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Tag: GOP race

  • Could South Carolina Change Everything?

    Could South Carolina Change Everything?

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    For more than four decades, South Carolina has been the decisive contest in the Republican presidential primaries—the state most likely to anoint the GOP’s eventual nominee. On Saturday, South Carolina seems poised to play that role again.

    Since the state moved to its prominent early position on the GOP presidential-primary calendar in 1980, the candidate who has won there has captured the nomination in every contested race except one. Given Donald Trump’s overall lead in the GOP race, a victory for him in South Carolina over Nikki Haley, the state’s former governor, would likely uphold that streak.

    “We all underestimate how deeply ingrained the Trump message is in the rank and file of our party,” Warren Tompkins, a longtime South Carolina–based GOP strategist and lobbyist, told me. “Take the personality out of it: What he stands for, what he says he’ll do, and what he did as president; he’s on the money.”

    This year, though, there may be a twist in South Carolina’s usual role of confirming the eventual GOP winner: Even as the state demonstrates Trump’s strength in the primary, it may also spotlight his potential difficulties as a general-election nominee. Like the first contests in Iowa and New Hampshire, South Carolina may show that though most Republican voters are ready to renominate Trump, a substantial minority of the GOP coalition has grown disaffected from him. And in a general-election rematch, that could provide a crucial opening for President Joe Biden, despite all of his vulnerabilities, to attract some ordinarily Republican-leaning voters.

    “Trump is essentially the incumbent leader of the party who is not able to get higher than, say, 65 percent” in the primaries, Alex Stroman, a former executive director of the South Carolina Republican Party, told me.

    Local observers say Haley has run a textbook South Carolina campaign, barnstorming the state in a bus, appearing relentlessly on national television, spending heavily on television advertising, and notably intensifying her criticism of Trump as “unhinged” and “diminished.” Trump, meanwhile, has breezed through the state as quickly as a snowbird motoring down I-95 from New York to Florida for the winter. Yet he has retained an imposing lead reaching as high as two to one over Haley in the polls.

    “I think you can argue Haley is running a fantastic campaign” in South Carolina, Jordan Ragusa, a political scientist at the College of Charleston and a co-author of a history of the South Carolina primary, told me. “But the pool of available voters is just so small that no matter what she does, it’s going to be hard for her to move the needle.”

    Read: The GOP has crossed an ominous threshold on foreign policy

    Over the past generation, South Carolina has had an extraordinary impact in shaping the outcome of GOP presidential-nomination contests. The state moved near the front of the GOP primary calendar in 1980, when Republicans were just establishing themselves as a competitive force in the state. GOP leaders created the primary, with its unusual scheduling on a Saturday, as a way to generate more attention for the party, which had previously selected its delegates at a convention attended by party insiders.

    The other key factor in creating the primary was support from Ronald Reagan’s presidential campaign, including Lee Atwater, a prominent GOP strategist then based in South Carolina. South Carolina did what Atwater hoped when Reagan won it in a rout, after unexpectedly losing the Iowa caucus to George H. W. Bush.

    Reagan’s victory in South Carolina placed him back on the path for the GOP nomination and cut a mold that has endured, with only one exception, in every contested GOP presidential-primary race through 2016. Each of those races followed the same formula: One candidate won the Iowa caucus, a second candidate won the New Hampshire primary, and then one of those two won South Carolina and eventually captured the nomination. (The exception came in 2012, when a backlash to a debate question about his marriage propelled Newt Gingrich to a decisive South Carolina win over Mitt Romney, who recovered to claim the nomination.)

    In 2016, Trump’s narrow victory in South Carolina effectively cemented the nomination for him after he had lost Iowa to Senator Ted Cruz of Texas and then recovered to win in New Hampshire. A victory for Trump on Saturday would allow him to equal a feat achieved only by incumbent GOP presidents: sweeping Iowa, New Hampshire, and South Carolina.

    Three factors, above all, explain South Carolina’s enduring influence in the GOP race. One is that it reflects the overall Republican coalition better than either of the two states that precede it. In Iowa, the Republican electorate leans heavily toward evangelical Christians who prioritize social issues; in New Hampshire, where there are few evangelicals, economic conservatives focused on taxes and spending, as well as a sizable group of libertarian voters, have dominated. South Carolina is the synthesis of both: It has a large evangelical population and a substantial cohort of suburban, business-oriented Republicans outside its three principal population centers of Greenville, Columbia, and Charleston.

