Tag: former South Carolina governor

Trump Is About to Steamroll Nikki Haley

[ad_1]

If one word could sum up Nikki Haley’s ambivalent challenge to Donald Trump in the New Hampshire Republican primary, that word might be: if.

If as used by New Hampshire’s Republican Governor Chris Sununu, Haley’s most prominent supporter in the state, when he concluded his energetic introduction of her at a large rally in Manchester on Friday night. “If you think Donald Trump is a threat to democracy, don’t sit on your couch and not participate in democracy,” Sununu insisted. “You gotta go vote, right?”

In that formulation, if served as more shield than sword. By framing his argument that way, Sununu clearly intended to appeal to the voters who do consider Trump a threat to democracy, but without endorsing that sentiment himself.

That slight hesitation about fully confronting the GOP’s fearsome front-runner has been the consistent attitude of Haley’s campaign. Haley, the former South Carolina governor, has shown impressive political skills and steely discipline to outmaneuver a large field of men and emerge as the most viable remaining alternative to Trump. She has displayed fortitude in soldiering on against Trump as a procession of Republican elected officials has endorsed him for the nomination over the past few weeks. And beginning with her speech last Monday night after the Iowa caucus, Haley has turned up the volume on her own criticism of Trump, yoking him to Joe Biden as too old and divisive. “With me, you’ll get no drama, no vendettas, no vengeance,” she told the crowd on Friday night.

But in this possibly decisive week of the GOP race, Haley has made clear that she will go so far and no further in criticizing or challenging Trump, just as Sununu did with his telltale if. Tuesday’s New Hampshire primary realistically represents the last chance for Haley to stop, or even slow, the former president’s march to his third consecutive GOP nomination. If Trump wins, especially by a big margin, he will be on a glide path to becoming the nominee. Nothing Haley has done this week reflects the gravity of that moment. “She’s got to swing for the fences, and so far she’s just throwing out bunts,” Mark McKinnon, who served as the chief media adviser to George W. Bush’s two presidential campaigns, told me.

Read: What Trump’s victory in Iowa reveals

Many New Hampshire political leaders resistant to Trump fear that Haley has not done nearly enough to generate a surge of turnout among independent voters—known locally as “undeclared voters.” Mike Dennehy, a longtime GOP strategist in New Hampshire, says that Haley’s messaging to these undeclared voters has lacked enough urgency to generate the brushfire of excitement she needs among them. “In my opinion, she’s not doing what she needs to do to connect with independent voters,” Dennehy told me. Haley, he believes, should be framing the choice to New Hampshire voters much more starkly, telling them: “It’s the end of the road here; I’m your last chance to stop a Trump-Biden rematch.” Haley fleetingly raised that argument in her remarks following the Iowa caucus, but it has receded as she’s reverted toward her standard stump speech in New Hampshire.

McKinnon and Dennehy know something about New Hampshire presidential campaigns that catch fire among independents. Dennehy was the New Hampshire campaign manager for then–Senator John McCain when he stunned George W. Bush, McKinnon’s candidate, in the 2000 New Hampshire primary. Bush arrived after a big win in the kickoff Iowa caucus and held a commanding lead in national polls. On the day of that New Hampshire primary, I had lunch with McKinnon; Matthew Dowd, the campaign’s voter-targeting guru; and Karl Rove, Bush’s chief strategist. They were relaxed, confident, and starting to kick around ideas for how they would contest the general election, while I scribbled in a notebook. Then, halfway through the lunch, Rove took a call, abruptly left the table, and never came back. The reason for his sudden summons back to campaign headquarters became apparent a few hours later: McCain that night beat Bush among independent voters by three to one, exit polls found, and won the state overall by nearly 20 percentage points.

In retrospect, McKinnon said, the Bush campaign should have seen what was coming. “McCain was definitely on fire; you could feel it on the ground,” he told me. For months McCain had held lengthy town halls across the state, answering questions for hours and then driving to the next event on the “Straight Talk Express” campaign bus, taking questions from reporters for hours more. He was provocative, funny, unfiltered, and unafraid of challenging Republican orthodoxy. “He was entirely authentic, entirely accessible; he was campaigning like he was running for governor of New Hampshire, steely, granite-like,” McKinnon recalled.

Like McCain, Haley has burrowed into New Hampshire with months of grassroots events. But the similarities stop there. Haley’s town halls are much more structured and controlled; sometimes she doesn’t even take questions from the audience. Her interactions with reporters are limited and often stilted. And she made a choice this week to reject debates by ABC and CNN unless Trump also participated, which forced the sponsors to cancel the sessions. Some Republican strategists are sympathetic to her decision not to appear again with Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, but more of the people I spoke with believe that by withdrawing, she forfeited the biggest platforms she would have had this week to drive a message to New Hampshire voters. “It’s about pulling as many independents out to vote as you can, and you can’t get to those independents if you don’t go on places like CNN and WMUR,” Dennehy said, referring to the powerful local New Hampshire television station that would have co-hosted one of the debates with ABC.

Read: The end is coming for Trump’s GOP rivals

Haley is pushing a tougher message against Trump than she was before Iowa. When a reporter this weekend asked her what her closing message was to New Hampshire voters, Haley replied, “Americans deserve better than what the options are. You’ve got Biden and Trump both distracted with investigations, both distracted with other things that aren’t about how to make Americans’ lives safer and better.” She says flatly that Trump is lying about her record and that America should not have to choose between two roughly 80-year-old candidates. After Trump at a Friday-night rally confused Haley with former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi during an extended monologue about the January 6 riot, Haley on Saturday responded by questioning his mental acuity: “When you’re dealing with the pressures of a presidency, we can’t have someone else that we question whether they’re mentally fit to do this.” And she’s been willing to differentiate from Trump on issues where she can reaffirm positions that were considered conservative in the Ronald Reagan–era GOP. That includes criticizing Trump for running up the federal deficit, not taking a tough enough stand against China, and playing “footsy,” as she termed it, with dictators such as Russia’s Vladimir Putin.

But Haley has muffled her case against Trump by more often refusing to confront him or by even defending him. When asked by CNN’s Dana Bash last week about Trump being held liable for sexual abuse in the defamation case brought against him by writer E. Jean Carroll, Haley implausibly replied, “I haven’t paid attention to his cases.” Last Friday, reporters asked Haley whether she saw racism in Trump’s multiplying jabs at her immigrant ancestry, which included reposting an inaccurate “birther”-like claim that she was ineligible to run because her parents had not been U.S. citizens when she was born. Her response could not have been more tepid: “I’ll let people decide what he means by his attacks.”

Haley has also continued to insist that, if elected, she would pardon Trump should he be convicted in any of the cases against him. Hours before the Iowa caucuses last Monday, she told a Fox News anchor that she would vote for Trump over Biden “any day of the week.” She’s closing her New Hampshire campaign with an unusual three-minute ad centered on a testimonial to her compassion and commitment from the mother of Otto Warmbier, the American college student who died in North Korean captivity; but nowhere does the ad criticize Trump for his coziness with the North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un. In Haley’s stump speech to New Hampshire voters, she still declares that chaos “follows” Trump “rightly or wrongly,” as he if is potentially just an innocent bystander to all the firestorms that he ignites with his words and actions. (Haley does Olympic-level contortions to avoid expressing any value judgments about Trump.) On Saturday, she even tempered her criticism of Trump’s confusion the night before when she reassuringly told a Fox interviewer, “I’m not saying that this is a Joe Biden situation.” To truly threaten a front-runner as commanding as Trump, “you’ve just got to throw caution to the wind,” McKinnon said. “And it’s the opposite with Haley: The wind throws caution to her.”

The evidence from Iowa suggests that Haley’s cautious approach has left her with a coalition too narrow to make a strong stand. With Trump bashing her in ads and his stump speech as “liberal” and “weak,” particularly on issues relating to immigration, Haley predictably ran poorly in Iowa among the most conservative voters, according to the entrance poll conducted by Edison Research for a consortium of media organizations.

