Nikki Haley leaves a campaign stop in Camden on Monday, Feb. 19, 2024
Tracy Glantz
tglantz@thestate.com
COLUMBIA, S.C.
After being flattened by Donald Trump in her home state primary, Nikki Haley is now 0-for-5 in 2024 Republican presidential nominating contests.
And yet over the next week, she’s scheduled to campaign in another six states, beginning in Michigan, where she is likely to endure another emphatic defeat on Tuesday by a margin even larger than her South Carolina loss.
Considerable financial resources are allowing Haley to soldier on, but the long-term cost may be a viable future for her inside a Trump-first Republican Party. Her pledge to “campaign until the last person votes” without a realistic path for victory suggests she’s come to terms with it.
“As it relates to her future in politics, I’m skeptical she has one, at least in today’s GOP,” said Jason Cabel Roe, a Detroit-based Republican consultant. “She more closely resembles the Bush-neocon-big business GOP than the modern populist GOP.”
Even if Trump is struck by lightning or sent to prison as a result of one of his criminal trials and a contested GOP convention unfolds at the Republican National Convention this summer, “there’s a better shot a Ron DeSantis could get it than a Nikki Haley,” Terry Sullivan, the GOP consultant who ran Marco Rubio’s 2016 presidential bid, said on a Puck podcast this week. “Because right now she’s just hurting herself with the base.”
Haley’s willingness to shrug off bruising home-state repudiation also speaks to the nationalization of all modern politics. With voters more loyal to sweeping movements and galvanizing ideologies that cross state borders, Haley has morphed into the last woman willing to sound the alarm on the political risk Trump poses to her party, despite abundant early polling showing his strength against President Biden.
Haley’s crusade now, revealed candidly by her campaign manager Betsy Ankney on a Friday Zoom call with the press, is about showcasing how Trump can’t win a general election.
If not Never Trump, it’s close to Not Trump.
“He will not defeat Joe Biden in November and he will drag the entire Republican ticket down with him,” Ankney proclaimed. “If Trump is the nominee, the House is gone.”
There’s a long history of candidates revising their assessments of their rivals once the primary has concluded. Trump’s campaign believes Haley will “kiss ass when she quits” and sign on with the former president who named her ambassador to the United Nations.
Even under the most generous circumstances for Haley, Trump’s campaign has projected he’ll have the delegates necessary to clinch the GOP nomination by March 19.
So while Haley is girded for battle through March 5th’s Super Tuesday – when 15 states and American Samoa cast ballots – she’ll face another inflection point on the purpose of her candidacy once Trump hits the magic number of delegates in mid-March.
Thirty-two years ago, Republican firebrand Pat Buchanan continued his 1992 campaign even after acknowledging President George Bush had amassed the delegates needed to be the GOP nominee by mid March. But Buchanan toned down his anti-Bush rhetoric and eventually turned his fire on Democrats in a rip-roaring convention speech.
On the Democratic side, Jerry Brown stayed in the race as an alternative to Bill Clinton through the national convention. The national exposure didn’t ever land him the presidency, but propelled him back into the governorship of California.
These could serve as models for Haley, who has built a large national network of supporters, volunteers and donors she could tap for a future endeavor inside or outside of politics.
“It allows her and her campaign to build connections on the grassroots level in state after state. If you bail out early, you just don’t go through those exercises in recruiting volunteers and paying county leaders across the country, and sort of team bank and phone captains,” said Timothy Head, executive director of the Faith and Freedom Coalition. “This is the first time she has raised really large amounts of money from national donors. It also gives her prolonged exposure and bonding to a lot of those donors who probably … have experienced some pause with Donald Trump.”
Trump is the only person who may hold more sway over Haley’s future than the former South Carolina governor herself. Political survival in the modern Republican Party nearly requires making penance with Trump.
Just listen to Rep. Nancy Mace, a former Trump critic who now faces a Low Country primary herself.
“We should question any Republican not supporting Donald Trump, question their motives. There’s no reason for us to continue to take shots at Donald Trump when he’s going to be the nominee,” Mace told right-wing media outlet One America News on Saturday.
Trump has made peace with countless rivals before, once they pledge their allegiance and unflinching loyalty. Haley’s bigger problem might be his unrelenting ecosystem of adherents.
“She’s done as a Republican after this and she doesn’t care,” tweeted Newsmax anchor Rob Schmitt. “She’ll be a mainstream staple, sell out the country, be rich & popular.”
