Tweet Share Share Comment Well, well, well: If it isn’t an authentic presidential primary surge/boomlet! Former South Carolina Gov. and United States ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley is en fuego. This fall, she’s up almost 10 points in Iowa and 15 points in New Hampshire; she also maintains a strong position in her native state. She keeps winning polls that ask voters who they think won the most recent Republican debate. She’s pulling donors away from Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis—and is even possibly on the verge of landing the support of big-fish billionaire Ken Griffin. Her squishy, poll-informed position on abortion—combined with her relative youth and her canny decision not to have been president when inflation went wild—would likely make her a good general election candidate against Joe Biden.
Do we have a real race on our hands? Not between Haley and Donald Trump, or at least not yet. While she has moved into position to finish in what her campaign is no doubt prepared to call “a strong second” in early primary states, Trump remains in what experts call “an even stronger and way-ahead first.” And say what you will about the moral aspects of Haley’s decision not to directly denounce Trump, but it was probably the right one strategically. She’s not going to take him down, and attempts to do so will only make her unpopular. She’s just got to wait.
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Trump is thus, more immediately, racing against time and the Department of Justice. Can he win the nomination before being convicted of one of the sundry crimes he’s been accused of—a conviction that some voters say would change their minds about whether they are willing to make him president again, and possibly make Haley relevant? His first criminal trial is likely to cover the federal charges against him for attempting to overturn the 2020 election; it’s scheduled to begin in the District of Columbia in March, and prosecutors say they expect to take about six weeks to make their case (which would be followed by the defense’s case, closing arguments, etc.).
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Read More In the meantime, Haley exists in an unprecedented state, a Schrödinger’s semi-front-runner. Her best asset as a candidate, basically, is that in her bearing, ideological positions, and possession of ineffable trail-mentum, she comes off as someone who might plausibly become president. But she also needs to continue knife fighting with second-tier candidates in a way that front-runners typically don’t want to reduce themselves to. The more of them she can force out of the race, the more support she can consolidate and the better prepared she’ll be to take advantage of a potential “conviction dip” in Trump’s polling.
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So she has an incentive to keep kicking DeSantis on his way down—feuding with him, for instance, over whose gubernatorial administration was more receptive to Chinese investment—in the hopes that he’ll finish in a distant third in Iowa and run out of money. She’s rolling out fringey ideas like criminalizing anonymous social media posting to compete with Vivek Ramaswamy, the race’s most outside-the-box thinker. (Or, at least, that’s the best/only explanation that exists for suggesting something that’s prohibited by the very first amendment to the Constitution.)
In fact, the AP reported Monday, Haley is launching a $10 million ad campaign in Iowa and New Hampshire whose purpose is to further erode support for DeSantis. And Axios reported Thursday that fundraiser Spencer Zwick, who has worked with Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan, is joining Haley’s team to help continue harvesting cash from the kind of Wall Street Republicans who initially backed DeSantis. A buzzy, big-money campaign barrage targeting a guy whose support is at 15 percent and falling? Only in America, only in 2024.
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