But although she performed better among more moderate elements of the GOP coalition—particularly those with four-year college degrees—she failed to inspire enough of them to come out and vote on a cold night. In Iowa, Haley won her highest share of the vote in the most populous urban and suburban counties. But the total number of votes she won in the big counties was only a fraction of the total that had come out for Marco Rubio, a candidate who appealed to a similar coalition, in the 2016 GOP caucus. Max Rust, a data analyst at The Wall Street Journal, told me in an email that his unpublished analysis found that Iowa turnout fell more compared with 2016 in better educated and more affluent areas than in rural and blue-collar places. “I was really surprised how much Haley underperformed in the suburbs,” David Kochel, a longtime GOP strategist, told me.

With Trump holding a steady double-digit lead over her in the New Hampshire tracking polls, Haley faces the prospect of a similar squeeze in Tuesday’s primary. Trump’s ferocious attacks on her from the right leave her with little opportunity to crack his support among staunch conservatives. And her much more carefully nuanced criticism of him leaves her facing long odds of catalyzing the massive turnout among independent voters she’d need to generate any momentum moving forward. The Suffolk University/Boston Globe/NBC-10 tracking poll released Saturday showed Haley only running even with Trump among undeclared voters, signaling that she’s failing to draw into the primary the large center-left contingent most hostile to the former president. (At the same time, Trump continued to lead her in the survey by two-to-one among Republicans.)

“There’s always been this ambivalence that emanates from her about Trump,” Dante Scala, a political scientist at the University of New Hampshire, told me. Scala, the author of Stormy Weather, a book about the New Hampshire primary, said that he understands that Haley must maneuver carefully, because “ultimately, if you want to win the nomination of this party, you are going to have to win over voters who like Trump.” But, Scala added, “I have to think [her] ambivalence rubs off on voters” and may discourage many of those most critical of Trump from bothering to turn out. (Sununu hasn’t helped that problem by publicly insisting that Haley may be hoping only for a strong second-place finish, and repeatedly declaring that he would vote for Trump if he wins the nomination.)

In my interactions with voters at a few Haley events here, she seems to inspire more respect than enthusiasm. Some are drawn to her contained and cerebral style, and to her message of generational change. “I was thinking if we give her a chance, we will get an opportunity to go in a new direction,” George Jobel, a marketing manager from Concord, told me after Haley’s Manchester rally. But for many others, Haley is simply the last option to register a vote of disapproval about Trump. Dan O’Donnell, a realtor and undeclared voter from Hollis, is planning to cast his ballot for the former South Carolina governor. But he told me that when friends ask him if he’s voting for Haley, “I tell them, ‘No, I’m going to vote against Trump.’” In the latest Suffolk tracking poll, most independent voters backing Haley likewise said that they were motivated primarily to vote against Trump, rather than for her.

In fairness to Haley, it’s not like anyone else this year—or, for that matter, in 2016—cracked the code of beating Trump in a Republican primary. DeSantis tried the opposite of her strategy, by running to Trump’s right and hoping that moderates would eventually consolidate around him if he was the only alternative remaining; that approach has left DeSantis in an even weaker position than Haley, barely surviving in the race. And toppling a front-runner is never easy: Even after McCain’s New Hampshire upset in 2000, he won only a few more states, and Bush recovered to resoundingly win the nomination.

But McCain at least went down swinging, indelibly imprinting a maverick image that allowed him to come back and win the GOP nomination eight years later. In his own way, even DeSantis seems liberated by the prospect of defeat, publicly declaring that Trump cares more about personal loyalty than the good of the country or even the party, and accurately complaining that Fox and other conservative media outlets function as a “Praetorian guard” suppressing criticism of the former president.

Haley, by contrast, still seems here to be weighing every word, as if she expects she will eventually need to defend it from the witness box in some Stalin-esque future MAGA-loyalty trial. If Haley thought she had a better chance to win, maybe she and her allies would dispense with the word if when describing Trump’s potential threat to American democracy. But her reluctance to fully confront Trump probably betrays what she really thinks about the odds that she can wrest control of the party from him this year. In this break-the-glass moment for Trump’s Republican opponents, Haley has made clear she will do no more than tap lightly on the window.

[ad_2]

Ronald Brownstein

Source link

January 21, 2024
What Is Nikki Haley Even Talking About?

[ad_1]

This article was featured in the One Story to Read Today newsletter. Sign up for it here.

N

ikki Haley was standing a few feet in front of me on a warm December night in New Hampshire. She had just finished a town-hall event at a Manchester ski lodge, from which no snow was visible for miles except the manufactured white stuff coating a sad little hill outside.

Presidential candidates often try to conjure a sense of momentum around their campaign, and Haley’s had been accumulating the key elements: rising poll numbers, crowd sizes, and fundraising sums. Her ascendancy began around Thanksgiving, an unofficial benchmark for when voters supposedly tune in to primary campaigns. Among many of them, the former South Carolina governor and United Nations ambassador had become a source of intrigue: Could she actually win? Or was she merely the latest contender to lead a post–Donald Trump Republican Party that never arrives?

I was in New Hampshire to gauge the extent of this apparent upsurge. Of all the campaign events in the past year—except Trump’s, which occupy their own category—Haley’s have been the most commanding. She has run the best race against Trump out of a motley bunch of Republicans—far better than former Vice President Mike Pence and South Carolina Senator Tim Scott, both long gone; Vivek Ramaswamy, whose yapping provocations gained him early notoriety but grated fast; and especially Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, who squandered his early status as Trump’s main challenger—and massive amounts of cash—by turning out to be a colossal dud of a candidate. (“Like a wounded bird falling from the sky,” Trump said of DeSantis, an overlooked but fascinatingly poetic assessment.)

On this night in Manchester, I watched Haley pound out a stump speech about how, among other things, her main achievement as UN ambassador was to take “the kick-me sign off of our backs.” And how “our kids need to know to love America.” And how she was determined to “humanize” the fractious issue of abortion and, rest assured, “the days of demonizing that issue are over.”

Haley is a gifted political performer, particularly in a certain kind of room. This was one of those, a politely boisterous gathering of a few hundred people, serious and professional, many still dressed for work. She came off as reasonable and solicitous, holding the same authority as she did at the various Trumpless debates she has rated so well in. You can see how Haley could rise to the level she has, the most formidable alternative to Trump or (if you prefer) first among the Republican also-rans.

Read: Nikki Haley offers an alternate reality

After completing her set remarks to a standing ovation, Haley took audience questions, greeted a 30-minute lineup of supporters, and satisfied their various selfie and autograph needs, nailing eye contact, small talk, and drive-by rapport. “She understands that kind of customer-service approach,” New Hampshire Governor Chris Sununu raved to me after telling the Manchester crowd that he was endorsing Haley. (“You bet your ass I am!”)

At the end of the night, Sununu stood to Haley’s left as she faced a clot of television cameras and microphones and shouted questions from reporters. She is good at this too—parrying pointed inquiries with self-assurance, then moving on before anyone can really reflect on what she said, or didn’t say.

But Haley’s sturdy pronouncements belie a certain wobbliness. Wait, what did she say exactly?

Nikki Haley supporters at a town hall in Manchester, New Hampshire, in December

New Hampshire Governor Chris Sununu, who endorsed Haley at the Manchester event

Beyond her expertly rendered deliveries, Haley’s actual answers can be mushy or even nonsensical, with strange constructions and frequent malaprops. In Manchester, Haley praised Sununu for having his “pulse to the ground” in his state and boasted that her campaign already had momentum before his endorsement “just gave it a speed bump.” At a November debate, she ordered Ramaswamy to “leave my daughter out of your voice” (as opposed to her daughter’s name out of his mouth). “We have to deal with the cancer that is mental health,” she declares in her town halls when the subject arises (mental health, not cancer).

Later in the session, a reporter asked Haley about Trump’s then-most-recent flare-up, his statement to Sean Hannity that he would be a dictator “on day one,” long since overshadowed by Trump’s “rot in Hell” Christmas message and his claim that immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country.” In the moment, the “dictator” comment did feel germane, as did the question to Haley about whether that should perhaps preclude him from leading the world’s most powerful democracy.