David Catanese is a national political correspondent for McClatchy in Washington. He’s covered campaigns for more than a decade, previously working at U.S. News & World Report and Politico. Prior to that he was a television reporter for NBC affiliates in Missouri and North Dakota. You can send tips, smart takes and critiques to dcatanese@mcclatchydc.com.
Javon L. Harris is a politics and legislative reporter for The State. He is a graduate of the University of Florida and the Thurgood Marshall School of Law at Texas Southern University. Before coming to South Carolina, Javon covered breaking news, local government and social justice for The Gainesville Sun in Florida. Support my work with a digital subscription
The afternoon before Donald Trump’s blowout win in South Carolina’s primary, Shellie Hargenrader and Julianne Poulnot emerged from a rally for the former president bubbling with righteous conviction.
They had spent the previous hour listening to the candidate’s son Donald Trump Jr. regale supporters at the campaign’s headquarters in an office park outside Charleston. The crowd had been energized, frequently calling out in response to his words as if at a church service, while Trump Jr. lacerated President Joe Biden, the media, the multiple legal proceedings against his father, and the punishment of the January 6 insurrectionists. “Trump is my president,” one man shouted.
Hargenrader and Poulnot were still feeling that spirit when they stopped on their way out from the rally to talk with me. When I asked them why they were supporting Trump over Nikki Haley, the state’s former governor, they started with conventional reasons. “Because he did a great job and he can do it again,” Hargenrader told me. Poulnot cut in to add: “He stands for the people and he tells the truth.”
But within moments, the two women moved to a higher plane in their praise of Trump and condemnation of Haley. “I think the Lord has him in the chair,” Hargenrader told me. “He’s God’s man.” Poulnot jumped in again. “And the election was stolen from him,” she said. “You have to live on Mars to not realize that.” And Haley? “I think she’s an opportunist and … she sold her soul to the devil,” Poulnot told me.
Such is the level of evangelical fervor for Trump within much of the GOP base that buried Haley in her home state on Saturday. Haley had said her goal in South Carolina was to match the 43 percent of the vote she received in last month’s New Hampshire primary, an exceedingly modest aspiration. But she appeared to fall short of even that low bar, as Trump routed her by a tally of about 60 percent to 40 percent, at the latest count.
Trump’s victory in South Carolina placed him in a virtually impregnable position for the nomination. Since South Carolina established its primary near the front of the GOP calendar in 1980, the candidate who won here has captured the Republican nomination in every contested race except one. With his win tonight, Trump became the first GOP contender other than an incumbent president to sweep the big three early contests of Iowa, New Hampshire, and South Carolina.
Reinforcing the message from the key initial contests of Iowa and New Hampshire, the South Carolina result showed that Haley faces a ceiling on her support too low to beat Trump. For Haley to catch Trump now would require some massive external event, and even that might not be enough.
But for all the evidence of Trump’s strength within the party, the South Carolina results again showed that a meaningful floor of GOP voters remains uneasy with returning him to leadership. “I like his policies, but I’d like to cut his thumbs off and tape his mouth shut,” Juanita Gwilt of Isle of Palms told me last night just outside Charleston, before Haley’s final rally leading up the primary. In Haley’s speech to her supporters, she insisted that she would remain in the race. “I’m an accountant. I know 40 percent is not 50 percent,” she said. “But I also know 40 percent is not some tiny group. There are huge numbers of voters in our Republican primaries who are saying they want an alternative.”
As in Iowa and New Hampshire, Trump’s pattern of support in South Carolina simultaneously underscored his dominant position in the party while pointing to some potential vulnerabilities for the general election. In this deeply conservative state, Trump carried virtually every major demographic group. Trump beat Haley, for instance, by nearly as much among women as men and by nearly as much among suburban as rural voters, according to the exit polls conducted by Edison Research for a consortium of media organizations. The robust overall turnout testified again to Trump’s greatest political strength—his extraordinary ability to motivate his base voters.
Still, some warning signs for him persisted: About one-third of all primary voters and even one-fourth of self-identified Republicans said they would not consider Trump fit for the presidency if he was convicted of a crime. More than four in five Haley voters said he would be unfit if convicted, about the same elevated share as in Iowa and New Hampshire. And as in the earlier states, Trump faced much more resistance among primary voters with a college degree than those without one, and among voters who did not identify as evangelical Christians than those who did. (The exit polls showed Haley narrowly carrying both groups.) As in both Iowa and New Hampshire, Trump won only about two in five independents in South Carolina, the exit polls found.
