Haley made the announcement during a Q&A session at the Hudson Institute, a conservative think tank, on Wednesday. They were the first public comments the former Trump administration official had made since dropping out of the GOP presidential primary earlier this year.
She made the remarks after a speech hitting both Biden and those Republicans opposed to aiding Ukraine. Asked who she thought would be better on foreign policy, Trump or Biden, Haley emphasized that her priority as a voter was to support a candidate who aligned with her views on national security, border and fiscal issues.
“Trump has not been perfect on these policies,” Haley said. “I’ve made that clear, many, many times. But Biden has been a catastrophe. So, I will be voting for Trump.”
The remarks drew swift condemnation from anti-Trump Republicans, including former Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-Ill.), who called her support for the former president “pathetic.”
Less predictable will be the reaction from those voters who backed Haley in primaries even after she had dropped her challenge to Trump.
Just earlier this week, Haley won more than 6 percent of the vote in the Republican primary in red-leaning Kentucky. She had previously racked up significant vote shares in states like Maryland, Nebraska and West Virginia.
“She’s seeing a consistent message that is coming back off of these primary election results,” Dave Wilson, a South Carolina-based Republican strategist, told The Hill earlier this month. “There is a significant chunk of people, Republican primary voters, who are saying they don’t want Donald Trump.”
But it remains unclear whether those voters will follow her lead and vote for Trump in November. Biden’s campaign has already made an effort to reach out to them and brushes off the threat that her pseudo-endorsement of the former president could hurt the incumbent.
“Nothing has changed for the millions of Republican voters who continue to cast their ballots against Donald Trump in the primaries and care deeply about the future of our democracy,” Michael Tyler, a Biden campaign aide, said in a statement to The New York Times. “Only one candidate shares those values, and only one campaign is working hard every day to earn their support — and that’s President Biden’s.”