“First of all, that’s for the voters to decide,” Haley declared, “if they want a dictator on day one.”

Yes, unquestionably. But what about Haley, the candidate we were speaking to—what did she decide?

“I’m not going to be a dictator on day one,” she assured everyone, not answering.

“I’ve always spoken in hard truths” is one of Haley’s trademark claims. In reality, the bluntness she discharges is reserved mostly for easy targets: the media, President Joe Biden, and “Kamala” (first name only, per GOP style). When it comes to speaking the hardest Republican truths of all—about Trump—Haley’s words fall feebly (wounded-bird-like), and her voice acquires a slightly halting tone and slower cadence.

Her preferred pose is one of pronounced exasperation. “Anti-Trumpers don’t think I hate him enough; pro-Trumpers don’t think I love him enough,” Haley said at the press gaggle. She shook her head and flashed a Man, I just can’t win look before escaping into a smoke screen of platitudes (“at the end of the day, I just put my truths out there and let the chips fall where they may”).

For all her cultivated brashness, Haley, whose campaign declined my requests to interview her, can also convey an impression of being terrified—of saying the wrong thing, of offending too many MAGA or MAGA-adjacent voters, or certainly of Trump himself.

The most excruciating example of this occurred a few days after Christmas, when a New Hampshire voter asked Haley to explain why the Civil War was fought. She provided a stem-winder of vague conservative assertions (“government doesn’t need to tell you how to live your life”) while omitting the obvious cause: slavery. She appeared to be sensitive to the fact that some Americans might be sick of being reminded about the nation’s shameful, bloody history. Haley, who as governor removed the Confederate flag from the South Carolina statehouse, has said that as president she would not play into the “national self-loathing” that she is always lamenting, “this idea that America is bad, or rotten, or racist.”

But trying to talk about the Civil War without mentioning slavery is like trying to run for the Republican nomination in 2024 while barely touching the all-encompassing, front-running figure at the center of it all.

One of Haley’s niftier moves occurs later in her stump speech, when she builds to a seemingly dramatic revelation.

“I think President Trump was the right president at the right time,” she reassures her audience. It is an imprecise and puzzling statement—what “time” exactly? (Charlottesville? COVID?) But Haley delivers the line with a force that sets a few heads bobbing in the crowd and leads her safely into her next credential. “I had a good working relationship with him when I was in his administration,” she further affirms.

“But …”

The words that follow this inevitable but are as fraught as any that a Republican candidate can utter. Say something like “He’s becoming crazier,” as former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie did of Trump last month, and you might win candor points but probably not any Republican primaries.

David A. Graham: Chris Christie, liberal hero

Haley’s next line barely deviates a word, speech to speech: “Rightly or wrongly, chaos follows him.” You could construct a tidy diagram to illustrate the perfect passivity she achieves here. Haley assigns no judgment (“rightly or wrongly”) and makes no suggestion that Trump might have ever said or done anything that actually caused this “chaos”—a euphemism for, say, the events of January 6 or whatever else is embedded in those 91 criminal counts. All of this “chaos” somehow comes randomly to rest upon the 45th president.

“Chaos follows him,” Haley said again at a December 14 town hall in the southern–New Hampshire town of Atkinson. “You know I’m right” was the extent of her elaboration.

“It just does.”

Haley’s soft landing at “chaos follows him” comes after a zig-zagging and sometimes turbulent journey with Trump. The odyssey began during the 2016 campaign, when Haley called him “scary” and the embodiment of “everything we teach our kids not to do in kindergarten.” She endorsed Senator Marco Rubio—like Haley, a child of immigrants—by saying she was excited to support a candidate who “was going to go and show my parents that the best decision they ever made was coming to America.”

Haley speaks at the Manchester town hall.

After Trump won the Republican nomination, Haley said, reluctantly, that she would vote for him. Trump asked her to serve as his ambassador to the United Nations reportedly as a favor to South Carolina’s lieutenant governor, Henry McMaster, a big Trump supporter, who wanted Haley out of the way so he could become governor. The UN job allowed Haley to burnish her foreign-policy résumé, and being in New York kept her removed from the daily discord of Trump’s White House. She served until 2018. “I got out of the administration without a tweet,” she likes to say.

Following Trump’s 2020 defeat and the January 6 insurrection, Haley sounded eager to bury her former boss and get on with her pursuit of his job. “His actions since Election Day will be judged harshly by history,” she declared in a January 7 speech at a Republican National Committee meeting. Haley said there was no chance Trump would ever run for federal office again. When those predictions proved premature, she reportedly tried to pay a quick make-up visit to Mar-a-Lago but was told by the proprietor not to bother. Less than three weeks after the insurrection, she told the Fox News host Laura Ingraham that everyone should “give the man a break.”

That April, Haley promised that she would support Trump if he ran for president again in 2024. And if he did, she said, she would not run herself.

Until … never mind.

As a candidate, Haley, whom Trump has taken to calling “Birdbrain,” frequently mentions how much better she would fare against Biden than Trump or DeSantis would. She often cites a Wall Street Journal poll from last month that shows her leading Biden by 17 points in a head-to-head matchup (Trump wins by four points). No doubt “electability” is a compelling argument, but this hypothetical Haley blowout is also premised on a dubious assumption—that Trump would be a gracious loser and urge his supporters to vote for their Republican standard-bearer, Ambassador Birdbrain.

When it comes to Trump’s indictments, Haley can’t bat away questions fast enough. “A lot of these cases have been politicized, we all know that,” she said in Manchester. Haley has promised to support the GOP nominee, whether it’s Trump or someone else. And in Plymouth, New Hampshire, at the end of December, she said that if she were elected president and Trump were convicted, she would likely pardon him “so that we can move on as a country and no longer talk about him.”

Such flaccid scolding is of course a big part of why Trump is still here. Appeasement has been the Republican business model since 2015. “It’s like what happened last time—nobody wanted to criticize Trump,” Mark Sanford, a former Republican representative from and governor of South Carolina, told me. Sanford, who declined to speak about Haley on the record, lost his 2018 House primary after becoming a strident Trump critic. “They figured he would go away,” Sanford said, referring to Trump’s Republican opponents over the years. “And they sort of waited and waited and waited, and he didn’t go away.”

Eight years later, Haley seems to be of a similarly passive mindset: put up tepid resistance to Trump, at least early on; stay alive; and hope that someone, or something, comes along to take care of the problem. “Maybe she catches a break from a jury,” Chip Felkel, a longtime Republican strategist in South Carolina told me, referring to the possibility of Trump being convicted in the coming months. Felkel, who is not affiliated with Haley’s campaign, says that he’s no fan of hers but that he’s hugely hostile to Trump, so he’ll support his former governor.

Chris Christie offers a different specimen of Trump alternative: a former friend and longtime ally of the 45th president whose unambiguous denunciations were the centerpiece of his campaign. Christie has held back little, calling Trump a “coward,” a “fool,” and a “self-centered, self-possessed, self-consumed, angry old man.”

In other words, Christie has been the rare candidate willing to tell actual hard truths about Trump. He will also not be the Republican nominee: He suspended his campaign last night.

Will Haley be the nominee? Are her pillowy “attacks” on the front-runner simply the undignified price of Republican viability today? Has this approach at least given her the best shot of any Republican to defeat Trump—an extremely long shot, but a shot nonetheless?

Her theory of the race is straightforward enough: Beat DeSantis for second in Iowa; be competitive with Trump in New Hampshire, where she’s gained in recent polls but still trails by double digits in most; and then parlay that momentum into defeating Trump in her home state (where the former president also remains well ahead).

Both Christie and Haley are pragmatic former governors who appeal to independents and college-educated moderates. Polling this past fall showed that a significant portion of his backers in New Hampshire would migrate to Haley if he bowed out of the race before the state’s January 23 primary.