The magnitude of Trump’s victory was especially striking given the mismatch in time and money the two candidates devoted to the state. Haley camped out in South Carolina for most of the month before the vote, barnstorming the state in a bus; Trump parachuted in for a few large rallies. Her campaign, and the super PACs supporting her, spent nearly $9.4 million in South Carolina advertising, about nine times as much as Trump and his supporters, according to data provided by AdImpact.
In South Carolina, Haley also delivered a case against Trump that was far more cogent and cohesive than she offered earlier in the race. During the multiple nationally televised Republican debates through 2023, Haley barely raised a complaint about Trump. Through Iowa and New Hampshire—when she had the concentrated attention of the national media—she refused to go any further in criticizing Trump than declaring that “chaos follows him, rightly or wrongly.”
But after allowing those opportunities to pass, she notably escalated her challenge to Trump over the past month in her South Carolina rallies and a succession of television appearances. This morning, after she voted near her home in Kiawah Island, reporters asked her about some racist comments Trump made last night at an event in Columbia. In her response, no trace remained of that passive voice. “That’s the chaos that comes with Donald Trump,” she said firmly, now clearly describing him as the source of the chaos rather than a bystander to its eruption. “That’s the offensiveness that is going to happen every day between now and the general election.”
Yesterday, at a rally in Moncks Corner, a small town about an hour north of Charleston, Haley delivered a biting critique of Trump’s comments that he would encourage Russia to invade NATO countries that don’t meet the alliance’s guidelines for spending on their own defense. “Trump is siding with a thug where half a million people have died or been wounded because [Russian President Vladimir] Putin invaded Ukraine,” she said. “Trump is siding with a dictator who kills his political opponents. Trump is siding with a tyrant who arrests American journalists and holds them hostage.”
A few minutes later, Haley lashed Trump for questioning why her husband, who is on a military deployment, has not appeared with her during the campaign. “Donald Trump’s never been near a uniform,” she said. “He’s never had to sleep on the ground. The closest he’s ever come to harm’s way is if a golf ball happens to hit him on the golf course.” Later, she criticized Trump for using tens of millions of dollars in campaign contributions to pay his own legal bills. And she insisted that he cannot win a general election.
Haley remains careful to balance every criticism of Trump with an equal jab at Biden. But though she portrays both Biden and Trump as destabilizing forces, the core of her retooled message is a repudiation of Trump’s insistence that he will make America great again. No, she says, the challenge for the next president is to make America normal again. “Our kids want to know what normal feels like,” she insisted in Moncks Corner.
Taken together, this is an argument quite distinct from the case against Trump from Biden, or his sharpest Republican critics, including former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie and former Representative Liz Cheney. Haley doesn’t join them in framing Trump as a threat to democracy or an aspiring autocrat. The refusal to embrace that claim as well as the staunch conservatism of her own agenda and her repeated indications that she’ll likely support Trump if he wins the nomination probably explains why Haley failed to attract as many independent and Democratic voters as she needed to participate today. Those non-Republicans cast only about 30 percent of the total votes, according to the exit polls. That’s about the same share as in both the 2016 and 2012 South Carolina primaries, and far less than the nearly 40 percent share then-Senator John McCain turned out in his “maverick” 2000 presidential bid against George W. Bush. (And even with that, Bush beat him by consolidating a big majority of partisan Republican voters, as Trump did earlier today.)
Instead, in South Carolina, Haley offered a case against Trump aimed more directly at wavering Republicans. She accused Trump of failing to display the personal characteristics that conservatives insist they value. It’s telling that at Haley’s rallies yesterday, she drew almost no applause when she criticized Trump on policy grounds for enlarging the federal deficit or supporting sweeping tariffs. But she inspired cries of disdain from her audience when she disparaged Trump, in so many words, as a grifter, a liar, and a self-absorbed narcissist more focused on his own grudges than on his voters’ needs. “Poor guy,” one man yelled out last night after Haley complained about Trump constantly portraying himself as a victim.
Would it have made any difference if Haley had pressed these assertions earlier in the race, when she had the large national audience of the debates, and Trump had not progressed so far toward the nomination? Several GOP strategists and operatives this week told me that attacking Trump while the field was still crowded would only have hurt Haley and benefited the other contenders who stayed out of the fray. Even now, in a one-on-one race, directly confronting Trump is rapidly raising Haley’s negative rating among GOP voters. Whit Ayres, a veteran GOP pollster, told me as the results came in Saturday night that GOP voters who voted for Trump twice might take it as a personal insult about their own prior decisions if Haley echoed Christie and Cheney in portraying the former president as “unfit for office and a threat to democracy.”