    “In a lot of ways, the state party here is a microcosm of the national party,” Jim Guth, a longtime political scientist at Furman University, in Greenville, told me. “We replicate the profile of the national party maybe better than New Hampshire [or] Iowa.”

    It has been possible for candidates over the years to win Iowa or New Hampshire primarily by mobilizing just one group, such as social conservatives in Iowa and moderate independents in New Hampshire. But because the South Carolina GOP contains so many different power centers, “you have to have a broader appeal,” Tompkins, who has worked in every GOP presidential primary since Reagan, told me.

    The second key factor in South Carolina’s importance has been its placement on the GOP calendar. From the outset, in 1980, the primary was designed by its sponsors as a “First in the South” contest that they hoped would signal to voters across the region which candidate had emerged as the favorite. As more southern states over the years concentrated their primaries on Super Tuesday, in early March, that multiplied the domino effect of winning the state.

    “Given the demographic alignment between South Carolina and a lot of the southern Super Tuesday states, and the momentum effect, it really made South Carolina pivotal,” Ragusa said.

    Read: Trump is about to steamroll Nikki Haley

    The third dynamic underpinning South Carolina’s influence has been its role as a fire wall against insurgent candidates such as John McCain in 2000 and Patrick J. Buchanan in the 1990s. South Carolina’s Republican leadership has usually coalesced predominantly behind the candidate with the most support from the national party establishment and then helped power them to victory in the state. That model wavered in 2012, when Gingrich won his upset victory, and even in 2016, when Trump won despite clear splits in the national GOP establishment about his candidacy. But most often, South Carolina has been an empire-strikes-back place where the establishment-backed front-runner in the race snuffs out the last flickers of viable opposition.

    All of these historic factors appear virtually certain to benefit Trump this year. Super Tuesday no longer revolves as much around southern states. But it remains a huge landscape: 15 states and American Samoa will all pick a combined 874 Republican delegates on March 5, nearly three-fourths of the total required to win the nomination.

    In the limited polling across the Super Tuesday states, Trump now leads, usually commandingly, in all of them. Haley has already announced campaign appearances in Super Tuesday states through next week. But with all of the Super Tuesday states voting just 10 days after South Carolina, it will be virtually impossible for Haley to close the gap in so many places at once without winning her home state or at least significantly exceeding expectations. Like earlier underdogs, she faces a stark equation: To change the race anywhere on Super Tuesday, she must change it everywhere through her showing in South Carolina.

    Saturday’s result could also reconfirm South Carolina’s other key historic roles. Trump is now the candidate of most of the GOP establishment—a dynamic reflected in his endorsement by virtually all of the leading Republicans in Haley’s home state. He’s also become the contender with the broadest appeal inside the Republican Party. Because Trump is so polarizing for the general public, it’s difficult to see him in that light. But South Carolina is likely to buttress the indications from Iowa and New Hampshire that Trump, as a quasi-incumbent, now has a broader reach across the Republican Party than Haley does, or, for that matter, than he himself did in 2016. In most South Carolina polls, Trump is now leading her with every major demographic group, except among the independents who plan to participate in the primary.

    Yet South Carolina, like Iowa and New Hampshire before it, will also provide important clues about the extent of the remaining resistance to Trump within the Republican coalition.

    Haley is likely to perform best among well-educated voters around the population centers of Columbia and Charleston. “Haley must run up the score with traditional Reagan Republicans who want to actually nominate a candidate who can win in the general election,” Stroman told me. “She is going to be absolutely swamped in the MAGA-rich right-wing upstate, and in rural areas across the state—so she needs the suburbs and cities to turn out to hopefully keep her closer than expected.”

    In New Hampshire, Haley finished closer to Trump than most polls projected, because a large number of independent voters, and even a slice of Democrats, turned out to support her.  She’ll need a similar dynamic to finish credibly in South Carolina, where she has said her goal is to exceed her 43 percent of the vote in New Hampshire. The better the showing for Haley among independents, and among college-educated voters in the suburbs, the stronger the general-election warning signs for Trump.

    Democratic voters could be a wild card on Saturday after relatively few of them turned out for the party’s own primary earlier this month. South Carolina does not have party registration, which means that any voter who did not participate in the Democratic primary can vote in the Republican contest. A group called Primary Pivot has launched a campaign to encourage Democrats and independents to swarm the GOP primary to weaken Trump. If Haley exceeds expectations in South Carolina, it will be because, as in New Hampshire, more independents and Democrats turn out for her than pollsters anticipated.