A week before Christmas, Christie faced growing public pressure, much of it from people backing Haley, to drop out in the name of stopping Trump. The former New Jersey governor had made a sustained and effective case against Trump over several months, but struggled to boost his support into the teens and was strongly considering it.

But he held off for a few weeks. Christie has been frustrated, even appalled, by Haley’s unwillingness to say how she really feels about Trump, according to sources close to Christie. He has become less and less shy about expressing his dissatisfaction with her in public. He has taunted Haley for not ruling out a role as Trump’s running mate, as he and DeSantis have. “I don’t play for second” has been Haley’s standard answer to the vice-presidential question, an emphatic non-denial. “That’s why she’s not saying strong things against Donald Trump,” Christie said on Face the Nation.

Jonathan V. Last: Nikki Haley’s endgame

His reaction to Haley’s slavery misadventure was especially pointed. “She’s unwilling to offend anyone by telling the truth,” he said in Epping, New Hampshire. “It’s worse to be able to be dishonest with people, and that’s what’s happening here.”

Now that Christie’s out of the primary, Haley will surely get some of his voters, though an endorsement seems unlikely anytime soon. Shortly before Christie announced his exit last night, at a town hall in New Hampshire, a hot mic caught him saying of Haley: “She’s gonna get smoked … She’s not up to this.”

Christie’s quandary over Haley is one that many Trump-skeptical Republicans identify with. “It’s the Nikki Haley dilemma,” Mike Murphy, a longtime Republican media consultant who has deep loathing for Trump and would love to see him lose, told me. He finds Haley’s cynicism depressing and is disgusted by her willingness to pander to “the latest insipid GOP crowd-pleasing trope,” as he recently wrote on Substack.

“Still, compared to Trump, she’s Gandhi,” Murphy continued. And he thinks she has a real chance to beat Trump in New Hampshire, where Murphy helped John McCain upset George W. Bush in 2000. “If I lived in New Hampshire, I’d vote for Haley in a heartbeat,” he told me.

Left: Haley signs an autograph. Right: Supporters leave after the town hall.

Haley’s knack for connecting one-on-one with voters does not always extend to political peers. On the contrary, her career has featured an array of disposable alliances, stubborn grudges, and a sense of paranoia about opponents, as my colleague Tim Alberta, then of Politico, documented in a 2021 profile of Haley. “She cut me off,” Sanford told Alberta. “This is systematic with Nikki,” he continued. “She cuts off people who have contributed to her success. It’s almost like there’s some weird psychological thing where she needs to pretend it’s self-made.”

“I don’t trust, because I’ve never been given a reason to trust,” Haley told Alberta. “Friend,” she added, “is a loose term.” She is fond of saying she wears heels not as a fashion statement but “for ammunition.”

No doubt Haley comes to this worldview honestly, having grown up as an Indian American in the Deep South of the 1970s and ’80s. She has faced discrimination, racism, sexism, and smears—not subtle ones, either. When she ran for governor, in 2010, a South Carolina political blogger and a lobbyist working for one of Haley’s rivals in the race both claimed to have had affairs with Haley (she denied them), and a Republican state senator called her a “raghead.”

“Every South Carolina politician here has been through that, all of us,” Katon Dawson, the former chair of the South Carolina GOP and a Haley supporter, told me. “We’re from South Carolina, and it is a bare-knuckled brawl.”

For Haley to win, Felkel, the South Carolina strategist, said he thinks she will have to channel some of that South Carolina pugilism and “open up a can of whoop-ass” on Trump. “We need to see more stiletto weaponry from her, and less ‘bless your heart,’” Felkel said.

In recent days, Haley has taken a somewhat more combative tack against Trump, after a pro-Trump super PAC released a campaign ad in New Hampshire that accused her of supporting a gas-tax increase in South Carolina and dubbed her “‘High Tax’ Haley.” (Haley had backed a gas-tax hike coupled with an income-tax cut.) “In his commercials and in his temper tantrums, every single thing that he’s said has been a lie,” she told an audience at a January 2 town hall on the New Hampshire coast.

“So if he’s gonna lie about me,” Haley went on, “I’m gonna tell you the truth about him.” The line drew the biggest applause of the event. Haley delivered it slowly, clearly, and with authority—like a candidate to be reckoned with, who might just be willing to escalate things.

But wasn’t Haley supposedly telling “hard truths” all along? Isn’t that kind of her signature thing? “She’s admitting that her retaliation to Trump’s lying about her is that she will stop lying about him,” Jonathan V. Last wrote in The Bulwark. Last dubbed Haley’s line “the most complete exposure to a politician’s subconscious I’ve ever seen.”

Or maybe this was always Haley’s conscious plan—to gradually parcel out her clever “hard truths” if convenient and when openings arise, and impress the right people and donors while doing so. Perhaps Haley already views this foray as a success. Even if she never seriously threatens Trump, she’s likely to perform respectably in the early states, win a second place or two, outlast DeSantis, and land some breezy swipes at Trump. Then, when his nomination becomes inevitable again, she can safely endorse her old boss (they always had a good working relationship!) and move on to her next campaign, to be Trump’s vice president or to try again in 2028.

Related Podcast

Listen to Mark Leibovich discuss Nikki Haley on Radio Atlantic:

[ad_2]

Mark Leibovich

Source link

January 11, 2024
The Nikki Haley Debate

[ad_1]

Listen to this article

Produced by ElevenLabs and NOA, News Over Audio, using AI narration.

Anyone watching the fourth Republican primary debate tonight would be forgiven for thinking that Nikki Haley was the favorite to win the GOP presidential nomination next year.

Ron DeSantis and Vivek Ramaswamy sure were acting like it. Neither man had finished answering his first question before he began attacking the former South Carolina governor and U.N. ambassador. “She caves any time the left comes after her, anytime the media comes after her,” warned DeSantis, the Florida governor. Ramaswamy went much further. He called Haley “corrupt” and “a fascist” for suggesting that social-media companies ban people from posting anonymously on their platforms.

The broadsides continued throughout the two-hour debate in Tuscaloosa, Alabama: DeSantis and Ramaswamy used every opportunity to go after Haley, even when they were prodded to criticize the Republican who is actually dominating the primary race, Donald Trump.

“I’m loving all the attention, fellas,” Haley said at one point. What she’d love even more is about 30 additional points in the polls. As well as Haley has been doing lately, she is capturing just about 10 percent of Republican voters nationwide, according to the polling average. Time is running out for her—or any other GOP candidate—to catch Trump. He skipped this meeting of the Republican also-rans, just as he did the three previous debates. This debate narrowed to four Trump alternatives, but the evening devolved into a familiar dynamic: Most of the challengers largely declined to criticize—or even discuss—Trump.

Read: The 2024 U.S. presidential race: a cheat sheet

Chris Christie was the exception, as usual. The former New Jersey governor lit into Trump and mocked his rivals for being too “timid” to do the same. “I’m in this race because the truth needs to be spoken: He is unfit,” Christie said. Acting the part of pundit as much as candidate, Christie noted ruefully how little Haley, DeSantis, and Ramaswamy wanted to talk about Trump and how fearful they seemed to be of angering him. DeSantis tiptoed toward criticism of Trump when he warned Republicans not “to nominate somebody who is almost 80 years old.” “Father Time is undefeated,” DeSantis said. But when he danced around the question of whether Trump was mentally fit to serve again as president, Christie bashed him. “This is the problem with my three colleagues: You are afraid to offend.”

Ramaswamy was next to speak. Instead of contradicting Christie and confronting Trump, he held up a handwritten sign that read, NIKKI=CORRUPT.

The reluctance of Trump’s rivals (aside from Christie) to attack the former president has frustrated Republicans who are rooting against his renomination. But on some level it makes sense. Haley, DeSantis, and Ramaswamy aren’t actually running against Trump—at least not yet. The best way to think of these Trump-less debates is as a primary within a primary. The four Republicans on stage tonight were battling merely for the right to face off against Trump. In sports terms, these preliminary matchups are like the divisional round of the NFL playoffs, except that Trump has already earned a bye to the conference championship. (The general election would be the Super Bowl.)