Hargenrader and Poulnot underscored Ayres’s point yesterday: They speak for millions of Republican voters who see Trump in quasi-religious terms as uniquely fighting for them, and the legal challenges ensnaring him only as evidence of the burdens he’s bearing on their behalf. “I don’t think people appreciate sufficiently the fine line Nikki Haley has to walk with this coalition,” Ayres told me.
After months of vacillation and caution, Haley is now making a forceful case against Trump, and displaying great political courage in doing so: She is standing virtually alone while most of the GOP establishment (including virtually all of the political leadership in South Carolina) aligns behind him. Ayres believes that Haley is speaking for a large enough minority of the party to justify continuing in the race for as long as she wants—even if there’s virtually no chance anymore that she can expand her coalition enough to truly threaten Trump. “Nikki Haley represents a perspective, an outlook on the world, and a set of values that are still held by what remains of the Reagan-Bush coalition in the Republican Party,” Ayres told me.
But the bill for treating Trump so gingerly for so many months has now come due for Haley in South Carolina. Haley waited until the concrete in this race had almost hardened before giving Republican voters a real reason to think twice about nominating Trump again. Perhaps the circle of GOP voters open to an alternative was never large enough to support a serious challenge to the former president. What’s clear after his decisive victory in South Carolina is that neither Haley nor anyone else in the GOP tried hard enough to test that proposition until it was too late.
Not very long ago, the harshest thing Nikki Haley would say about Donald Trump was that “chaos follows him”—a sort of benign jab that creatively avoids causation and suggests mere correlation, like noting that scorched trees tend to appear after a forest fire.
For most of the Republican-primary campaign to date, Haley adopted a carefully modulated approach toward the former president, and reserved most of her barbs for her other primary rivals. Her motto seemed to be “Speak softly about Trump and carry a sharp stick for Vivek Ramaswamy.” Recently, though, Haley has made a hard pivot.
Just two days after she came in (a distant) second to Trump in the New Hampshire primary, she began fundraising for the first time off his attacks on her—selling T-shirts with the slogan BARRED PERMANENTLY after the former president said that anyone who continues to support her will be “permanently barred from the MAGA camp,” whatever that means.
In the past week, Haley has been on a tear, calling Trump “totally unhinged,” “toxic,” “self-absorbed,” and lacking in “moral clarity.” Her campaign unleashed a new attack-ad series in which Trump and President Joe Biden are portrayed as two “grumpy old men” standing in the way of the next generation. And yesterday, Haley posted a gag photo of a Trump Halloween costume labeled “Weakest General Election Candidate Ever.” To paraphrase the words of the Democratic-primary candidate Marianne Williamson, Girlfriend, this is so on.
Such an aggressive posture is new for Haley, and Democrats and anti-Trump Republicans have applauded her for it. She should have been talking this way all along, some of her supporters argue. “If she started it sooner, she would’ve cut the lead in New Hampshire,” Chip Felkel, a Republican strategist in South Carolina, told me. In his view, Haley thought she “had to play nice” to win over Trump voters: “But this ain’t a nice game.”
Can Haley still achieve anything by playing hardball at this point? Things don’t look promising. Her bid to defeat Trump is already the longest of long shots, based on the polls coming out of virtually every state, including Haley’s own South Carolina. So what’s the point of changing things up? Why muster the courage to smack-talk Trump now, when the race seems all but over? I asked a number of political strategists and experts for their view, and pieced together a few plausible theories. (Neither the Haley nor the Trump campaign responded to a request for comment.)
1. Attacking Trump is easier now. The most obvious theory for Haley’s more combative rhetoric is that with only one other major candidate still in the primary, the task of drawing a direct contrast with Trump is much simpler. “If you have six people in a race and a couple are attacking a couple others, it’s hard to predict how that’s going to work in terms of driving your ballots,” David Kochel, a longtime Iowa Republican strategist, told me. “When it’s a multi-candidate field, you’ve got to tell your own story.” After Iowa, “that’s resolved,” he said, and so “she has no choice but to turn her attention to Trump.”
