong resistance into being bullied into anything — well-educated suburban voters who are unenthused about an election where they hate both candidates nearly equally, for different reasons. These voters are the reason Glenn Youngkin, Brian Kemp and other Republican politicians who kept Trump at arm’s length were able to win, even over his animosity. As much as Republicans are used to threading the needle on these close national elections, Trump winning them over will dramatically increase his paths to victory.

So how do you do that? Tone is obviously one factor. The more Trump emphasizes winning through success and bringing people into the fold as opposed to driving people out of it and embarking on a mission of revenge, the better. Speaking seriously on issues like abortion and IVF matters. But the vice presidential choice has to be front of mind as well. If there’s one message to take away from Haley’s speech announcing her campaign’s suspension, it was: don’t pick Vivek, or anybody like him. Trump will have to weigh his tendency toward wanting to pick someone who stands as their own man or woman, and presumably the inheritor of the leading candidate for 2028, against the satisfaction of picking a Mini-Me.

What’s clear now is that there was no path for Haley within the Republican nomination once Ron DeSantis left the field. She needed him in the race to keep Trump’s totals lower and have any shot at states where she polled in the forties. It speaks again to the nature of the new populist coalition that makes up the GOP’s primary electorate that even a late-game injection of serious donor money couldn’t make a serious difference. The long-term question for the Republicans, though, is who can lead them after this cycle. Trump the individual has command of this new beast. But there will need to be others as well — and that’s definitely not Nikki Haley.

On the one hand, Biden is not remotely conservative, and neither are his supporters. There is not a single issue on which Democrats have a better position than Republicans. On the other hand, Trump’s cozying up to Vladimir Putin, his anti-free-trade policy and other positions are not mainstream Republican positions either. And that’s all before Trump’s aberrant personality and mouth that would earn him several belts in the face if he said what he says from the protection of distance to people’s faces.

Given that Haley won in just Vermont, Bernie Sanders land, and the District of Columbia, a significant portion, maybe most, of Haley’s voters may be write-offs. Of course, Biden has his own problem with voters who like Arab terrorists — I mean, think Biden is insufficiently stern toward Israel, this country’s oldest ally in the Middle East.