    Besting Trump for the nomination may no longer be a realistic goal for Haley if she loses her home state. But, after mostly dodging confrontation with Trump for months, she is now delivering a more cogent and caustic argument against him, and showing a determination to force Republicans to wrestle with the general-election risks they are accepting by renominating him. The biggest question in South Carolina may not be whether Haley can beat Trump, but whether the state provides her more evidence, even in defeat, to make that case.

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    Ronald Brownstein

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  • First in the Nation—And Last?

    First in the Nation—And Last?

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    Donald Trump shares an essential trait with the voters of New Hampshire: a craving for flattery and affirmation.

    Residents here are accustomed to parades of candidates trekking up every four years to tell them how sacred their first-in-the-nation primary is, how discerning their famously “independent” and “contrarian” voters are. Politicians strain endlessly to convey how vital New Hampshire is to the process.

    But things feel precarious and a bit upside down here these days—more final whimper than first salvo.

    I landed in Manchester on Friday afternoon and found the place almost numb with abandonment. Elm Street, the “main drag” of New Hampshire’s biggest city, which is usually good for a few candidate sightings and media scrums, was quiet. Once the marquee stopover on the presidential tour, this original colony felt neglected in the final weekend before today’s primary, and well past its glory.

    “Where is everyone?” I asked the woman next to me at the counter of the downtown Red Arrow Diner on Friday. The century-old greasy spoon on Lowell Street has served as a landmark for visiting political hacks and as a reliable backdrop for candidate photo ops.

    “Ryan Binkley was just here,” my stool-neighbor informed me. I Googled Ryan Binkley. He is a pastor from Texas who says he is running for president because God called him to. Who is Ryan Binkley? the yard signs say (good enough to finish fifth in Iowa, apparently).

    You can see why the once-pandered-to populace of the Granite State might feel unloved. Last year, the Democrats—led by the current president of the United States—dumped New Hampshire in favor of South Carolina as the party’s official first primary. The scorned New England mainstay scheduled its primary anyway, even though the Democratic National Committee said it would not recognize the results or award any delegates derived from this unholy action. President Joe Biden has not campaigned in the state, and his name is not on the ballot.

    Read: Trump is about to steamroll Nikki Haley

    Now Republicans keep dropping out, leaving the GOP race down to Trump, who routed the field in Iowa last week, and the former United Nations ambassador Nikki Haley (plus Binkley and a few others). Campaign events were still occurring in New Hampshire in this final week, but far fewer than usual; Trump, and to a lesser extent Haley, drew most of the attention and the biggest crowds.

    The former president seemed both rambling and serene. “When I fly over a blue state, two days later, I get a subpoena,” Trump said at the start of a rally in Concord on Friday night. Technically, New Hampshire is itself a blue state, or at least it has been in the past several presidential elections; Trump lost it in both 2016 and 2020. But things were feeling quite safe here for Trump in the primary. Recent polls showed him with double-digit leads over Haley and Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, who was still in the race heading into the weekend but barely bothered with New Hampshire.

    “DeSantis, God bless him. He’s a remainder at this point,” New Hampshire Governor Chris Sununu, a Republican, told me at a Haley event in a Milford restaurant on Friday afternoon. “What happened to this guy?” Trump asked of DeSantis a few hours later in Concord. “One of the great self-destructions I think I’ve ever witnessed.”

    At the very least, DeSantis understood that the prevailing dynamic of the Republican Party over the past eight years has stayed intact. “You can be the most worthless Republican in America,” he said in one of his final campaign stops in Iowa, discharging a few nuggets of clarity as he approached the end. “If you kiss the ring, he’ll say you are wonderful.” The governor quit the race on Sunday and, yes, kissed the ring on the way out, endorsing Trump.

    Read: Ron DeSantis’s cold, hard reality

    This followed a week’s procession of white flags. Former Trump “opponents” kept endorsing the former president—Vivek Ramaswamy last Monday; the governor of North Dakota, whoever that was, the day before; Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina on Friday, joining Trump in Concord. By Sunday, New Hampshire felt like the last stand of a battle that had never started.

    Throughout the weekend, Trump tried to assure his supporters that he knows how important the state is, even though he would almost certainly rather spend his time elsewhere; he described New Hampshire as “a drug-infested den” in a 2017 phone call with the then-president of Mexico. He has been holding nightly rallies across the state since Friday, telling everyone how special they are, and the admiration is of course mutual.