The jabs are meant to draw Trump out—to pressure him to join her on a debate stage or to provoke a tantrum that turns off his potential voters and motivates her own. “She needs him to make a mistake,” Kochel said. “She needs some intervening activity, some dynamic that is not completely in her control.”
Maybe this is a good moment for Haley to exploit Trump’s weakness with women voters. In a hypothetical head-to-head matchup, Biden beats Trump with the support of women, a new Quinnipiac poll showed, and that gender gap appears to be growing. Last week, Haley dragged Trump over his defamation-case loss to E. Jean Carroll, in which he was ordered to pay $83 million in additional defamation damages to the woman whom he was previously found liable for defaming and sexually abusing. “Haley is running the Taylor Swift strategy in the primary,” Steve Bannon, Trump’s former White House chief strategist, told me. “She’s playing to the ‘Trump is toxic’ women’s vote.’” The pop star’s apparent potential to influence Americans, and especially women, to vote Democratic, coupled with the results of the Quinnipiac poll, represent “deep, underlying forces that need to be addressed,” Bannon said—something Haley will continue to seize on.
2. Haley’s anti-Trump rhetoric represents the death throes of her campaign. Haley’s campaign has followed the same trajectory as several other Republicans’ efforts in the Trump era: They might have avoided attacking him directly at first, but when their prospects dimmed, they lashed out. Marco Rubio mocked Trump’s small hands just before dropping out of the race; Ted Cruz called Trump a “pathological liar” at the tail end of his own campaign. “It seems like they all have consultants in their ear telling them if they take on Trump directly, they are going to crater support with the base, which is true,” Tim Miller, a political consultant and writer at the conservative outlet The Bulwark, told me. “Then, finally, when they’re up against the wall and in the final stages, they figure it’s worth a shot.”
Maybe ratcheting up the combativeness is a form of emotional catharsis. When I asked the Democratic strategist James Carville about Haley’s change in approach, he texted me that Haley “is tired, scared & pissed off.” Because she’s trailing Trump in her own state, “certain doom in SC is eating at her. NEVER discount the human element.” Haley now sounds a lot more like she did behind closed doors during the Trump administration, Mike Murphy, a Republican consultant, told me, citing conversations he’s had with former Haley staffers. “This is Nikki therapy,” he said. “She’s just having fun poking him in the eye, getting all her ya-yas out. It’s the most entertaining dead-cat bounce in history.”
3. Haley is giving her donors what they want. Haley’s billionaire supporters adore this new, aggressively anti-Trump candidate, and they’re rewarding her with cash. “Nikki’s more aggressive posture toward Trump was welcomed as it is communicating the stark choice in front of the party,” Bill Berrien, the CEO of the manufacturer Pindel Global Precision, who hosted a fundraiser for Haley in New York, told The Washington Post. Cliff Asness, a co-founder of AQR Capital Management and a Haley donor, wrote on X that, in response to Trump’s attacks, he “may have to contribute more” to her.
At least some of these funders are convinced that Haley still has a shot. “She’s got donors saying, ‘You have a credible campaign, and you never know when Trump is going to choke to death on a meatloaf,’” Murphy said. Whether or not Haley believes that, she’s going along with it. The odds that she might become the nominee through an act of God or a brokered convention, after all, are probably better than buying a Power Ball ticket. “It’s a clutching-at-straws thing, but she’s got the best straw in town to clutch on,” Murphy said. “Why the hell not? It’s free and fun.”
4. Haley is looking to a post-Trump future. A few weeks ago, rumors circulated that Haley might be on Trump’s shortlist for vice president. If the decision, though unlikely, went her way, that could set her up to be Trump’s political heir. But Haley’s recent hostility toward Trump—and his splenetic response—have surely shut the door on that possibility. Instead, Haley is staking out her own territory.
“She’s not done. She’s running for 2028,” Sarah Isgur, a senior editor at The Dispatch and a former deputy campaign manager for the 2016 Republican presidential hopeful Carly Fiorina, told me. Trump has “changed her brand-thinking.” Instead of gunning for some sort of role in MAGA world, Haley can portray herself as the last person standing in the war against Trumpism—a position that many men before her have fought for and failed to achieve. If she can do that, she can consolidate a leadership future for herself, post-Trump, Isgur said.