The all-important question is whether one of these four can break away from the others in time to wage a fair fight against Trump. The window for doing so is closing fast, but it is not shut completely. Although Trump is capturing nearly 60 percent of Republican primary voters in the national polling average, he remains below 50 percent in Iowa and New Hampshire, the early states where his challengers are campaigning most aggressively. A majority of Republicans in both Iowa and New Hampshire are backing someone other than Trump at the moment, suggesting at least the possibility that Haley or DeSantis could consolidate the anti-Trump vote and overtake him in one or both states. Trump’s lead has been consistent—and it has actually grown since the debates started without him—but historically, primary races are most volatile in the final few weeks before voters begin casting ballots.

Read: The Republican primary is slipping away

The debate stage has shrunk by half since the first GOP primary forum in August, when eight candidates met the Republican National Committee’s criteria for participation. Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina ended his bid after appearing in last month’s debate in Miami, as did North Dakota Governor Doug Burgum, who did not qualify.

Yet four candidates might be as small as it gets. No more RNC-sanctioned debates are scheduled before the Iowa caucuses on January 15 or the New Hampshire primary eight days later. If Trump wins both states against a divided field—as polls suggest he will—his nomination would probably seem unstoppable.

The most likely path to preventing Trump’s nomination is the same as it was when the primary began: for anti-Trump Republicans to agree on a single candidate to go up against him one-on-one. Nikki Haley is making her move. But if tonight’s debate revealed anything, it’s that her Republican competitors aren’t ready to let her have that chance.

[ad_2]

Russell Berman

Source link

December 6, 2023
Nikki Haley’s Dilemma Is Also the Republicans’ Problem

[ad_1]

Republicans have had 10 months to hammer out a coherent post-Roe message on abortion. You would think they’d have nailed it by now.

Yet on Tuesday, Nikki Haley set out to declare her position on the issue—and proceeded to be about as clear as concrete.

She began with plausible precision. “I want to save as many lives and help as many moms as possible,” the former South Carolina governor and ambassador to the United Nations told reporters gathered at the Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America headquarters, in Northern Virginia—a press event billed as a “major policy speech.” But her statements quickly got squishier. It’s good that some states have passed anti-abortion laws in the past year, she said. And as for the states that have reacted by enshrining abortion-rights protections? Well, she wishes “that weren’t the case.”

And then she seemed to channel Veep’s Selina Meyer. “Different people in different places are taking different paths,” Haley said, with a self-assurance that belied the indeterminacy of her words.

Read: Abortion pills will be the next battle in the 2024 election

Questioning whether any national anti-abortion legislation would ever pass, Haley did gesture at a need for some action. “To do that at the federal level, the next president must find national consensus,” she said. As for what that might look like, she had no words. And she took no questions.

Some people seemed to like Haley’s speech, in a tepid way. She sounded human when she described how her husband had been adopted, and how she’d struggled with infertility. “Ms. Haley deserves credit for confronting the subject head on, with a speech that wasn’t sanctimonious or censorious,” The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board wrote, before concluding, “The party could do worse than Ms. Haley’s pitch.” But it could do better—or at least do with something more specific.

Leaders of the self-described pro-life movement were predictably annoyed at Haley’s conciliatory-sounding vagueness. “Disappointing speech by @NikkiHaley today. Leads with compromise & defeatism, not vision & courage,” Lila Rose, who heads the group Live Action, tweeted. “We agree that consensus is important, but to achieve consensus we will need to stake out a principled position,” wrote Kristan Hawkins, the president of Students for Life of America.

Even Haley’s hosts seemed on the wrong page. “We are clear on Ambassador Haley’s commitment to acting on the American consensus against late-term abortion by protecting unborn children by at least 15 weeks,” Marjorie Dannenfelser, the president of Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, said in a statement sent to me. But a few hours later, Team Haley emailed me to correct the record: “She committed to working to find a consensus on banning late-term abortion. No specific weeks,” Nachama Soloveichik, Haley’s communications director, wrote. Not only did Haley alienate both sides—she confused them!

Mary Ziegler: Abortion restrictions targeted at minors never stop there

Haley is in a tough spot, as are all of the Republican presidential wannabes. They each have their own personal convictions on abortion; former Vice President Mike Pence, for example, has been outspoken in his support for a national ban. But they’re up against an issue that seems to have cost their party a string of recent elections. Most Americans believe that abortion should be accessible, with some limits.

The “consensus” position, then, is somewhere in the foggy zone between no abortion ever and abortion whenever. But primary elections tend to push candidates toward one extreme or another. “The gap between what the base demands and what swing voters will tolerate has gotten really wide,” Sarah Longwell, the publisher of the Never Trump site The Bulwark, told me. “Nowhere is this more true than on abortion.”

What all politicians need to do “is settle on a position they believe they can defend, and they need to repeat it consistently and clearly,” Whit Ayres, a Republican strategist, told me. “Any politician whose position on abortion is vague will be wrapped around the axle eventually with questions and doubts about where they actually stand.”

Some GOP candidates have followed Ayres’s advice. But much axle-wrapping has occurred already in the early days of the 2024 primary season.

Asked on the campaign trail whether he’d support a 15-week federal ban on abortion, Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina told CBS, “I do believe that we should have a robust conversation about what’s happening on a very important topic,” before pivoting so hard to an anecdote about Janet Yellen that I thought he’d need a neck brace. In a follow-up interview, Scott backtracked, clarifying that as president, he would “literally sign the most conservative pro-life legislation” Congress sent to his desk.

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, who is expected to mount a presidential bid, did approve a very conservative state law recently—a six-week abortion ban. But he signed that legislation in the dead of night earlier this month, while most people in Tallahassee were probably in bed. (By contrast, last year, he celebrated the signing of a 15-week ban with a big party at a church.) The following day, DeSantis gave a speech at a Christian university full of students who are opposed to abortion, yet said nothing about his major legislative achievement. He’s mostly stayed quiet about it since—even at glad-handing events in early primary states.

So far, the only confirmed presidential candidate who seems clear on his position and keenly aware of the political optics is Donald Trump. Despite being hailed by anti-abortion activists as the “most pro-life president” in history, Trump has never been rigid on abortion (probably because he supported abortion rights for most of his life as a public figure), and he doesn’t talk much about the issue now. But a spokesperson told The Washington Post recently that Trump “believes that the Supreme Court, led by the three Justices which he supported, got it right when they ruled this is an issue that should be decided at the State level.” Shorter Trump: I’ve done my bit—it’s up to the states now. God bless.

If any national consensus on abortion exists, the GOP strategist Ayres said, Trump’s position “is pretty close” to it. Trump has always seemed to have “a lizard-brain sense of where the voters are,” Longwell said. “He has a relationship to the base, and he doesn’t have to pitch what he believes.” And, unlike DeSantis, Trump has never signed a law banning abortion at any stage, so it’ll be harder to pin him down. Sure, there’s an activist class that would like to see abortion banned in all cases. To them, Trump could reply, You got your justices. You’re welcome.

Read: The new pro-life movement has a plan to end abortion

Right now Trump and his lizard brain have a commanding lead in the GOP primary. His victory would set up an interesting general-election situation—a fitting one for our complicated post-Roe country: a former president who once personally supported abortion rights and is now politically opposed to them running against a sitting president whose own position on abortion is the exact opposite.

Until a Republican presidential nominee emerges, we’ll hear many more Haley-esque platitudes that sound thoughtful and weighty but ultimately aren’t.

“Whether we can save more lives nationally depends entirely on doing what no one has done to date,” Haley told reporters on Tuesday, before wrapping up her speech with—you could almost hear a drumroll—“finding consensus.” The waffling will continue, in other words, until the primary concludes.