    “I’m thrilled to be back in the home of first-in-the-nation,” Trump said at his Concord rally. Any candidate who comes to New Hampshire cannot utter those four words—first in the nation—enough. And Trump did, four times in the space of a few sentences.

    “You know who kept you first in the nation?” Trump asked the crowd.

    “Trump!” he said, uttering his own name along with some in the audience.

    “But I just want to tell you, you’re first in the nation,” he said. “You’re always going be first in the nation!”

    Read: What is Nikki Haley even talking about?

    For her part, Haley has been intent on convincing everyone that New Hampshire is still a race at all. A two-person race, to be precise. “Between Nikki and Trump,” Sununu repeated, like a fleece-wearing parrot, as he accompanied Haley across the state, four or five stops a day. He and Haley kept contrasting this particular two-person race with the one most Americans are dreading, between Trump and Biden.

    “People don’t want two 80-year-olds running for president,” Haley said in a brief press conference Friday at a diner in Amherst (Trump is 77; Biden is 81). She devoted much of the session to scolding the media for not properly correcting the false things Trump says about her. “Y’all need to call him out,” she urged. She also theorized that although 70 percent of Americans don’t want to be subjected to a Trump-Biden rematch, “70 percent of the media does want a rematch.”

    This is dubious, for what it’s worth. If anything, “the media” wanted a competitive primary campaign—some genuine uncertainty and drama, and a reason beyond obligation to keep tuning in.

    Like Trump, Dean Phillips is happy to fill the vacuum of love for New Hampshire. “We’ve got to practice democracy,” the Democratic representative from Minnesota said at a Nashua senior center on Saturday afternoon. Phillips, a wealthy former gelato baron, is waging a long-shot campaign against Biden—actually, a write-in version of Biden, who, because he’s not on the ballot, can be voted for only that way by New Hampshirites willing to overlook the president’s ghosting of their state.

    “Why write in Biden?” Phillips asked at the event, if Biden is “writing off New Hampshire?” Polite chuckles, maybe a moan or two. Phillips also suggested that Biden was “taking the Granite State for granted.” (Dean Phillips: The Dad Joke candidate!)

    Read: 90 minutes in a van with Dean Phillips

    Back in Concord, Trump had gone even further in conveying his admiration for his host and its traditions—reaching all the way back to the Civil War. Uh-oh. Haley did this last month, and it didn’t go well. But Trump—student of history that he is—had an important lesson to share. “They said the people from New Hampshire were very tough fighters,” Trump said. “Did you know that?” (No one seemed to.) He said he had read that somewhere. “History,” he continued. “Very tough fighters.”

    “You won a lot of battles. That was a nasty war.”

    He later proceeded with a strange flurry of comments about Haley, ridiculing her failure to protect the U.S. Capitol on January 6—wait, did he mean Nancy Pelosi, then the speaker of the House? Maybe, but Trump kept saying Haley’s name, over and over.

    “They,” he said, don’t want to talk about how Haley was in charge of security on January 6.

    He also said that Haley—this time he apparently did mean Nikki Haley, the one he’s running against—was not “capable,” “tough,” “smart,” or “respected” enough to be president and handle Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping, or Kim Jong Un. “Very fine people,” Trump called them.

    In a different time, this would be the kind of weird front-runner face-plant that could turn a New Hampshire primary on its head. Haley did her best to keep Trump’s bizarre comments aloft over the weekend. But mostly they were met with the usual resignation of a party with little will to fight, drifting toward the inevitable.

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    Mark Leibovich

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  • The End Is Coming for Trump’s GOP Rivals

    The End Is Coming for Trump’s GOP Rivals

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    The arctic chill that upended the final weekend of the Iowa Republican caucus provided a fitting end to a contest that has seemed frozen in place for months.

    This caucus has felt unusually lifeless, not only because former President Donald Trump has maintained an imposing and seemingly unshakable lead in the polls. That advantage was confirmed late Saturday night when the Des Moines Register, NBC, and Mediacom Iowa released their highly anticipated final pre-caucus poll showing Trump at 48 percent and, in a distant battle for second place, Nikki Haley at 20 percent and Ron DeSantis at 16 percent.

