Nikki Haley is testing the limits of big money in GOP presidential politics

Much of the Republican donor class has a distaste for Donald Trump — and maintains the classic tycoon belief that fat wallets can shape the world.

Nikki Haley’s campaign is becoming a grand test of whether they can still change the course of a presidential run.

Major political financiers who have gotten behind Haley in recent weeks include billionaire investor Stanley Druckenmiller, Home Depot co-founder Ken Langone, metals mogul Andy Sabin and LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman, a Democratic megadonor. Citadel hedge fund founder Ken Griffin and Jamie Dimon, the CEO of JP Morgan Chase, have also expressed interest in backing her campaign.

It’s a group of people who can buy anything. Except, perhaps, the Republican nomination for president.

“It’s like having the best bows and arrows in the age of gunpowder,” said Mike Madrid, a Republican strategist who was a co-founder of the anti-Trump Lincoln Project. “That doesn't mean (big money) is not relevant. You can still do some damage with it. You'd rather have it than not, but it’s not going to win the battle anymore.”

Haley and her allies, newly embraced by a cohort of the country’s wealthiest people, are now spending more on television than any of their competitors, including Trump. And as voting starts this month in the first nominating states, she has a trove of resources at her disposal, with the recent endorsement from the Koch-aligned Americans for Prosperity, a top conservative spending group. But it is far from clear that all this financial power can generate a breakthrough for Haley. Big donor kingmakers have lost power steadily in recent years, with their influence eroded by a torrent of small-dollar donations online and Trump’s overpowering grip on the GOP base.

It didn’t help that Republican megadonors vacillated for months before settling on Haley as their preferred champion.

Before Haley’s rise, Wall Street executives and billionaire tech founders spent much of last year eyeing — and even backing — candidates like Ron DeSantis and Tim Scott. It didn’t do anything to alter the course of the race, with the donor class failing to steer the Republican primary electorate to any alternative to Trump. Now they are with Haley, arguably the only candidate left with even a plausible shot of upsetting Trump’s glide path to the nomination. And still, Haley is polling, on average, more than 30 points behind Trump in Iowa, and at best, 15 points behind him in New Hampshire.

“One word explains it, and it’s Trump,” said Tom Tancredo, a former Republican member of Congress and an anti-illegal immigration crusader from Colorado. “Which is one reason why the establishment hates him so much, because they can’t control him through money.

“Nikki Haley is their last hope this go around,” he said.

Armed with big money, Haley is now unloading a barrage of spending in an effort to end DeSantis and catch up to Trump. Her allied super PAC has spent and reserved more on advertisements this primary than any other group — more than $50 million so far, according to the ad tracking firm AdImpact. And her campaign and the super PAC, SFA Fund Inc., are the two top spenders for television ads reserved since Jan. 1.

That’s a major sign of her continued financial strength as the Iowa caucuses and New Hampshire primary approach this month.

In the case of Americans for Prosperity, the organization’s backing of Haley in the Republican primary followed months of testing the waters and considering other candidates — all while Trump continued building his lead. Their endorsement of Haley came at the end of November, just a month and a half before Republicans would start picking a nominee.

A spokesperson for AFP Action said the group has spent nearly $23 million so far in the primary, $5.7 million of which has specifically been on Haley advocacy. That includes a network of field staff it deployed in early primary and Super Tuesday states, so far reaching out to roughly 600,000 voters by phone or at doors since endorsing Haley.

But the only place Haley has begun to close the gap with Trump is in New Hampshire, and she remains locked into a tight race for second place in Iowa, where DeSantis focused heavily throughout the summer and fall.

Meanwhile Trump, with his army of small-dollar donors, is still holding his lead, now polling above 60 percent nationally in the GOP primary. And some major GOP donors are already admitting defeat.

Marc Rowan, a billionaire investor who co-hosted a fundraiser for Scott this summer and gave to his super PAC, in December suggested that the race was destined to be a Trump-Biden rematch, and that he was “disappointed” in the field of candidates.

And at least one major national conservative group that hoped to stop Trump from clinching the nomination has effectively taken to the sidelines for the rest of the GOP contest.

