Tweet Share Share Comment With exactly a month to go until the first nominating contest of the presidential race begins in Iowa, Nikki Haley has a few things going for her.
• She’s established as the non–Donald Trump candidate that members of the press (and betting markets) believe to have best chance of winning the nomination.
• She has a base of Republican donors on Wall Street and elsewhere that could help her end the fourth quarter in a better financial position than primary rival Ron DeSantis, whose fundraising has slowed.
• As of this week, she’s been endorsed by Republican New Hampshire governor (and Trump critic) Chris Sununu, which could boost her poll numbers in, yes, New Hampshire.
• And she has a well-established advantage over Joe Biden in head-to-head general election polls—leading him 51–34, for example, in a recent Wall Street Journal poll. In the same poll, Trump only led Biden by 4.
Those are significant assets for a candidate to have. One thing she lacks, though, is any momentum in Iowa: According to a Des Moines Register/NBC News/Mediacom Iowa poll released this week, Haley’s support in the state remains flat at 16 percent, the same level she enjoyed in October before the surge of attention around her campaign. Doing well in Iowa isn’t everything—Ted Cruz won it last time—but Trump’s campaign would surely frame an overwhelming victory in the very first contest as evidence of his inevitability.
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Haley’s not doing that much better in the other early states, and, more to the point, doesn’t have any evident plan to do anything about it. As every article about this subject must acknowledge, it’s possible that there was nothing a non-Trump candidate could have done to ultimately surpass him—but as Jonathan Martin wrote in Politico last week, it’s not as if the makings of an anti-Trump coalition don’t exist. There are large handfuls of former Trump administration officials who believe he’s unfit for the office; there are current and former primary candidates like Chris Christie and Tim Scott who could be offered something for their dropping out and/or endorsing a non-Trump option; and as Mitt Romney and others have said, there are Republicans in Congress who are publicly supportive of Trump, but in private recognize that he is damaging the party’s national brand.
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Haley hasn’t tried to organize these potential allies, nor to make a case against Trump herself. She approached what may have been the final GOP debate with surprising passivity, alluding only in passing to her head-to-head advantage over Biden and making very oblique reference to Trump (in her closing statement, she said that she doesn’t engage in “whining” or “vendettas,” which, we suppose, is at least fairly direct as indirect criticisms go, if that makes sense).
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Sarah Longwell, a Republican consultant who’s become known for conducting focus groups of Trump supporters and other voters, suggested that there might be a practical explanation for Haley’s low-energy performance. “When you move into a pole position in a campaign, as she’s done, people call you with lots of advice,” Longwell said. “Donors call you with advice, consultants call you with advice. And she seemed like she might be kind of frozen by that, by the stakes and expectations being high for her.”
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Even granting her a mulligan on the debate, though, why isn’t Haley inundating early-state voters with messaging that touts her landslide-level poll advantage against Biden? Longwell has a theory. “I would guess that when they test an electability argument, they get pushback from two-time Trump voters. Because she can’t say that Trump lost last time—if you say that, you’ve broken a cardinal rule. Voters see Trump as perfectly electable.” This is not entirely a matter of stolen-election delusion, she notes, given how angsty Democrats have gotten about polling that shows Trump leading Biden, albeit by smaller margins than Haley does, in key states. “When Democrats are constantly talking about the fact that Trump can win, what happens is that Republicans start to believe that Democrats are really afraid of him,” Longwell added.
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Apostate Republican operative Tim Miller is less sympathetic to Team Haley. “I think they are running a CYA campaign,” he said. (CYA stands for Cover Your Ass.) “It keeps her viable while hoping for an act of God.” That act, presumably, would be a Trump health problem or a late-spring conviction in his federal Jan. 6 trial—and two separate developments in the appeals courts are now threatening to push that trial back. Miller compared Haley’s approach to that taken by 2016 candidates like Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio, who rationalized their aversion to confronting Trump on strategic grounds until well past the point that they were, as the kids say, cooked. “If the 2016 trend continues,” Miller said, “she’ll probably lash out at him right before she drops out.”
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As Longwell puts it, “a lot of it comes down to whether you really want to win. If she really wants to win, she should be going bananas right now. Making the case for herself, pretending that Ron DeSantis doesn’t exist, going after Trump, saying he’s too old.” Longwell, like Miller, derided the tactic of making only coded references to the front-runner. “People don’t hear euphemisms,” she said. “They don’t play these subtlety games.” (Trump, if nothing else, has challenged the conventional wisdom that “going negative” too early in a campaign will backfire. The man lives in the negative.)
The next month will answer the question of whether Haley, in her private moments, actually daydreams about being inaugurated in 2025. “I think a lot of the candidates in this race were playing to live to fight another day in the Republican Party,” Longwell said. “They wanted to come in second so it looks like they’re the heir apparent, to have outperformed DeSantis, and to position themselves for the next election.” Ms. Haley, at long last—are you going to go bananas, or not?
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