    The caucus has also lacked energy because Trump’s shrinking field of rivals has never appeared to have the heart for making an all-out case against him. “I think there was actually a decent electorate that had supported Trump in the past but were interested in looking for somebody else,” Douglas Gross, a longtime GOP activist who chaired Mitt Romney’s 2012 campaign in Iowa, told me. But neither DeSantis nor Haley, he adds, found a message that dislodged nearly enough of them from the front-runner. “Trump has run as an incumbent, if you will, and dominated the media so skillfully that it took a lot of the energy out of the race,” Gross said.

    In retrospect, the constrictive boundaries for the GOP race were established when the candidates gathered for their first debate last August (without Trump, who has refused to attend any debate). The crucial moment came when Bret Baier, from Fox News Channel, asked the contenders whether they would support Trump as the nominee even if he was convicted of a crime “in a court of law.” All the contenders onstage raised their hand to indicate they would, except for Chris Christie and Asa Hutchinson, two long shots at the periphery of the race. With that declaration, the candidates effectively placed the question of whether Trump is fit to be president again—the most important issue facing Republicans in 2024—out of bounds.

    That collective failure led to Christie’s withering moral judgment on the field when he quit the race last week: “Anyone who is unwilling to say that he is unfit to be president of the United States is unfit themselves to be president of the United States.” But even in practical political terms, the choice not to directly address Trump’s fitness left his principal rivals scrambling to find an alternative way to contrast with the front-runner.

    Over time, DeSantis has built a coherent critique of Trump, though a very idiosyncratic one. DeSantis runs at Trump from the right, insisting that the man who devised and articulated the “America First” agenda can no longer be trusted to advance it. In his final appearances across Iowa, his CNN debate with Haley last week, and a Fox town hall, DeSantis criticized Trump’s presidential record and 2024 agenda as insufficiently conservative on abortion, LGBTQ rights, federal spending, confronting the bureaucracy, and shutting down the country during the pandemic. He has even accused Trump of failing to deport enough undocumented immigrants and failing to construct enough of his signature border wall.

    Read: Trump is coming for Obamacare again

    On issues where politicians in the center or left charge Trump with extremism, DeSantis inverts the accusation: The problem, he argues, is that Trump wasn’t extreme enough. The moment that best encapsulated DeSantis’s approach came in last week’s CNN debate. At one point, the moderators asked him about the claim from Trump’s lawyer that he cannot be prosecuted for any presidential action—including ordering the assassination of a political rival—unless he was first impeached and convicted. DeSantis insisted the problem was that in office, Trump was too restrained in using unilateral presidential authority. He complained that Trump failed to call in the National Guard over the objections of local officials to squelch civil unrest in the Black Lives Matter protests following the 2020 murder of George Floyd. When DeSantis visited campaign volunteers last Friday, he indignantly complained “it’s just not true” that he has gone easy on Trump in these final days. “If you watched the debate,” DeSantis told reporters, “I hit on BLM, not building the wall, the debt, not draining the swamp, Fauci, all those things.”

    Perhaps the prospect of impending defeat has concentrated the mind, but DeSantis in his closing trek across Iowa has offered perceptive explanations for why these attacks against Trump have sputtered. One is that Trump stifled the debates by refusing to participate in them. “It’s different for me to just be doing that to a camera versus him being right there,” DeSantis told reporters. “When you have a clash, then you guys have to cover it, and it becomes something that people start to talk about.” The other problem, he maintained, was that conservative media like Fox News act as “a praetorian guard” that suppresses criticism of Trump, even from the right.

    Those are compelling observations, but incomplete as an explanation. DeSantis’s larger problem may be that the universe of voters that wants Trumpism but doesn’t think Trump can be relied on to deliver it is much smaller than the Florida governor had hoped. One top Trump adviser told me that the fights Trump engaged in as president make it almost impossible to convince conservatives he’s not really one of them. Bob Vander Plaats, a prominent Iowa evangelical leader who has endorsed DeSantis, likewise told me that amid all of Trump’s battles with the left, it’s easier to try to convince evangelical conservatives that the former president can’t win in November than that he has abandoned their causes.

    The analogy I’ve used for DeSantis’s strategy is that Trump is like a Mack truck barreling down the far-right lane of American politics, and that rather than trying to pass in all the space he’s left in the center of the road, DeSantis has tried to squeeze past him on the right shoulder. There’s just not a lot of room there.

