Haley can’t beat Trump — but she can hurt him
Nikki Haley absorbed a double-digit loss to Donald Trump in the New Hampshire Republican primary, but vowed to soldier on: “This race is far from over,” she said Tuesday night. But in truth, as the saying goes, it’s all over but the shouting.
I went to Haley’s Monday night rally in Salem, New Hampshire, and as I sat there watching her throw the softest possible punches at Trump, it occurred to me that she doesn’t even appear to be running to beat Trump but merely to prove that she can compete with him. I don’t even get the sense that she thinks she can win.
She knows how to jab but no knockout is forthcoming.
In the Republican race, Haley is the last real challenger standing of a truly sad lot, many of whom have since tucked their tails in submission to Trump. And some, like Vivek Ramaswamy and Tim Scott, have endorsed the former president in such a bromanceish, sycophantic fashion that it makes the way Mike Pence used to gush over Trump’s “broad shoulders” pale in comparison.
Haley’s survival is a testament not to a steel spine but to a gelatinous one: her Play-Doh-like tendency to try to fit the mold of whomever she’s talking to; her attempts to be authoritative while simultaneously tying herself into knots trying not to offend a Republican base that has ditched her brand of Republicanism.
And although she has lately ramped up her verbal attacks on Trump, those attacks are wobbly and mostly trivial. Haley still suffers from what brought down most of Trump’s other opponents: She doesn’t want to vanquish him as much as tiptoe past him.
Haley keeps insisting that she’d do better than Trump in a general election matchup with President Joe Biden, pointing to the other side of a mountain that won’t be moved.
Trump won’t just go away; he’ll have to be defeated. And Haley can’t defeat him because she has no answer for the central problem: She needs the support of a group of voters who are religiously devoted to him.
However, I do believe that the longer she stays in the race, the more damage she’ll do to Trump’s bid. She has begun to highlight his shopworn, confusedsounding rants. We’ve spent a lot of time focusing on Biden’s age and acuity, but Trump is almost as old. He flubs and gaffes, too. Haley is drawing out a small piece of the unvarnished version of Trump.
As McKay Coppins smartly observed this month in The Atlantic, Trump has become an abstraction to voters, existing in many Americans’ minds “as a hazy silhouette — formed by preconceived notions and outdated impressions — rather than as an actual person who’s telling the country every day who he is and what he plans to do with a second term.” And what he plans is pretty terrifying.
I saw this haziness firsthand at a polling place in New Hampshire on Tuesday, as many of the people voting for Trump described him to me in hagiographic terms. I’ve seen it even among some liberals who’ve somehow forgotten the agita and anguish that the Trump years produced.
It’s probably not her intention but Haley is providing a service to the nation: a soft launch of reminding voters that Trump is a chaos agent of the highest order who put the nation through a dizzying series of unnecessary crucibles that tested the very durability of our institutions and our ability to withstand his anti-democratic onslaught.
Haley has begun to do the work that Biden and his campaign team will greatly expand on — if they’re smart. Because from my conversations at that same polling place, I gathered that some of Trump’s support isn’t as intense and devoted as I thought it was. Several of the people who told me that they voted for him are also worried about the criminal cases against him.
Right now, Trump is using the backdrop of his pending criminal cases to present himself as a victim. But as we move toward the general election and also the possibility of actual trials, his victim narrative may lose its value as a political advantage and become something more like a millstone.
I arrived in New Hampshire troubled about the prospect of a second Trump presidency — a very real possibility — but I leave it buoyed by the sense that he’s weaker than he appears and that Haley’s jabs, though not that effective, are only the precursors to the haymakers that the Biden campaign could land.
Charles M. Blow is a columnist for The New York Times.
Ben Mathis-Lilley
Well, that was fun! (Was it?)
Former South Carolina governor and Trump-era U.N. ambassador Nikki Haley started her presidential campaign last February as a second- or third-tier candidate.
She was most similar to fellow South Carolinian Tim Scott — both relatively polished, TV-ready Republicans with solid resumés who seemed like they should run for president at some point even if there wasn’t much of a case for why they should be doing it now.
Donald Trump was leading the race by a wide margin, and Haley (like Scott, who dropped out in November) made the decision not to attack him directly, hoping that voters would get tired of the “chaos” around Trump on their own.
This didn’t happen—chaos is a good thing, apparently, to voters who are mad enough.
But Haley did better than the other non-Trump candidates, finding a niche at primary debates as the one person who would at least attempt to sell Republican policies (on abortion, in particular) to a general audience. She got a decent poll bump from this, and attracted financial support from conservatives in the business and finance donor community, most notably the Kochs’ Americans for Prosperity organization.
The state she was always set up to do the best in was New Hampshire, which has a local fetish for moderate politicians and rules which allow independent voters to swing on over to whichever primary they feel like voting in. (Centrist Democrats Pete Buttigieg and Amy Klobuchar did well there in 2020, although the contest was still won by a leftist from the adjacent state of Vermont.)
This time around, Chris Christie dropped out of the Republican race a few weeks before New Hampshire, removing Haley’s only competition for voters who actively dislike Trump. Two days before the primary, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis dropped out, clearing the field for Haley and Trump altogether and, in theory, simplifying the stakes for Republicans who aren’t anti-Trump per se but might have the nagging feeling, in the back of their heads, that someone else would have a better chance of beating Joe Biden this fall, perhaps because polls keep showing this over and over.
And …. in this context, Haley lost— and by enough that the Associated Press called the race ten minutes after the last polls in the state closed at 8 p.m. ET. She can now look forward to voting in South Carolina, where she trails Trump by 30, and then to … a bunch of other states where Trump leads by more than that.
Where does that leave her campaign? I cannot see into the mind of the kind of person who would run for president against Donald Trump without being willing to criticize him but Haley gave a defiant speech Tuesday night, while her campaign manager said in a memo she thinks Haley still can be competitive in “Virginia, Texas, Maine, Massachusetts, Minnesota, North Carolina, and Vermont” on March 5, a.k.a. Super Tuesday.
Those states feature relatively educated electorates—Haley does better with voters who have college degrees— and/or allow Democrats and independents to cross over into the GOP primary, so it’s not the worst argument, but …. no. Exit polling in New Hampshire found that Trump won registered Republicans on Tuesday by 50 points. Strange things have happened in American politics recently, but the Republican Party awarding its nomination to someone who is losing its voters by 50 is not going to be one of them. (Who’s in the best position to get nominated in the event of an incapacitating Trump health event or felony conviction? That would probably be Meatball Ronald, thanks to his decision to get out of the race before he was considered an active nuisance to the party.)
So, probably, give or take a Glenn Youngkin trial balloon that will get shot down with a cannon by actual voters, November’s matchup is all but officially set between Biden and Trump. And now, it appears, the news cycle is about to turn its merciless eye away from Biden’s poor favorability numbers toward the swathes of Republican and independent voters who say that they will not vote for Trump under any circumstances—not to mention the Democrats who haven’t been paying attention to the news and will likely come home to Biden after they realize that the Republicans are really, truly nominating Donald J. Trump again.
(Can you blame them for not believing this? It’s a bad idea!) General election 2024 is underway—may God help us all.
Ben Mathis-Lilley is a columnist for Slate.