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

Contributing sentiments towards policy:

57% : Fully 61% said Trump should remain the party's leader.
57% : Here and now, it's Haley and Trump alone, competing according to the GOP's rules.
56% : GOP nominating contests have always featured a healthy number of states with those kinds of rules, but more have shifted that way since Trump first ran in 2016.
53% : And Trump continues to hold major sway with the majority of GOP primary voters.
52% : 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 nonpartisan consultant at FHQ Strategies, told NBC News.
42% : 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.
28% : An NBC News poll released last week found that 79% of GOP primary voters said they preferred Haley over Trump in a hypothetical presidential nominating contest.
28% : It's one reason she has upped her rhetoric about Trump in recent weeks -- blasting him as "unhinged" and "not qualified to be the president of the United States.
27% : 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.
26% : 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.
13% : Haley's campaign criticized the caucus process as "rigged for Trump," and she lost the nonbinding primary to "none of these candidates."

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