    Even so, DeSantis’s complaints about Trump look like a closing argument from Perry Mason compared with the muffled, gauzy case that Haley has presented against him. DeSantis’s choice to run to Trump’s right created a vacuum that Haley, largely through effective performances at the early debates, has filled with the elements of the GOP coalition that have always been most dubious of Trump: moderates, suburbanites, college-educated voters. But that isn’t a coalition nearly big enough to win. And she has walked on eggshells in trying to reach beyond that universe to the Republican voters who are generally favorable toward Trump but began the race possibly open to an alternative—what the veteran GOP pollster Whit Ayres calls the “maybe Trump” constituency.

    The most notable thing in how Haley talks about Trump is that she almost always avoids value judgments. It’s time for generational change, she will say, or I will be a stronger general-election candidate who will sweep in more Republican candidates up and down the ballot.

    Read: The real reason Republicans couldn’t kill Obamacare

    At last week’s CNN debate, Haley turned up the dial when she that said of course Trump lost the 2020 election; that January 6 was a “terrible day”; and that Trump’s claims of absolute immunity were “ridiculous.” Those pointed comments probably offered a momentary glimpse of what she actually thinks about him. But in the crucial days before the caucus, Haley has reverted to her careful, values-free dissents. At one town hall conducted over telephone late last week, she said the “hard truths” Republicans had to face were that, although “President Trump was the right president at the right time” and “I agree with a lot of his policies,” the fact remained that “rightly or wrongly, chaos follows him.” Talk about taking off the gloves.

    Jennifer Horn, the former Republican Party chair in New Hampshire who has become a fierce Trump critic, told me, “There’s no moral or ethical judgment against Trump from her. From anyone, really, but we’re talking about her. She says chaos follows him ‘rightly or wrongly.’ Who cares? Nobody cares about chaos. That’s not the issue with Trump. He’s crooked; he’s criminal; he incited an insurrection. That’s the case against Trump. And if his so-called strongest opponent won’t make the case against Trump, why should voters?”

    Gross, the longtime GOP activist, is supporting Haley, but even he is perplexed by her reluctance to articulate a stronger critique of the front-runner. “I don’t know what her argument is,” Gross told me. “I guess it’s: Get rid of the chaos. She’s got to make a strong case about why she’s the alternative, and it’s got to include some element of judgment.”

    The reluctance of DeSantis and Haley to fully confront the former president has created an utterly asymmetrical campaign battlefield because Trump has displayed no hesitation about attacking either of them. The super PAC associated with Trump’s campaign spent months pounding DeSantis on issues including supporting statehood for Puerto Rico and backing cuts in Social Security, and in recent weeks, Trump’s camp has run ads accusing Haley of raising taxes and being weak on immigration. In response, DeSantis and Haley have spent significantly more money attacking each other than criticizing, or even rebutting, Trump. Rob Pyers, an analyst with the nonpartisan California Target Book, has calculated that the principal super PAC supporting Trump has spent $32 million combined in ads against Haley and DeSantis; they have pummeled each other with a combined $38 million in negative ads from the super PACs associated with their campaigns. Meanwhile, the Haley and DeSantis super PACs have spent only a little more than $1 million in ads targeting Trump, who is leading them by as much as 50 points in national polls.

    Haley’s sharpest retort to any of Trump’s attacks has been to say he’s misrepresenting her record. During the CNN debate, Haley metronomically touted a website called DeSantislies.com, but if she has a similar page up about Trump, she hasn’t mentioned it. (Her campaign didn’t respond to a query about whether it plans to establish such a site.)

    “Calling him a liar right now is her strongest pushback, but I just don’t think GOP voters care about liars,” Horn told me. “If she engaged in a real battle with him for these last days [before New Hampshire], that would be fascinating to see. The fact that she’s not pushing back, the fact that she’s not running the strongest possible campaign as she’s coming down the stretch here, makes me wonder if she is as uncertain of her ability to win as I am.”

    Some Republican strategists are sympathetic to this careful approach to Trump, especially from Haley. A former top aide to one of Trump’s main rivals in the 2016 race told me that “nobody has found a message you can put on TV that makes Republicans like Trump less.” Some other veterans of earlier GOP contests believe that Haley and DeSantis were justified in initially trying to eclipse the other and create a one-on-one race with Trump. And for Haley, there’s also at least some argument for preserving her strongest case against Trump for the January 23 New Hampshire primary, where a more moderate electorate may be more receptive than the conservative, heavily evangelical population that usually turns out for the caucus.