Haley will be able to say “I told you so” if Trump loses to Biden in November—or if he wins but then governs disastrously. She’ll be “the good conservative who tried to warn you,” Murphy said. This also means that after the race is over, she’ll have to lie low for a while, and not join other Trump rivals turned grovelers, including Ron DeSantis, Tim Scott, and North Dakota Governor Doug Burgum. She’s playing “the long-term game,” Murphy said.
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“Everybody’s waiting to write my obituary.”
This is never a good thing for a candidate to be saying on Election Day.
But Nikki Haley, the candidate, was trying—pleading—to make a larger point to CNN’s Dana Bash as they sat on raised chairs in the middle of Chez Vachon, the landmark coffee shop and makeshift TV studio on the west side of Manchester, New Hampshire.
“We had 14 candidates,” Haley said, referring to the number of people who were seeking the Republican nomination a few months ago. “It’s now down to two”—Haley and Donald Trump. “That’s not an obituary; that’s somebody who’s a fighter.”
Fair enough. Haley was indeed still here and showing up, which is something to be proud of. She is the last woman standing between the former president and an unimpeded romp to the Republican nomination. This was Haley’s “closing argument” as she made her final rounds in New Hampshire yesterday, greeting volunteers at polling places, doing interviews, and hitting the tables at Chez Vachon. She would keep fighting and continue to flout the naysayers who have trailed her for her entire career. Underestimate me is the message printed on one of Haley’s favorite T-shirts. That’ll be fun.
Almost immediately after the polls closed, a few hours later, networks declared Trump the New Hampshire winner. His margin of victory over Haley, however, looked smaller than expected. “THIS RACE IS OVER,” Trump insisted in a text blasted out to his supporter list just after 8 p.m. Nope, Haley told her Election Night revelers in Concord, vowing to persist as the campaign moved to her home state of South Carolina. “New Hampshire is first in the nation. It’s not last in the nation,” she said in her speech. “This race is far from over.”
I spent much of December and early January watching Haley campaign for the job she quite clearly has been aspiring to for years. She proved to be disciplined and polished, good enough to outlast the battalion of male challengers arrayed alongside her—“the fellas,” as she has lately taken to calling her rivals, many of whom endorsed Trump as they fell away. She has claimed repeatedly to be part of a “two-person race” against Trump, despite finishing third in Iowa behind him and Florida Governor Ron DeSantis.
This felt like wishful thinking at times, but it is unquestionably true now and will present Haley with what’s been a recurring dilemma of her candidacy: How hard will she be willing to campaign against Trump? Will she be as noxious and ornery as the former president surely will be against her? Will she be willing to attack Trump and seize the ample vulnerabilities he provides, even if it risks his unrestrained ire?
Haley was hesitant to go after him when the field was more crowded. She offered only the mildest of critiques—that “chaos follows” Trump “rightly or wrongly” and that he was not “the right president” for these times (as he was before). But it was hardly a sure thing that Haley would deploy her best material against Trump—about his odd behavior and mental capacity and legal problems.
The final days of the New Hampshire campaign offered clues that she might now be willing to do so. She mentioned Trump’s age throughout the day yesterday (inflating it by three years, to 80) and brought up the perplexing sequence from Trump’s Friday-night rally, in which he seemed to suggest that Haley had been in charge of security at the Capitol on January 6 (he apparently had mistaken her for Nancy Pelosi).
Perhaps more notably, Haley conveyed that she was willing to draw out the race for as long as necessary. “Joe Biden isn’t going to get any younger or any better,” she said in her speech in Concord. “We’ll have all the time we need to beat Joe Biden.” This carried a sly message directed at Trump: He wasn’t getting any younger or better, either. And the longer the race continued, the more his court cases would advance, new facts would be revealed, and his behavior could spiral. Haley pointed out that voters in 20 states would be casting ballots in the next two months. There would be many more contests to enjoy, or stay alive for.
If nothing else, Haley would live to see another Election Day, in another state.
Primary days can give off an oddly freewheeling and punch-drunk vibe. Candidates, staffers, and volunteers have all done their work. Most of them are exhausted and often battling colds, hangovers, or other ailments. There is no more practice and preparation left to do.
“The hay is in the barn,” as old political hacks like to say. Or, at least one political hack said this—to me—but I forget who it was. I’ve also seen the maxim attributed to stir-crazy football coaches (before the big game) and distance runners (before a race). The basic idea is the same: There’s not much left to do, except find a way to pass hours and burn nervous energy.
Everything that remains tends to be improvisational and hardly strategic. Candidates rush around, trying to get supporters out to vote and, in Haley’s case, to convince them that the race is not over, despite all the polls showing Trump with a big lead.
