What a Haley or DeSantis win would probably look like
DES MOINES – We’ve long heard that Trump voters would walk across hot coals to vote for him. Well, on Monday night, they trudged through Iowa’s frigid tundra.
Still, just over 110,000 Iowa Republicans ended up voting this year – under 15 percent of Iowa’s 752,000 registered Republicans – and just over half voted for Trump. So, did 56,260 Trump supporters in the Hawkeye State (7.48 percent of the Iowa GOP electorate) deliver a knockout blow to the former president’s GOP challengers?
They certainly narrowed their paths to the nomination. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis put all his chips on Iowa. He did the “full Grassley,” visiting all of Iowa’s 99 counties, yet Trump won 98 of them. (Former U.N. ambassador Nikki Haley took one by a single vote.) Yet he only narrowly edged out Haley – who spent much less time and resources here – for a distant second place. His path to the nomination continues to narrow.
Haley, by contrast, bet on New Hampshire. A surprise second-place showing in Iowa would have given her a boost, but New Hampshire is her do-or-die state. A CNN-University of New Hampshire poll last week showed her trailing Trump by just seven percentage points – within striking distance. (A new Suffolk poll shows Trump leading her by 16 points in a three-way race, and he is up by 13 in the RealClearPolitics average.) Former New Jersey governor Chris Christie’s withdrawal helps her, as she is likely to inherit many of his voters; he had been polling at 11 percent in the RealClearPolitics average. But entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy’s withdrawal likely helps Trump, who stands to inherit most of Ramaswamy’s 5 percent support in the Granite State.
If Haley can pull off a David vs. Goliath win in New Hampshire, she would go into her home state of South Carolina with a head of steam. And if she then pulled an upset there, we would have a real race. On Super Tuesday, there is a number of states up for grabs – including California, Colorado, Maine, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Vermont and Virginia – where Haley could be competitive. It’s a long-shot – maybe even a triple-bank shot – but it’s not impossible.
Ironically, narrowly losing to DeSantis in Iowa actually helps Haley in New Hampshire. If she had pushed DeSantis into third place, he would have had no choice but to quit the race, and a lot of his MAGA-friendly voters in New Hampshire would probably have gone to Trump (where DeSantis is pulling 5.8 percent in the RealClearPolitics average). By staying in, and denying those voters to Trump, he could actually help give her the margin of victory.
So, no, it’s not over, and that is good thing for the GOP – because Haley is a much stronger general election candidate than Trump. In a new CBS News poll, Haley leads Biden by eight percentage points in a headto-head matchup – the only GOP candidate outside the margin of error. The reason she outperforms Trump and DeSantis is that she wins more moderates, independents and voters with college degrees, erases Biden’s edge with women, and peels off more 2020 Biden supporters.
Her GOP critics have pointed to an NBC NewsDes Moines Register survey that found that a 43 percent plurality of Haley primary supporters would vote for Biden in the general election, while just 23 percent would vote for Trump. Far from a negative, that means she has crossover appeal and can win over disaffected Biden 2020 voters that Trump cannot. How did Ronald Reagan beat President Jimmy Carter in 1980? He won over the “Reagan Democrats” – many of whom went on to become Republicans. The key to victory in 2024 could be “Haley Democrats.”
And what if she somehow did pull it off? How great would it be for the GOP if, instead of Vice President Harris, the first female president were an unapologetic conservative, the child of immigrants who came to this country to pursue the American Dream – and raised a daughter who went on to assume the highest office in the land? Haley is the candidate best positioned to do what Biden promised but failed to do – unite the country at a moment when the country desperately needs uniting. There is a hunger for this in America. The vast majority of Americans don’t want a rematch between our two deeply flawed geriatric front-runners. The first party to figure this out – and nominate a young rising star with crossover appeal – would win the 2024 election in a landslide. But to do that, Haley first needs to win the New Hampshire primary.
If she doesn’t win, that opens a narrow path forward for DeSantis. Let’s say Haley falls well short of Trump in New Hampshire and then loses in South Carolina, too. At that point, she’s finished – leaving DeSantis the only challenger left heading into Super Tuesday. Republicans who want someone other than Trump would rally around him – much as they rallied around Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) at the end in 2016. It didn’t work for Cruz, but maybe DeSantis can complete the Hail Mary pass. And he’d be positioned to inherit the nomination if there was a legal development that made a Trump candidacy unviable.
Right now, Trump is the favorite to win the GOP primaries, and Iowa had tightened his grip on the nomination. But it’s not over. In a country of 332 million, just 110,000 people have voted. Calls from Trump supporters to declare the race done are offensive and premature. Let voters have their say. ––Follow Marc A. Thiessen @marcthiessen on X (formerly Twitter).