    “She has to draw much sharper contrasts,” Gross told me. “And to be fair to her, once she gets out of here, maybe she will. What she strikes me as is incredibly disciplined and calculating. So, I do think you’re going to see modulation.”

    DeSantis has the most to lose in Iowa, because a poor showing will almost certainly end his campaign, even if he tries to insist otherwise for a few weeks. For Haley, the results aren’t as important because whatever happens here, she will have another opportunity to create momentum in New Hampshire, where polls have shown her rising even as DeSantis craters. Still, if Haley is unable or unwilling to deliver a more persuasive argument against Trump, she too will quickly find herself with no realistic hope of overtaking the front-runner, whose lead in national polls of Republican voters continues to grow. That’s one thing common to winter in both Iowa and New Hampshire: It gets dark early.

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    Ronald Brownstein

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  • Rosencrantz and Guildenstern at the Republican Debate

    Rosencrantz and Guildenstern at the Republican Debate

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    In their first presidential debate last night, Republicans staged their own version of Tom Stoppard’s classic play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead.

    Stoppard’s story focuses on the titular two characters, who are minor figures in Hamlet. The playwright recounts the Hamlet story from their peripheral perspective, as Rosencrantz and Guildenstern wait and wander, distant from the real action. For much of the play’s three acts, they strain for even glimpses of the man at the center of the tale, Prince Hamlet.

    The eight GOP candidates onstage last night often seemed like Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, with their words largely stripped of meaning by the absence of the central protagonist in their drama.

    The debate had plenty of heat, flashes of genuine anger, and revealing policy disputes. Former UN Ambassador Nikki Haley, who has often seemed a secondary player in this race, delivered a forceful performance—particularly in rebutting the entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy on policy toward Ukraine—that made her the most vivid figure onstage to many Republicans.

    But all that sound and fury fundamentally lacked relevance to the central story in the GOP race: whether anyone can dent former President Donald Trump’s massive lead over the field. At times, it seemed as if the other candidates had lost sight of the fact that it is Trump, not the motormouthed Ramaswamy, who is 40 points or more ahead of all of them in national polls.

    “Trump is the big winner,” the Republican consultant Alex Conant told me after the debate. “Nobody made an argument about why they would be a better nominee than Donald Trump. They didn’t even begin to make that argument.”

    There were plausible reasons the candidates focused so little on the man they are trying to overtake. The Fox News moderators did not ask specifically about Trump’s legal troubles until an hour into the debate, instead focusing on discussions about the economy, climate change, and abortion. Ramaswamy seemed to be daring the other candidates to smack him down by repeatedly attacking not only their policies but their motivations. “I’m the only person on this stage who isn’t bought and paid for,” he insisted at one point. Loud booing from the audience almost anytime someone criticized Trump may also have discouraged anyone from targeting him too often.

    But it was more than the debate’s immediate circumstances that explained the field’s decision to minimize direct confrontation with Trump. That choice merely extended the strategy most have followed throughout this campaign, which in turn has replicated the deferential approach most of Trump’s rivals took during the 2016 race.

    David A. Graham: Ramaswamy and the rest

    Haley took the most direct shot at the former president on policy, criticizing him from the right for increasing the national debt so much during his tenure; Florida Governor Ron DeSantis jabbed Trump too—though not by name—for supporting lockdowns early in the pandemic. Yet these exchanges were overshadowed by the refusal of any of the contenders, apart from former Governors Chris Christie and Asa Hutchinson, to object to Trump’s attempts to overturn the 2020 election or his role in sparking the January 6 insurrection. All of them except Hutchinson and Christie raised their hand to indicate they would support Trump as the GOP presidential nominee even if he is convicted of a crime before the election.

    To Conant, all of this seemed reminiscent of the 2016 campaign, when Trump’s rivals seemed reluctant to attack him in the hope that he would somehow collapse on his own. “Their strategy is wrong,” Conant said. “He’s going to be the nominee unless somebody can capture the support of Republicans who are open to an alternative. And nobody even tried to do that tonight.”

    David Kochel, an Iowa-based Republican consultant, wasn’t as critical. But he agreed that the field displayed little urgency about its biggest imperative: dislodging from Trump some of the voters now swelling his big lead in the polls. “What this race needs is to start focusing in on [the question of] ‘Trump or the future, which is it?’” Kochel told me. “I’m not sure we saw enough of that” last night.

