Governor Haley strikes us as making a smart move by refusing to bow out of the race for the Republican nomination after losing — if that’s the word for it — to President Trump by 11 points in New Hampshire. No doubt Mr. Trump won an important victory, against the backdrop of an epic campaign by the Justice Department to put him in the dock before Super Tuesday.* Yet a lot can happen between now and the nominating conventions.

It’s not just that there are important primaries ahead and millions of voters yet to cast primary ballots. The caucuses in Iowa and  primary in New Hampshire, after all, didn’t rack up half a million votes. Before the race is over there will be primaries or caucuses in all 50 states, with, if past is prologue, more than 150 million votes to be cast on election day. “New Hampshire is first in the Nation. It is not last in the nation,” is the way Mrs. Haley put it. 

It might be likely, but it can’t be certain, that Mr. Trump is going to sweep those primaries. A lot can happen over the next nine months, even apart from such actuarial issues as a candidate faltering physically. We, for one, are not confident in the economy as currently being run by the Biden administration and the Federal Reserve. The globe is tempting fate in respect of a world war. A recession, or a hot war, could change the outlook of millions.

The elephant of uncertainty in the room, though, is the pursuit of the 45th president on criminal charges. It’s a campaign that was launched by President Biden’s use of the Justice Department to go after Mr. Trump. Only three days after Mr. Trump announced for president, Mr. Garland appointed a special prosecutor to pursue Mr. Trump. With each passing week since then, the criminal cases have been looking more and more political.

This perception, in our estimate, is shared by millions of Americans, no matter that many were horrified by what happened on January 6, 2021. The investigation of Mr. Trump has been a running abuse of due process, starting with his trial before the J6 Committee in Congress in a violation of the prohibition on attainder — after Mr. Trump was impeached on incitement of insurrection and discovered by the Senate to be not guilty.

Yet we can’t know what the impact would be were Mr. Trump actually put in the dock in a criminal trial and convicted of a crime. We’ve read the polling to suggest that a conviction would knock six points off his standing in the polls. So far, though, Mr. Trump’s support among Republicans has only grown with each ham-handed charge laid against him. Would that trend continue were a trial to be held before the conventions and Mr. Trump to land in the clink?

We aren’t rooting for any of that to happen, but no editorial writer would rule out the possibility. Hence the logic of Governor Haley’s decision to hang in. If the next two months give us a spirited two-man — pardon, two person — race and if Mr. Trump’s circumstances change, the idea is that Mrs. Haley would be the logical candidate to which the GOP would turn. She, after all, has come from a long way back in the first few weeks of the campaign.

President Trump unburdened himself of some harsh language about Mrs. Haley’s refusal to drop out. Yet Larry Kudlow, in a shrewd column, quotes the 45th president as saying, before the results were in, that he wouldn’t mind Mrs. Haley staying in. “Very magnanimous,” is the way Mr. Kudlow describes Mr. Trump’s remark. He reckons this suggests that the 45th president will “continue his ‘unity’ theme, which has been so effective.” 

It will be better for the GOP engagement with voters to have two persons in the next few months. It will make for a better debate, a more efficient refining of the issues, and a sharper campaign against President Biden — or whoever might replace him as the Democratic nominee. For November, at least at the moment, both Mr. Trump and Mrs. Haley are polling better than the socialistic, tax-raising, big spending, appeasement-minded inflationist. 

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* March 5, when the state primaries include Alabama, Arkansas, Alaska, California, Colorado, Iowa, Maine, Massachusetts, Minnesota, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Vermont, and the Old Dominion.