[ad_2]

Elaine Godfrey

Source link

April 28, 2023
Donald Trump Is on the Wrong Side of the Religious Right

[ad_1]

The sanctuary buzzed as Mike Pence climbed into the elevated pulpit, standing 15 feet above the pews, a Celtic cross over his left shoulder. The former vice president had spoken here, at Hillsdale College, the private Christian school tucked into the knolls of southern Michigan, on several previous occasions. But this was his first time inside Christ Chapel, the magnificent, recently erected campus cathedral inspired by the St. Martin-in-the-Fields parish of England. The space offers a spiritual refuge for young people trying to find their way in the world. On this day in early March, however, it was a political proving ground, a place of testing for an older man who knows what he believes but, like the students, is unsure of exactly where he’s headed.

“I came today to Christ Chapel simply to tell all of you that, even when it doesn’t look like it, be confident that God is still working,” Pence told the Hillsdale audience. “In your life, and in mine, and in the life of this nation.”

It only stands to reason that a man who felt God’s hand on his selection to serve alongside Donald Trump—the Lord working in mysterious ways and all—now feels called to help America heal from Trump’s presidency. It’s why Pence titled his memoir, which describes his split with Trump over the January 6 insurrection, So Help Me God. It’s why, as he travels the country preparing a presidential bid, he speaks to themes of redemption and reconciliation. It’s why he has spent the early days of the invisible primary courting evangelical Christian activists. And it’s why, for one of the first major speeches of his unofficial 2024 campaign, he came to Hillsdale, offering repeated references to scripture while speaking about the role of religion in public life.

Read: Mike Pence refuses to connect the dots

Piety aside, raw political calculation was at work. Trump’s relationship with the evangelical movement—once seemingly shatterproof, then shaky after his violent departure from the White House—is now in pieces, thanks to his social-media tirade last fall blaming pro-lifers for the Republicans’ lackluster midterm performance. Because of his intimate, longtime ties to the religious right, Pence understands the extent of the damage. He is close personal friends with the organizational leaders who have fumed about it; he knows that the former president has refused to make any sort of peace offering to the anti-abortion community and is now effectively estranged from its most influential leaders.

According to people who have spoken with Pence, he believes that this erosion of support among evangelicals represents Trump’s greatest vulnerability in the upcoming primary—and his own greatest opportunity to make a play for the GOP nomination.

But he isn’t the only one.

Although Pence possesses singular insights into the insular world of social-conservative politics, numerous other Republicans are aware of Trump’s emerging weakness and are preparing to make a play for conservative Christian voters. Some of these efforts will be more sincere—more rooted in a shared belief system—than others. What unites them is a common recognition that, for the first time since he secured the GOP nomination in 2016, Trump has a serious problem with a crucial bloc of his coalition.

The scale of his trouble is difficult to overstate. In my recent conversations with some two dozen evangelical leaders—many of whom asked not to be named, all of whom backed Trump in 2016, throughout his presidency, and again in 2020—not a single one would commit to supporting him in the 2024 Republican primary. And this was all before the speculation of his potential arrest on charges related to paying hush-money to his porn-star paramour back in 2016.

“I think people want to move on. They want to look to the future; they want someone to cast a vision,” said Tony Perkins, the president of the Family Research Council, who spoke at Trump’s nominating convention in 2016 and offered counsel throughout his presidency.

At this time eight years ago, Perkins was heading up a secretive operation that sought to rally evangelical support around a single candidate. One by one, all the GOP presidential aspirants met privately with Perkins and his group of Christian influencers for an audition, a process by which Trump made initial contact with some prominent leaders of the religious right. Perkins probably won’t lead a similar effort this time around—“It was a lot of work,” he told me—but he and his allies have begun meeting with Republican contenders to gauge the direction of their campaigns. His message has been simple: Some of Trump’s most reliable supporters are now up for grabs, but they won’t be won over with the half measures of the pre-Trump era.

“Oddly enough, it was Donald Trump of all people who raised the expectations of evangelical voters. They know they can win now,” Perkins said. “They want that same level of fight.”

It’s one of the defining political statistics of the current political era: Trump carried 81 percent of the white evangelical vote in 2016, according to exit polling, and performed similarly in 2020. But the real measure of his grip on this demographic was seen during his four years in office: Even amid dramatic dips in his popularity and approval rating, white evangelicals were consistently Trump’s most loyal supporters, sticking by him at rates that far exceeded those of other parts of his political coalition. Because Trump secured signature victories for conservative Christians—most notably, appointing the three Supreme Court justices who, last year, helped overturn Roe v. Wade—there was reason to expect that loyalty to carry over into his run for the presidency in 2024.

From the June 2022 issue: How politics poisoned the evangelical Church

And then Trump sabotaged himself. Desperate to dodge culpability for the Republican Party’s poor performance in the November midterm elections, Trump blamed the “abortion issue.” He suggested that moderate voters had been spooked by some of the party’s restrictive proposals, while pro-lifers, after half a century of intense political engagement, had grown complacent following the Dobbs ruling. This scapegoating didn’t go over well with social-conservative leaders. For many of them, the transaction they had entered into with Trump in 2016—their support in exchange for his policies—was validated by the fall of Roe. Yet now the former president was distancing himself from the anti-abortion movement while refusing to accept responsibility for promoting bad candidates who lost winnable races. (Trump’s campaign declined to comment for this story.)

It felt like betrayal. Trump’s evangelical allies had stood dutifully behind him for four years, excusing all manner of transgressions and refusing countless opportunities to cast him off. Some had even convinced themselves that he had become a believer—if not an actual believer in Christ, despite those prayer-circle photo ops in the Oval Office, then a believer in the anti-abortion cause after previously having described himself as “very pro-choice.” Now the illusion was gone. In text messages, emails, and conference calls, some of the country’s most active social conservatives began expressing a willingness to support an alternative to Trump in 2024.

“A lot of people were very put off by those comments … It made people wonder if in some way he’d gone back to some of the sentiments he had long before becoming a Republican candidate,” said Scott Walker, the former Wisconsin governor, who runs the Young America’s Foundation and sits on the board of an anti-abortion group. Walker, himself an evangelical and the son of a pastor, added, “I think it opened the door for a lot of them to consider other candidates.”

The most offensive part of Trump’s commentary was his ignorance of the new, post-Roe reality of Republican politics. Publicly and privately, he spoke of abortion like an item struck from his to-do list, believing the issue was effectively resolved by the Supreme Court’s ruling. Meanwhile, conservatives were preparing for a new and complicated phase of the fight, and Trump was nowhere to be found. He didn’t even bother with damage control following his November outburst, anti-abortion leaders said, because he didn’t understand how fundamentally out of step he was with his erstwhile allies.

“He thinks it will go away, but it won’t,” Marjorie Dannenfelser, the president of the Susan B. Anthony List, an anti-abortion group, told me. “That’s not me lacking in gratitude for how we got here, because I know how we got here. But that part is done. Thank you. Now what?”

Read: What winning did to the anti-abortion movement

Before long, evangelical leaders were publicly airing their long-held private complaints about Trump. Mike Evans, an original member of Trump’s evangelical advisory board, told The Washington Post that Trump “used us to win the White House” and then turned Christians into cult members “glorifying Donald Trump like he was an idol.” David Lane, a veteran evangelical organizer whose email blasts reach many thousands of pastors and church leaders, wrote that Trump’s “vision of making America as a nation great again has been put on the sidelines, while the mission and the message are now subordinate to personal grievances and self-importance.” Addressing a group of Christian lawmakers after the election, James Robison, a well-known televangelist who also advised Trump, compared him to a “little elementary schoolchild.” Everett Piper, the former president of Oklahoma Wesleyan University, reacted to the midterms by writing in The Washington Times, “The take-home of this past week is simple: Donald Trump has to go. If he’s our nominee in 2024, we will get destroyed.”

Perkins said that he’s still in touch with Trump and wouldn’t rule out backing his primary campaign in 2024. (Like everyone else I spoke with, Perkins said he won’t hesitate to support Trump if he wins the nomination.) He’s also a longtime friend to Pence, and told me he has been in recent communication with the former vice president. In speaking of the two men, Perkins described the same dilemma I heard from other social-conservative leaders.

