BLOOMINGTON, Minn. — Before a crowd of hundreds on Monday in the Twin Cities, Republican presidential hopeful Nikki Haley attacked former president Donald Trump on a number of issues and portrayed herself as the more likely candidate to defeat President Joe Biden in a general election.
"We have a decision to make," Haley said on stage in the ballroom of the Bloomington DoubleTree hotel. "Do we go with more of the same? Or do we move in a new direction?"
Haley, the former United Nations Ambassador and governor of South Carolina, lost her home state's primary by double digits to Trump this weekend and promptly lost financial backing from the billionaire Koch network. Trump has called Haley's campaign a "delusion" now that she has lost not only South Carolina, but also New Hampshire and Iowa.
However, Haley remains in the race as Trump's only major challenger and visited Minnesota as part of her campaign blitz of Super Tuesday primary states. She plans to visit Colorado, Utah, Virginia, North Carolina and Massachusetts this week ahead of Super Tuesday on March 5, and already twice visited Michigan, which holds a critical primary and convention in the coming days.
In Bloomington, Haley reframed the early primary results not as a loss, but as a sign of Trump's weakness as a candidate.
"He lost 40 percent of the Republican primary vote in all of the early states. You can't win a general election, if you can't take on that 40 percent," Haley said. "And instead of bringing people in, he's pushing people out. And so the biggest issue is, we need a candidate who can win a general election."
Despite serving in the Trump administration and voting for him twice as president, Haley's tone has shifted somewhat in recent weeks as she has grown more comfortable directly confronting the former president. On Monday evening, she described Trump's COVID relief package as "welfare," accused him of cozying up to Vladimir Putin and Russia, and assailed him for using his influence to torpedo a bipartisan immigration deal in Congress earlier this year.
"We can't wait one more day to secure that border," Haley said. "Congress needs to do their job and Trump needs to stay out of it."
Although the entire Republican congressional delegation has thrown its support behind Trump, Haley was introduced on stage Monday by State Rep. Kristin Robbins and former U.S. Senator Rudy Boschwitz.
"Nikki Haley is a person who is going to put us back on the right path and going to bring people together," Boschwitz said. "She is a person who has the experience and toughness."
The Haley campaign estimated that about 1,500 people attended her campaign stop on Monday evening in Bloomington. Haley's appearance was interrupted a few times by protesters, who were physically escorted out of the hotel ballroom when they shouted at Haley on-stage. After Haley defended their right to express their opinions, the crowd erupted into cheers of "Nikki!" as a counter to the protesters.
Mitch Rauk said he came to see Haley because she brings a "sense of balance" compared to Trump.
"Just steady, focus on results type thing, not focus on revenge or things like that," Rauk said. "I think the majority of us just want someone who is looking out for us as a whole. Whether it's Republican or Democrat, just us."
If Haley loses the nomination, Rauk said he'd have a tough decision to make between Trump and Biden, saying that "it's horrible that we have those two as choices."
Meanwhile, Laura Eisenberg of Minnetonka said she would write-in Haley as a candidate in November no matter what.
"I made that decision a week ago," she said, "to walk away from Biden and do a write-in on Nikki. But I'm hoping that Trump will be in jail so then she will actually be on the ticket."
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