Why doesn’t Nikki Haley want me to vote for her?

Winning elections takes more than just showing up. Winning elections requires that you show voters that you care about them, especially when others might say they don’t matter.

This is something that Bill Clinton understood very well. Watch the documentary “The War Room.” At the very end of the movie, one of the last comments Clinton made — with joy and surprise — was that he and his team even won Nevada. For those from small states, it’s an especially striking moment.

Such moments are a clear indication that Clinton knew what it took to win the Electoral College. When running for president, it’s important to remember that elections are won or lost by picking up the small states. It is a part of the design of the Electoral College, but it is a fact that Al Gore forgot when he ran against George W. Bush in 2000. As much as the American media focused on the Florida results, and as close as they were, if Al Gore had won Nevada, he would have been president of the United States. Instead, he focused massive resources on the big state (Florida) and left Nevada to fend for itself. It was a bad decision.

While Boise Nice can be pretty forgiving, it isn’t foolish. Actions speak louder than words.

This past week, Nikki Haley made a similarly poor decision by treating the Idaho caucuses as something that didn’t matter enough to warrant any real attention. While she and her campaign took the time to invest $50,000 to get her name on the ballot, she decided not to take an hour or two of her time to craft a professional appeal to the state’s Republican voters.

Her lack of professionalism in how she appealed to Idaho voters made me lose faith in her ability as a legitimate candidate for president. You see, I was one of the 13.2% of Idaho Republicans who voted for Haley in our presidential caucus this past Saturday.

When the day began, my wife and I were excited to participate in the caucus and to support Haley as our preferred candidate. We liked her balance of toughness and Southern charm and have long been impressed with her record as governor and as ambassador. We thought that she would be the perfect candidate to defeat Joe Biden in the fall, a candidate who would have a potential for eight more years rather than the four that Trump would be limited to.

As tough a fighter as Trump is, he will only have a short time to accomplish what he starts. What comes next will depend on his vice presidential pick or the next Republican to run. In some ways, Trump will enter office a lame duck on day one, and Haley would not face that same problem. There were other reasons we supported her, but that was a big one.

Our caucus experience started off great. My wife and I experienced firsthand the beauty of American democracy as we volunteered at our district’s event. We helped set up the check-in stations and coordinated to make sure the ballots were securely distributed to participants and that those participants would be able to have a comfortable place to watch videos from Donald Trump’s and Nikki Haley’s campaigns giving their final pitch.

Idaho’s GOP timed the caucus to take place ahead of “Super Tuesday” to ensure that Idaho’s 32 delegates would matter. Due to a snafu by our state legislature, there would be no presidential primary election in Idaho. Dorothy Moon and the party tried to get the legislature to fix the problem and to do so in a way that had Idaho matter in the process, but the legislature failed to address it. That meant that the state party had to step up and run caucuses to select our candidate, and step up the party did. The party created an intuitive and fair process that worked seamlessly at our local precinct.

What the state party had no control over, however, was how the candidates would present themselves. The responsibility for convincing voters like me to vote for a candidate was the job of the Trump and Haley campaigns. The Trump campaign did a stellar job. The campaign put together a highly professional video that addressed the issues that Idahoans care about. Trump took the time to thank Idaho’s representatives by name and demonstrated that he thought we were all in the fight together. He was asking for Idahoans to vote for him, but he was also showing that he cared enough about them to ask them in a thoughtful manner.

The same cannot be said of Nikki Haley’s presentation. My wife and I had watched many news reports about how Haley was on the road making her case as strongly as she could in preparation for Super Tuesday, so we were sympathetic to her time constraints. We knew that she wouldn’t be stopping by Idaho personally, but we did expect her to put together a good pitch for our 32 delegates. We expected Haley to behave like a professional politician who cared about whether we voted for her.

She and her campaign did not deliver. Instead of providing the caucus-goers of Idaho with a professionally produced video that highlighted the issues important to Idaho and demonstrated knowledge of our local politicians, we got the half-baked, “night-before-it’s-due” first-draft essay version of a pitch.

As my wife and I watched Nikki Haley’s video presentation, we could see that it wasn’t persuading any of the caucus-goers who might have been on the fence and considering voting for her. It was even making my wife and me second-guess our support. Where Trump’s presentation had been professionally made and edited, Haley’s was filmed on the fly as she was driving from one place to another on her whirlwind tour to appeal to voters in other states.

How did we know this? We could hear the constant rumbling of her bus engine in the background of the recording, and we could see her rise and fall as the bus drove down the road. We could even tell when the bus hit a pothole, as a sharp “thunk” resonated and her body jumped upward on the screen for a second. Even worse, we could hear the echo of the space she was recording in because she didn’t even take the time to use an external microphone and relied instead on the built-in mic on the laptop she was using to record her message.

My wife and I felt insulted. We didn’t feel that our votes mattered to Haley at all. As much as we think claims that she is a RINO are unfounded, she demonstrated that she wasn’t really interested in Idaho’s votes. We understand that this is Trump country. Idaho is a strongly Republican state with a deep conservative tradition. These features are part of why we moved to the state and why we love it so much, but it is also a state that is defined by things like “Boise Nice.” Idahoans are a polite group, and even the angry Californians who move here eventually come around to that sentiment.

While Boise Nice can be pretty forgiving, it isn’t foolish. Actions speak louder than words. People from the smaller states matter as much as the people from larger states. In presidential elections, they can matter even more because they can tip the balance and bring victory. Nikki Haley treated Idaho as an afterthought. If she hadn’t, she probably would still have lost the caucuses, but she would have earned something else. She would have earned my wife’s and my continued respect. She lost that on Saturday when she demonstrated that she didn’t really care if we voted for her at all.