Mike Pence and Nikki Haley spent millions trying to convince Republican voters to return to Bush-era conservatism.
Trump crushed both of them by historic margins in the 2024 primary.
And four words from Batya Ungar-Sargon just exposed why their old-guard agenda is dead.
Trump's America First agenda buried forever wars RINOs
Mike Pence dropped out of the 2024 presidential race in October 2023 before a single vote was cast.
The former Vice President couldn't even qualify for the third Republican debate despite months of campaigning.
Nikki Haley lasted longer but fared only slightly better — winning just two states out of dozens of contests.¹
She won Washington, D.C., and Vermont, two places that reliably vote Democrat in presidential elections.²
Trump demolished both of them because Republican voters rejected their vision for the party's future.
Ungar-Sargon confronts Short with brutal math
Media analyst Batya Ungar-Sargon recently confronted Marc Short, Mike Pence's longtime advisor, about why these candidates crashed so spectacularly.
Short tried defending Pence and Haley's old-guard, everywhere else focused hawkish foreign policy.
"Vice President Pence's outfit represents exactly the kind of free trade, foreign entanglement, socially conservative agenda that Trump voters have really left behind," Ungar-Sargon said.³
To be clear, Ungar-Sargon couldn’t be more wrong on the last item, but she nevertheless pointed out the obvious math problem with Short's position.
"Nikki Haley ran on that exact platform that you're describing. Maybe you even voted for in the primary. She outspent President Trump two to one, and she only won two states. He blew her out of the water. The voters just aren't there anymore," Ungar-Sargon explained.
Haley spent massive amounts of money trying to position herself as the Trump alternative who could unite independents and so-called “traditional conservatives.”⁴
The problem was the bases’ definition of “traditional conservative” and hers is a little different
Worse for Haley and Pence the base seemed to see a huge gap between what they said about being socially conservative and spending and their records on the latter particularly.
Folks who talk about being hawkish on foreign policy and throw around terms like “national security interest” never figured out that Americans realize those things have become synonyms for cronyism and putting America last.
So the strategy failed miserably across the country except in two of the most liberal voting jurisdictions in America.
Republican primary voters in even South Carolina — Haley's home state — rejected her by double digits.⁵
Short says groups abandoning principles
Short suggested that traditional GOP-alligned organizations have abandoned their founding principles.
"This isn't about Donald Trump," Short declared.
Instead he said it’s about "organizations holding firm” and sticking to what he thinks should be their “values, regardless of who's in the Oval Office."
Short evidently fails to recognize that conservative groups – at least membership ones not beholden to big donors – reflect the members of the organization. Instead, he’s accused them of going silent on Trump because they feared backlash from the President's supporters.
"I think in many cases, many of those same conservative groups have been coward because they don't want to go and criticize President Trump, but they've abandoned those same things they were founded on," Short said. "And we're not going to do that. We're going to stand firm for conservatism."
But Ungar-Sargon questioned whether voters had already rendered their verdict on this style of conservatism.
"Don't the voters get a say in what those values should be? And didn't they have their say when they voted for Trump?" she asked.
Trump campaigned openly on tariffs to protect American manufacturing and ending foreign wars that drain American blood and treasure.
Voters in 2024 knew exactly what they are supposed to be getting with Trump's promises of populist economic nationalism.
With enormous sums of taxpayer dollars still heading out of the country to places like Ukraine and the Middle East, thus far tariff policy has been the major change voters have seen implemented.
Nevertheless, voters chose the America First agenda overwhelmingly over the warmed-over Bush-era policies Pence and Haley offered, and the Trump base remains largely hopeful with three years to go in Trump’s second term.
Trump voters rejected failed establishment policies
Short doubled down on putting America last as somehow being “very conservative.”
"I think a lot of voters voted for Donald Trump because they thought it'd be a repeat of the first administration, and the first administration was very conservative," Short explained.
Ungar-Sargon called out this obvious dodge.
"But he did campaign on tariffs," she said. "He campaigned on ending the war in Ukraine and ending our support for it, right? So a lot of these things, ending the foreign entanglements, a protectionist economic agenda that says no to free trade."
Trump's 2024 campaign featured the same America First themes that energized his 2016 victory.
The difference was Pence and Haley couldn't read the room about what Republican voters actually wanted and certainly weren’t going to be in the second administration putting their thumbs on scale like in the first term.
Pence spent his entire campaign attacking Trump on spending and social issues.⁶
Which might have worked if voters believed he’d be more of an actual conservative on those topics than a compromiser and lackey for big corporate interests and cronies in the military industrial blob.
Republican voters delivered their verdict
Ungar-Sargon ultimately acknowledged Short's right to hold unpopular positions.
"I truly admire that, because I admire anybody who takes an unpopular stand," she said. "But I think in admitting that it's unpopular, you're sort of admitting that the electorate is not there anymore."
Short refused to concede the point about his agenda's unpopularity with Republican voters.
Republican primary voters delivered their verdict on Pence and Haley's vision for the party.
They crushed both candidates who ran on supposed free trade agreements, so-called “nation-building” wars, and corporate favors for multinational companies.
Trump's working-class coalition wants politicians who fight for Americans, not Wall Street and foreign interests.
The Republican Party base moved on from the Bush-Cheney era a decade ago.
Pence and Haley, and all too many other politicians just don’t seem to have gotten the memo.
Sadly, if the powers that be in the GOP don’t get with it soon, it might not be that 2026 is a disaster but 2028 too.
¹ Nikki Haley, "Haley wins Vermont, the only state to spurn Donald Trump in the Republican presidential primary," VTDigger, March 6, 2024.
² Ibid.
³ Batya Ungar-Sargon debate with Marc Short, December 2025.
⁴ "As Donald Trump leans on former 2024 rivals, Nikki Haley's support remains elusive," CNN Politics, May 1, 2024.
⁵ "Nikki Haley wins Vermont primary," 19th News, March 6, 2024.
⁶ "Mike Pence: Donald Trump has been 'walking away' from conservative principles," NBC News, June 18, 2023.