The Club for Growth opened the primary season 10 months ago with a donor retreat in Palm Beach, inviting nearly every major potential candidate except Trump. Their associated super PAC, Win It Back PAC, went on to run anti-Trump television ads this summer, but eventually acknowledged their intervention was doing little stop Trump’s polling lead in the primary.

The group spent just over $6 million on ads, according to AdImpact. But by September, they had informed donors that the strategy of attacking Trump had done nothing to further consolidate the field. Online focus groups suggested the ads made Republican voters like Trump even more.

Since the organization halted its presidential primary spending in late summer, the Club for Growth and Win It Back PAC have declined to make any further commitments about getting involved in the contest — instead featuring Trump in a positive light in multiple ads for down-ballot candidates the group has endorsed.

“I think big money’s dead in this Republican primary,” said Chuck Coughlin, a political strategist in Arizona who left the GOP after Trump’s election. “But I don’t know that it’s dead forever. At some point in time you’ll have the horse race again, after presumably Trump loses again, and you’ll have a vigorous effort to redefine what the party is.”

Candidates like Haley are relying on big money making a comeback. Haley has not yet filed a fourth-quarter fundraising report, due Jan. 15, but her campaign on Wednesday announced it had raised $50 million from 180,000 donors since launching her candidacy, $16.3 million of which came from “digital and mail grassroots efforts” in the final quarter of the year.

Olivia Perez-Cubas, a spokesperson for Haley, said she has donors from all 50 states.

“The vast majority of them are regular Americas who are tired of the chaos in Washington and fed up with Republicans losing,” Perez-Cubas said in a statement to POLITICO. “You can see the groundswell of support in her standing room-only town halls in Iowa and New Hampshire and the number of new supporters. Nikki believes the Republican Party needs to be about bringing new people in and that’s exactly what she’s doing.”

Still, the proportion of Haley's fundraising coming from small-dollar donors, defined as giving less than $200, was less than half Trump's through the end of September, according to a POLITICO analysis of the latest available campaign finance reports. DeSantis’ percentage of small-dollar donors through that period was even less than Haley’s.

Haley’s campaign pointed to her opposition to Wall Street and Silicon Valley bailouts over the years, as well as her resignation from the Boeing board when it sought a bailout, as examples of her willingness to buck the donor class.

In a statement, Trump spokesperson Steven Cheung likened Haley to Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan, calling her “the latest carbon copy from Establishment Central Casting.”

Former Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, who ran unsuccessfully for president in 2016, said the task for Haley, who has benefited from a late consolidation of donor cash, is to “prove to voters that she is her own person.” She received a warm reception after the Republican primary debates, he said, because of her “willingness to say what was on her mind.”

“Voters want leaders who don’t care about what the establishment thinks and are willing to take on the swamp. It is why President Trump has such a large lead,” Walker said, adding that the conservative electorate is hardly susceptible to donor class kingmaking efforts. “Voters — particularly primary voters — want to pick the nominee themselves.”

Corry Bliss, a Republican consultant who ran the Congressional Leadership Fund and American Action Network in 2018 — major outside spending groups supporting House Republican candidates that cycle — said big money may matter less in a presidential race than any other contest. “It’s the only race in the country where voters automatically care,” Bliss said, citing the high name recognition of national candidates and the wall-to-wall coverage they receive.

But in any other political contest today, much less-known candidates are still desperate to get as much cash behind them as possible to get their message out.

“I think if you called every U.S. Senate and U.S. House candidate in the country and asked, ‘Does fundraising matter? Do you want to be the candidate in your race with the bigger super PAC or the smaller super PAC?’” Bliss said, “100 percent would say, ‘I want to be the candidate with the bigger super PAC.’”

And it may find new life in presidential politics, too. Tancredo, who ran a long-shot campaign for president in 2007, said he suspects the influence of the donor class will surge again in GOP presidential nominating when Trump is no longer a candidate.

“Money is just such a pervasive influence in politics,” he said. “The only way to dislodge it is with a person who will grab people by the heart.”