    The failure to more directly address the elephant in the room, or what Bret Baier, a co-moderator, called “the elephant not in the room,” undoubtedly muted the debate’s potential impact on the race. Nonetheless, the evening might provide a tailwind to some of the contenders, and a headwind to others.

    The consensus among Republicans I spoke with after the debate was that Haley made a more compelling impression than the other seven candidates onstage. Her best moment came when she lacerated Ramaswamy for calling to end U.S. support to Ukraine, a move she said would essentially surrender the country to Russian President Vladimir Putin. “You are choosing a murderer over a pro-American country,” she told Ramaswamy. “You have no foreign-policy experience, and it shows.”

    The debate “lifted Nikki Haley as one of the prime alternatives for the people who are worried that Trump carries too much baggage to get elected,” the veteran GOP pollster Whit Ayres told me last night. “She gutted Ramaswamy.”

    Ramaswamy forced himself into the center of the conversation for much of the night, making unequivocal conservative declarations such as “The climate agenda is a hoax,” and categorical attacks on the rest of the candidates as corrupt career politicians.

    Yet the evening showed why he may not advance any further than other outsider candidates in earlier GOP races, like Herman Cain and Michele Bachmann in 2012. His choice to emulate Trump as an agent of chaos surely thrilled the GOP voters most alienated from the party leadership. But Ramaswamy’s disruptive behavior and tendency toward absolutist positions that he could not effectively defend seemed likely to lower his ultimate ceiling of support. He appeared to simultaneously deepen but narrow his potential audience.

    Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina also had a difficult night, though less by commission than omission. In his first turn on such a big stage, he simply failed to make much of an imprint; the evening underscored the limitations of his campaign message beyond his personal story of rising from poverty. “I forgot he was even there,” Kochel said. “Maybe nice guys finish last; I don’t know. He disappeared.”

    Former Vice President Mike Pence, by contrast, was as animated as he’s been in a public forum. That was true both when he was making the case for an almost pre-Trumpian policy agenda that reprised priorities associated with Ronald Reagan and when he was defending his actions on January 6.

    DeSantis, who seemed slightly overcaffeinated at the outset, didn’t disappear, but he didn’t fill Trump’s shoes as the focal point of the debate either. The other candidates devoted little effort to criticizing or contrasting with him. To Conant, that was a sign they consider him a fading ember: “No reason to risk losing a back-and-forth with a dead man,” Conant said. Others thought that although DeSantis did not stand out, he didn’t make any mistakes and may have succeeded in reminding more conservative voters why they liked him so much before his unsteady first months as a presidential candidate.

    Christie in turn may have connected effectively with the relatively thin slice of GOP voters irrevocably hostile to Trump. That may constitute only 10 to 15 percent of the GOP electorate nationally, but it represents much more than that in New Hampshire, where Christie could prove formidable, Ayres told me.

    But it won’t matter much which candidate slightly improved, or diminished, their position if they all remain so far behind Trump. Ayres believes materially weakening Trump in the GOP race may be beyond the capacity of any of his rivals; the only force that might bring him back within their reach, Ayres told me, is if his trial for trying to overturn the 2020 election commences before the voting advances too far next year and damages his image among more Republican voters.

    In a Republican context, Ayres said, “The only institutions that have the ability to bring him back to Earth are not political institutions; they are judicial institutions.”

    Kochel, who attended the debate, pointed out that the loud disapproval from the crowd at any mention of Trump’s legal troubles accurately reflected the desire of most GOP voters to bury the issue. “A lot of the base right now collectively has their hands up over their ears and are going ‘La-la-la,’” Kochel said. The problem for the party, though, is that while Republican partisans may not want to deal with the electoral implications of nominating a candidate facing 91 criminal charges, “general-election voters are going to deliver a verdict on all of this even if a jury doesn’t.”

    David A. Graham: What people keep missing about Ron DeSantis

    Apart from Christie and Hutchinson, the candidates on the stage seemed no more eager than the audience to address Trump’s actions. While all of them agreed Pence did the right thing on January 6 by refusing Trump’s demands to reject the election results, none except those two and Pence himself suggested Trump did something wrong in pressuring his vice president. Nor did the others find fault in anything else Trump did to subvert the 2020 result.

    The final act of Stoppard’s play finds Rosencrantz and Guildenstern drifting toward a doom that neither understands, nor can summon the will to escape. In their caution and timidity, the Republicans distantly chasing Trump don’t look much different.

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    Ronald Brownstein

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