- Nikki Haley isn’t the first presidential hopeful to lose her home state.
- Recent candidates, including Sens. Marco Rubio and Elizabeth Warren, suffered similar fates.
- Not everyone who has such a loss was able to restart their career after.
You can’t always go home.
Former UN Ambassador Nikki Haley learned this the hard way after a drubbing in the South Carolina GOP presidential primary.
This doesn’t have to be the end. While some former presidential hopefuls have dropped out before suffering similar fates, there are a handful who took the negative headlines and pressed on with their careers. One, George H.W. Bush, lost his adopted home state of Texas only to later win the presidency itself. Based on both sides’ recent comments, though, it appears extremely unlikely that Haley will join Trump on the ticket.
Still, Haley vowed earlier this week that she would continue on no matter what.
Even Trump knows some of her pain, though he at least got to be a major party nominee before suffering such a defeat. As a native New Yorker, Trump lost the Empire State in both 2016 and 2020. Many unsuccessful major party nominees, including Sen. Mitt Romney, have lost either their home state, their current state, or both. Sen. George McGovern of South Dakota stands alone in the modern era. Amid a historic 1972 thumping, McGovern carried just Washington DC and Massachusetts.
But for our purposes, we’re just interested in presidential primary home-state defeats. The Washington Post compiled a list of such failures since 1980, pointing out just how devastating such losses were to the campaigns.
