The Daily Telegraph - Saturday
Haley’s cunning plan to snatch Trump support
Ahead of the Iowa caucus on Monday, the former UN ambassador is snapping at her old boss’s heels
Nikki Haley has finally worked out how to deal with Donald Trump.
The former South Carolina governor, who served in Mr Trump’s administration as UN ambassador, has always been uneasy about criticising her former boss. But like all of Mr Trump’s challengers she must strike a delicate balance between poaching supporters from his enormous polling lead and upsetting the “Make America Great Again” wing of the party.
As the clock ticks down to the Iowa caucus on Monday – the first round of state-by-state voting to decide the Republican presidential nominee – Ms Haley has a new message about Mr Trump: he might have good ideas, but he is more trouble than he’s worth.
“I think president Trump was the right president at the right time to break the things that we needed,” she told a packed room of voters in Ankeny, near Des Moines, on Thursday.
“I agreed with a lot of his policies. But rightly or wrongly, chaos follows him.”
“We can’t be a country in disarray and have a world on fire, and go to four more years of chaos because we won’t survive it.”
The message is designed to smooth over the differences between Ms Haley’s establishment wing of the GOP and Mr Trump’s anarchic supporters. And it appears to be landing, to an extent. Polls last night showed Ms Haley leapfrogging her rivals to take second place in Iowa.
Candidates are criss-crossing a rural state the size of England, cars skidding on ice and snow with temperatures lower than -20C, to meet with voters.
Anne Darby, a retired teacher and former Trump supporter who runs a children’s riding school, said: “I agree with a lot of what Trump did, but I feel like he’s an alienator. I don’t want him back in office. I don’t like him. I want somebody who can talk to both sides.”
Tom Agnigsch, a retired IT director, agrees. “Chaos follows. We need somebody with higher moral conviction, better character,” he said.
Unlike Ron DeSantis, who has thrown almost all of his campaign’s resources into the Iowa caucus, Ms Haley is playing a longer game.
Her campaign team originally expected to perform poorly in Iowa – a socially conservative, rural state – and have focused on building a ground campaign in the next two primaries.
In New Hampshire she now has a chance of overtaking Mr Trump, after Chris Christie, her main rival on the party’s moderate wing, suspended his campaign.
Prior to his withdrawal, Mr Christie had 12 per cent support in New Hampshire, enough to give Ms Haley the edge on Mr Trump if all of his supporters switch to her.
South Carolina, her home state, votes at the end of February, when Ms Haley’s team hope she will have built enough momentum to switch from underdog to frontrunner.
What her team never expected was that she would overtake Mr DeSantis in Iowa, where the Florida governor has spent weeks tirelessly travelling through almost every town in the state. A new poll released on Friday showed her in second place, with the support of 20 per cent of GOP voters to Mr Trump’s 54 per cent.
Those close to her hope that beating Mr DeSantis in Iowa could knock him out altogether. Eric Levine, a Haley campaign fundraiser, said: “I think Monday is the end of the DeSantis campaign, and then it’s just Haley versus Trump,” said Eric Levine, a Haley campaign fundraiser in New York.
“I think this potentially becomes a long drawn out slugfest between Trump and Nikki Haley. And I think at the end of the day, I remain hopeful that she can pull it off.”
“All of a sudden now, Trump is focussed on her. He was attacking DeSantis, he was attacking Biden.
“Now he’s just focused exclusively on her. He obviously sees her as a threat. He wouldn’t be wasting his breath on her if he didn’t think she was a threat to him.”
For all the good news in the polls for Ms Haley, there are some who remain sceptical about her ability to overtake Mr Trump on a national scale.
There are major policy differences between the pair. Mr Trump has said he would end US support for Ukraine and end the war in “one day”, while Ms Haley has been a vocal supporter of American involvement abroad.
On abortion, Ms Haley has dodged questions about nationwide bans and says she would leave the decisions to individual states. Mr Trump has hinted he would look at federal action, if broad support could be found.
‘I think Monday is the end of the DeSantis campaign, and then it’s just Haley versus Trump’
Ms Haley prefers instead to point to polls showing that she would beat Joe Biden by a larger margin – paving the way for Republican domination of Washington.
“That’s bigger than the presidency,” she said. “You go into DC with a double digit win – that’s a mandate, to stop the wasteful spending, get our economy back on track … to get our kids reading again and go back to the basics on education.”
Reaching the crescendo of her stump speech, she finishes: “A mandate to bring life back to our country and a mandate for a strong America we can be proud of. Don’t you want that again?”
With just three days to go until voters hit the polls, it increasingly feels like they do.