Nikki Haley has gained ground — but GOP rules mean it may result in few delegates

CHARLESTON, S.C. — Nikki Haley is framing her path to the GOP presidential nomination as a long, state-by-state war of attrition. But while Haley battles for public opinion, the GOP is doling out delegates — and those rules are designed to create blowouts.

Haley spent much of the week in her home state, South Carolina, and she’s closing the week with a trip to Texas, one of the many states holding contests on Super Tuesday in early March. But both states and many others on Haley’s path forward handsomely reward candidates who can win majorities of the vote in states or congressional districts — a likely outcome in what’s now a one-on-one race, with Haley, the former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, trailing significantly in public polling.

Even if Haley makes things relatively close against Donald Trump — say, by pushing into the 40s in primary vote share, like she did in New Hampshire — she could quickly get buried by a big delegate advantage for the former president as states start to dole out delegates at a breakneck pace. Unlike in a Democratic presidential primary, in which winning 40% of the vote translates to winning about 40% of the delegates, the GOP’s rules make it easier for a front-runner to collect all or the vast majority of the delegates available.

The only way Haley can prevent that from happening is to yank Republican public opinion into a fundamentally different place, after a race in which even four indictments haven’t pushed Trump off course.

“A number of people say the rules are Trump’s firewall. I guess that’s true, but it’s a conditional firewall: It only exists if Trump is super popular,” Josh Putnam, a political scientist specializing in presidential nominating procedures and a