🚀 Nikki Haley’s key aide stays quiet | Semafor
Lerner’s hand is clearly visible in Haley’s simple, patient approach to the 2024 campaign. Unlike her rivals, she’s opted against focusing on a single state — a time-honored path to a moment of glory and a losing campaign. Instead, she’s stretched her focus out to all the primary states, trying to chart a narrow course across the early primaries toward ending up as the sole non-Trump alternative. Her message to voters is also simple: She’s the most electable Republican — and one who can depart from the “chaos” that so often surrounds Trump.
Haley, who pays Lerner’s firm a relatively modest $15,000 monthly retainer, has also been frugal, a preoccupation of Lerner’s (and a marked contrast with DeSantis’s messy, extravagant bid). On Tuesday, the campaign announced it had raised $24 million in the fourth quarter of 2023 — more than doubling their previous fundraising numbers — and entered the new year with $14.5 million cash on hand.
It’s Haley’s own dexterity, however, that has kept her upright, at least until recently, on the near-impossible Republican tightrope. She’s a rare former Trump aide who maintained both her relationship with him and her distance from him, a party of one who is seen neither as Trump’s pawn nor his nemesis. Winning a Republican primary against him may well be impossible, but Haley and Lerner’s careful strategy seem, so far, to have gotten her closer than anyone else.
A very interesting piece on Nikki Haley’s strategy for the GOP nomination, and her strategist, Jon Lerner. #eng