“I don’t even want to talk about numbers, and I don’t think y’all should either,” Haley admonished Bash at Chez Vachon.
She then mentioned one number in particular: six.
That reflects the sum of votes that Haley received in Dixville Notch, the tiny village in the northern tip of the state that is known for tallying its votes just after midnight on the morning of the primary. “There were more than 10 journalists for every voter,” The New YorkTimes said in its report on the wee-hours scene, which it called “as much a press spectacle as it is a serious exercise in democracy.” (The same could be said about the New Hampshire primary in general, an exercise that features a relatively tiny number of voters whose views are comically amplified by media swarms.)
“All six came to us,” Haley reported of the Dixville Notch vote. “Not part, not one—all six.”
Haley was joined at Chez Vachon by New Hampshire Governor Chris Sununu, her biggest supporter and frequent traveling companion across the state in recent weeks. At one point, I asked Sununu, who was standing next to the kitchen door—nearly getting run over by waitresses carrying plates loaded with pancakes, bacon, and poutine drowned in brown gravy—whether he was worried that this might be the last New Hampshire primary as we know it. Some have predicted as much, given that the Democrats are no longer holding their first contest here. Was he feeling wistful at all, nostalgic maybe?
“Nah, we’re always in this. It never leaves us,” Sununu said. He added that the Democrats had “learned their lesson”—that they never should have messed with New Hampshire and tried to take away its rightful spot at the front of the primary parade.
Sununu has shown himself willing to question Trump’s age and mental fitness more directly than Haley had been until the past few days. “If he’s off the teleprompter, he can barely keep a cogent thought,” Sununu said of Trump in an interview with Fox News yesterday. “This guy is nearly 80 years old.”
“He’s 77,” the Fox host corrected him.
“That’s nearly 80,” Sununu maintained. “We’ll do math later.”
He has an obvious point about Trump, one that’s worth making. But this is a pet peeve of mine. Sununu and Haley often say that a Donald Trump–Joe Biden rematch would feature “two 80-year-olds.” Haley recently said that if Trump were convicted, and she were elected, she would likely pardon the former president. Why? Because it’s not in the country’s interest to have “an 80-year-old man sitting in jail,” she said.
It sounds like a minor thing, but if Haley is going to attack Trump (correctly) for lying, if she’s going to try to claim some moral high ground in this race, she herself should not be fudging the facts. There’s no need to anyway; at 52, she’s clearly younger than both him and Biden.
Since I figured the encounter at Chez Vachon might be the last time that I’d be so close to Haley—maybe ever—I decided to be one of those nuisance reporters and follow her out of the restaurant.
“How old is President Trump?” I asked her as she crossed Kelley Street. Haley ignored me.
“How old is President Trump?” I tried again. She kept walking. Someone else shouted a question that I didn’t hear.
“There’s a lot of energy, that’s what we’re seeing today,” Haley said in a rote tone, disappearing into a town car and motoring off to her next stop, and then more stops after that.
Despite the Iowa caucuses taking place 1,700 miles away from California — and the temperature being much colder here — the Golden State, its elected leaders and its policies were a constant target in the lead up to the first presidential nominating contest in the nation Monday.
Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-San Francisco) could be a “hedge fund maven,” given how much money she has made in the stock market while in office, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis told Iowans. He accused GOP rival Nikki Haley, the former U.N. ambassador, of telling more lies and being “more liberal than Gavin Newsom.” Haley said she is as afraid of a Kamala Harris presidency as she is of another term for former President Trump.
Bashing California, one of the most liberal states in the nation, is a grand tradition in the GOP. But Republican presidential candidates may be targeting the state and its politicians more this cycle because they are a better target than President Biden.
“Biden isn’t as motivating a villain as other Democrats might be. So the Republican candidates are essentially running a negative campaign against California,” said Dan Schnur, a politics professor at USC, UC Berkeley and Pepperdine.
He pointed to DeSantis’ attack on Haley during a debate last week as proof.
“The very worst thing Ron DeSantis could think of to say about Nikki Haley during the debate was that she might be more liberal than Gavin Newsom,” Schnur added. “For an Iowa Republican — or any Republican for that matter — that’s an absolutely terrifying concept.”
California was once a Republican stronghold, launching the political careers of Presidents Nixon and Reagan. But conservative attacks on the state have ramped up in the decades since Reagan left office.