“Donald Trump came onto the playground, found the bully that had been pushing evangelicals around, and he punched them. That’s what endeared us to him,” Perkins explained. “But the challenge is, he went a little too far. He had too much of an edge … What we’re looking for, quite frankly, is a cross between Mike Pence and Donald Trump.”

Who fits that description? Former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has been blasting out scripture-laden fundraising emails while aggressively courting evangelical leaders, making the case that his competence—and proud, publicly declared Christian beliefs—would make him the ultimate advocate for the religious right. Tim Scott, who has daydreamed about quitting the U.S. Senate to attend seminary, built the soft launch of his campaign around a “Faith in America” tour and is speaking to hundreds of pastors this week on a private “National Faith Briefing” call. Nikki Haley, the former South Carolina governor and U.S. ambassador to the United Nations who is known less for her devoutness than her opportunism, invited the televangelist John Hagee to deliver the invocation at her campaign announcement last month.

Trump’s campaign is banking on these candidates, plus Pence, fragmenting the hard-core evangelical vote in the Iowa caucuses, while he cleans up with the rest of the conservative base.

There is another Republican who could crash that scenario. And yet, that candidate—the one who might best embody the mix that Perkins spoke of—is the one making the least effort to court evangelicals.

In January, at the National Pro-Life Summit in Washington, D.C., Florida Governor Ron DeSantis won a 2024 presidential straw poll in dominant fashion: 54 percent to Trump’s 19 percent, with every other Republican stuck in single digits. This seemed to portend a new day in the conservative movement: Having had several months to process the midterm results, the thousands of activists who came to D.C. for the annual March for Life were clearly signaling not just their desire to move on from Trump, but also their preference for the young governor who had just won reelection by 1.5 million votes in the country’s biggest battleground state.

There was some surprise in early March when the group Students for Life of America—which had organized the D.C. conference in January—met in Naples, Florida, for its Post-Roe Generation Gala. The event drew activists from around the country. Pence, a longtime friend of the group, had secured the keynote speaking slot. But DeSantis was nowhere to be found. Some attendees wondered why there was no video sent by his staff, no footprint from his political operation, not even a tweet from the governor acknowledging the event in his own backyard.

Mark Leibovich: Just wait until you get to know Ron DeSantis

Kristan Hawkins, the Students for Life president, cautioned against reading anything into this, explaining that her group had not formally invited DeSantis, instead reserving the spotlight for Pence. At the same time, she complained that DeSantis has had zero engagement with her or her organization, “not even a back-channel relationship.” For all of DeSantis’s culture warring with the left—over education and wokeism and drag shows—Hawkins argued that he has largely ignored the abortion issue.

“So many people are astounded when I tell them that Florida has one of the highest abortion rates in the country. It’s the only Republican-controlled state in the top 10,” Hawkins told me. “Folks on social media are like, ‘You’re wrong! Florida has DeSantis!’”

She sighed. “Checking the box, yes. When asked, he’ll affirm ‘pro-life.’ But leading the charge in Tallahassee? We haven’t seen it.”

This squared with what I’ve heard from many other evangelical leaders—in terms of both the policy approach and the personal dealings. “He doesn’t have any relationships with me or the people in my world,” Perkins told me. “I’ve been cheering for him … but he hasn’t made any real outreach to us. That’s a weakness. I guess he sort of keeps his own counsel.” Dannenfelser was the lone organizational head who told me she’d gotten some recent face time with DeSantis, while noting that she, not the governor or his team, had requested the meeting.

DeSantis has been made aware of these complaints, according to people who have spoken with the governor. (His political team declined to comment for this story.) John Stemberger, the president of Florida Family Policy Council, told me that DeSantis had recently attended a prayer breakfast held by the state’s leading anti-abortion activists, and that his team has “slowly but methodically” begun its outreach to leaders in early-nominating states. However sluggish his efforts to date, DeSantis now stands to benefit from the good fortune of great timing: Having signed a 15-week abortion ban into law just last year, he is now supporting a so-called heartbeat bill that Republicans are advancing through the state legislature. The timing of Florida’s implementation of this new law, which would ban abortions after six weeks, will roughly coincide with the governor’s expected presidential launch later this spring.

“He’s got a robust agenda, and he’ll be doing robust outreach soon enough,” Stemberger said.

Even without the outreach, DeSantis is well positioned to capture a significant share of the Christian conservative vote. Among pastors and congregants I’ve met around the country, his name-identification has soared over the past year and a half, the result of high-profile policy fights and his landslide reelection win. Last month, a Monmouth University national survey of Republican voters found DeSantis beating Trump, 51 percent to 44 percent, among self-identified evangelical voters. (Trump reclaimed the lead in a new poll released this week.) This, perhaps more than any other factor, explains the intense interest in the Florida governor among conservative leaders: Unlike Pence, Haley, Pompeo, and others, DeSantis has an obvious path to defeating Trump in the GOP primary.

Stemberger, an outspoken Trump critic during the 2016 primary who then became an apologist during his presidency—telling fellow Christians that Trump had accomplished “unprecedentedly good things” in office—would not yet publicly commit to backing DeSantis. But he suggested that the abortion issue crystallizes an essential difference between the two men: Whereas Trump “self-destructs” by “shooting from the hip all the time,” DeSantis is disciplined, deliberate, and “highly strategic.” Part of that strategy is a speech DeSantis is scheduled to deliver next month at Liberty University.

Tellingly, Stemberger didn’t note any difference in the personal beliefs of the two Republican front-runners. I asked him: Does faith inform DeSantis’s politics?

“It’s interesting. I know he’s Catholic, but I’m not even sure he attends Mass regularly,” Stemberger told me. He mentioned praying over DeSantis with a group of pastors before the governor’s inauguration. “But his core is really the Constitution—the Federalist Papers, the Founding Fathers. That’s how he processes everything. He’s never going to be painted as a fundamentalist Christian … He does make references to spiritual warfare, but that’s an analogy for what he’s trying to do politically.”

Ronald Brownstein: The contradictions of Ron DeSantis

Indeed, over the past year, while traveling the country to raise money and rally the conservative base, the governor frequently invoked the Book of Ephesians. “Put on the full armor of God,” DeSantis would say, “and take a stand against the left’s schemes.”

In bowdlerizing the words of the apostle Paul—substituting the left for the devil—DeSantis wasn’t merely counting on the biblical illiteracy of his listeners. He was playing to a partisan fervor that renders scriptural restraint irrelevant. Eventually, he did away with any nuance. Last fall, DeSantis released a now-famous advertisement, cinematic frames shot in black and white, that borrowed from the radio host Paul Harvey’s famous speech, “So God Made a Farmer.” Once again, an important change was made. “On the eighth day,” rumbled a deep voice, with DeSantis pictured standing tall before an American flag, “God looked down on his planned paradise and said: ‘I need a protector.’ So God made a fighter.”

The video, which ran nearly two minutes, was so comically overdone—widely panned for its rampant self-glorification—that its appeal went unappreciated. Trump proved that for millions of white evangelicals who fear the loss of power, influence, and status in a rapidly secularizing nation, nothing sells like garish displays of God-ordained machismo. The humble, country-preacher appeal of former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee has lost its political allure. Hence the irony: DeSantis might have done the least to cultivate relationships in the evangelical movement, and the most to project himself as its next champion.

Speaking to the students at Hillsdale, Pence took a decidedly different approach to quoting the apostle Paul.

Having spoken broadly of the need for all Americans to return to treating one another with “civility and respect,” the former vice president made a specific appeal to his fellow Christians. No matter how pitched the battles over politics and policy, he said, followers of Jesus had a responsibility to attract outsiders with their conduct and their language. “Let your conversation be seasoned with salt,” Pence said, borrowing from Paul’s letter to the Colossians.

If he does run for president, this will be what Pence is selling to evangelicals: humility instead of hubris, decency instead of denigration. The former vice president pledged to defend traditional Judeo-Christian values—even suggesting that he would re-litigate the fight over same-sex marriage, a matter settled by courts of law and public opinion. But, Pence said, unlike certain other Republicans, he would do so with a graciousness that kept the country intact. This, he reminded the audience, had always been his calling card. As far back as his days in conservative talk radio, Pence said, he was known as “Rush Limbaugh on decaf.”

That line got some laughs. But it also underscored his limitation as a prospective candidate. After the event, while speaking with numerous guests, I heard the same thing over and over: Pence was not tough enough. They all admired him. They all thought he was an honorable man and a model Christian. But a Sunday School teacher couldn’t lead them into the battles over gender identity, school curriculum, abortion, and the like. They needed a warrior.

Read: Nobody likes Mike Pence

“The Bushes were nice. Mitt Romney was nice. Where did that get us?” said Jerry Byrd, a churchgoing attorney who’d driven from the Detroit suburbs to hear Pence speak. “Trump is the only one who stood up for us. The Democrats are ruining this country, and being a good Christian isn’t going to stop them. Honestly, I don’t want someone ‘on decaf.’ We need the real thing.”

After Pence sacrificed so much of himself to stand loyally behind Trump, this is how the former president has repaid him—by conditioning Christians to expect an expression of their faith so pugilistic that Pence could not hope to pass muster.

Byrd told me he was “done with Trump” after the ex-president’s sore-loser antics and is actively shopping for another Republican to support in 2024. He likes the former vice president. He respects the principled stand he took on January 6. But Byrd said he couldn’t imagine voting for him for president. Pence was just another one of those “nice guys” whom the Democrats would walk all over.

Unprompted, Byrd told me that DeSantis was his top choice. I asked him why.

“He fights,” Byrd replied.

[ad_2]

Tim Alberta

Source link

March 24, 2023
A Rare Reprieve From the Permanent Presidential Campaign

[ad_1]

Does anyone want to be president?

Typically, by the time a president delivers the State of the Union address at the start of his third year in office, as Joe Biden will on Tuesday, at least half a dozen rivals are already gunning for his job. When Donald Trump began his annual speech to Congress in 2019, four of the Democrats staring back at him inside the House chamber had already declared their presidential candidacies.

Not so this year. The only Republican (or Democrat, for that matter) officially trying to oust Biden is the former president he defeated in 2020. Trump announced his third White House run in November and then barely bothered to campaign for the next two months before holding relatively small-scale events in New Hampshire and South Carolina in January. Trump will finally get some company next week, when Nikki Haley, the former South Carolina governor and United Nations ambassador, plans to kick off her campaign in Charleston. More Republicans could soon jump into the presidential pool. But the 2024 campaign has gotten off to a decidedly slow start, and the first weeks of 2023 have brought a rare reprieve from what has become known—with some derision—as the permanent campaign. This pause is not the result of some collective cease-fire; it’s what happens when you have a former president who lost reelection but still inspires fear in his party, along with a Democratic incumbent—the oldest to ever serve—who is not exactly itching to campaign.

Even New Hampshire—normally one of the first states to welcome would-be presidents—has been subdued. “Other than Trump, I can’t think of a leading person being here for the last couple of months,” Raymond Buckley, the longtime chair of the state’s Democratic Party, told me. He said he’s used the lull to prioritize party building, “instead of constantly focusing on one Republican senator or governor after another.”

The same is true in Iowa, that other presidential proving ground with a year-round appetite for stump speeches. “It’s pretty quiet on the western front,” David Oman, a Republican strategist and former co-chair of the Iowa state GOP, told me. As my colleague McKay Coppins recently reported, most of the Republicans who want the party to nominate someone other than Trump are, once again, reluctant to actually do anything about it. Trump’s potential GOP rivals have been similarly shy about taking him on; until Haley put out word about her announcement last week, no one in the emerging field—which could include Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, former Vice President Mike Pence, and former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, among others—was willing to be the first target of the barrage of insults and invective Trump would surely hurl their way.

Read: Republicans’ 2024 magical thinking

The momentary quietude has dampened any pressure for Biden to shift back into campaign mode, and he’s in no rush anyway. Tuesday’s State of the Union address will likely yield even more performance reviews than usual, as pundits and viewers alike judge the toll that Biden’s advancing age has taken on his oratory. As for the substance of his speech, White House officials told me Biden will continue the project he began months ago: promoting the accomplishments of his first two years in office, especially his bipartisan infrastructure law and the Democrats’ Inflation Reduction Act that he signed last summer.

In the absence of a fully formed GOP presidential field, Biden has been content to use the new House Republican majority as a foil—adopting a strategy that Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama employed after Democrats lost power in Congress during their first terms. Biden has vowed to protect programs such as Medicare and Social Security from GOP budget cuts; refused to negotiate over the debt ceiling (although the White House said last week he’d entertain “separate” conversations on deficit reduction); and eagerly highlighted ill-fated GOP proposals to replace the federal income tax with a 30 percent national sales tax.

Yet with Speaker Kevin McCarthy seated behind the president on the House rostrum for the first time, Biden is expected to stress conciliation over confrontation. “The president will once again amplify his belief that Democrats and Republicans can work together,” a White House official told me, speaking anonymously to preview a speech that hasn’t been finalized, “as they did in the last two years and as he is committed to doing with this new Congress to get big things done on behalf of the American people.”

Biden allies expect the president to formally announce his reelection bid sometime after the State of the Union, but they note that could still be months away. Such a wait isn’t unusual for incumbents, who don’t need to introduce themselves to the electorate and generally want to be seen as focused on governing. But no president since Ronald Reagan has faced as much uncertainty about whether he would seek a second term. (Then the oldest president, Reagan was eight years younger in 1983 than the 80-year-old Biden is now.) Outgoing Chief of Staff Ron Klain pointedly referenced a reelection bid as he departed the White House last week, telling Biden he looked forward to supporting him “when you run for president in 2024.” But other White House officials routinely affix the qualifier “if he runs” to discussions about a potential campaign, suggesting it remains less than a sure thing.

Franklin Foer: How Joe Biden wins again

Aiding Biden is the fact that no Democrats of note (besides Marianne Williamson) have made any moves to challenge him for the nomination, and the president’s allies are operating under the assumption that he will have the field to himself. “I would be shocked at this point if this becomes a competitive primary,” Amanda Loveday, a senior adviser to the pro-Biden super PAC Unite the Country, told me.

The bigger question is how many Republicans will challenge Biden knowing they’ll have to get through Trump first—and when they’ll see fit to jump in. GOP officials told me they expect Haley’s announcement to prompt others to enter the race soon. But Trump clearly froze the field for a while. All through 2021 and most of 2022, Buckley told me, “rarely a week went by without a major visit” to New Hampshire from a White House aspirant. “It all came to a grinding halt once Trump announced,” he said. Jeff Kaufmann, the Republican Party chair in Iowa, told me that the first months of 2021—the brief period after January 6 when Trump’s political future was in doubt—were busier for GOP hopefuls than this past January, just a year before the caucuses.

For most of American history, the observation that barely anyone was campaigning more than a year and a half before the election would be entirely unremarkable. Only in this century has a two-year campaign for a four-year term in the White House become the norm. (As recently as 1992, the governor of a small southern state declared his candidacy only 14 months before the election, and he did just fine.)

For most of the country, this respite from presidential politics is probably welcome, especially for voters who were inundated with nonstop campaign ads leading up to the midterm election. The view is a bit different, however, in Iowa and New Hampshire, where the quadrennial pilgrimage of politicos brings welcome attention and a sizable economic boost. Republicans in both states want to ensure that the GOP does not follow the Democrats in trying to leave them behind. Kaufmann told me he wasn’t worried; Senator Tim Scott would be coming out to Iowa in a few weeks, and others were calling to schedule events, perhaps preparing their launches. By March, he assured me, all would be back to normal. This extended presidential halftime will be over, and America’s never-ending campaign will resume in full.

[ad_2]

Russell Berman

Source link

February 4, 2023