In 2002, former President George H.W. Bush even apologized for referring to American Taliban fighter John Walker Lindh as “some misguided Marin County hot-tubber.” By 2012, California was the most disliked state of any in the nation, according to poll of Americans by Public Policy Polling. About 44% of those surveyed said they viewed the state unfavorably.
Today, GOP fundraising appeals bleat about the state’s residents — especially Hollywood celebrities and tech billionaires — fueling Democratic campaigns, despite the fact that the state also provides an outsize amount of political donations to Republican candidates.
This electoral cycle, DeSantis compared Haley to Newsom, whom he debated in November, at a CNN face-off in Des Moines last week.
DeSantis brought up Pelosi while lamenting the lack of rules on members of Congress while campaigning at Jethro’s BBQ in Ames.
“I just think we have a problem with Congress … they’re almost detached from the people. They live under different rules,” he said, adding that he has not traded stocks since being elected to office and compared himself to Pelosi. “They make a killing in the market … and I don’t think the congressmen should be able to be doing the stock trades. I think we need to reform that.”
Haley raised Harris, the current vice president and former U.S. senator and state attorney general, as she discussed why she believes Trump should not be reelected president.
“Y’all know it, chaos follows him. And we can’t be a country in disarray and have a world on fire and go through four more years of chaos because we won’t survive it,” she told supporters at an event space in Ankeny. “You don’t defeat Democrat chaos with Republican chaos. And the other thing we need to think about: We can never afford a President Kamala Harris.”
California should overhaul its fiscal situation and policies before questioning why Iowa should have such an important role in selecting the nation’s presidential nominees, said former Iowa Gov. Terry Branstad, who has family connections to California and has spent substantial time in the state.
“Maybe you ought to get your housein order. California has got the biggest deficit and California is moving in the wrong direction,” Branstad said in an interview. “California has got so much going for it. It’s a beautiful state, it has got great weather and all that stuff. But now people are leaving because of the tax burden and the hostility and all the regulations.”
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.
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.
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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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 GovernorRon 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.
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.
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.
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 TheBulwark. 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:
The latest GOP presidential debate demonstrated again that Ron DeSantis and Nikki Haley are pursuing utterly inimical strategies for catching the front-runner, Donald Trump.
The debate, on Wednesday evening, also showed why neither approach looks remotely sufficient to dislodge Trump from his commanding position in the race.
DeSantis delivered a stronger overall debate performance than Haley. But the evening mostly displayed the structural limitations of the theory that each campaign is operating under, and the limited progress either candidate has made toward surmounting those obstacles.
As he showed during the debate, DeSantis is grounding his coalition on the right by defining himself as an unflagging champion for the party’s most conservative elements. During the debate, the Florida governor’s frequent attacks on Haley, and more infrequent (and oblique) jabs at Trump, both represented variations on the charge that neither rival can be trusted to advance conservative priorities.
Haley, in mirror image, is grounding her coalition in the party’s center. She has focused on consolidating the centrist GOP voters and donors who have long expressed the most resistance to Trump. That includes moderates, people with at least a four-year college degree, GOP-leaning independents, and suburbanites.
DeSantis’s vision, in other words, has been to start on the right and over time build toward the center; Haley wants to grow in the opposite direction by locking down the center, and then expanding into the right.
Supporters of both Haley and DeSantis believe that the other’s approach lowers their ceiling too much to ultimately topple Trump. The problem for all Republicans looking for an alternative to the former president is that last week’s debate offered the latest evidence that each camp may be right about the other’s limitations. With the voting beginning only five weeks from Monday in the Iowa caucus, neither Haley nor DeSantis has found any effective way to loosen Trump’s grip on the party.
Neither, in fact, has even tried hard to do so. Instead, they have centered their efforts almost entirely on trying to squeeze out the other to become Trump’s principal rival. To beat Trump, or to come close, eventually either of them will need to peel away some of the roughly 60 percent of GOP voters who now say in national polls that they intend to support him for the nomination. But both have behaved as if they can leave that challenge for a later day, while focusing on trying to clear the field to create a one-on-one contest with the front-runner.
The theory in DeSantis’s camp has been that the only way to beat Trump is to aim directly at his core supporters with a conservative message. DeSantis advisers acknowledge that his positioning has not connected with many centrist voters. But his camp believes that if DeSantis can emerge after the early states as the last viable alternative to Trump, the moderates most resistant to the former president will have no choice but to rally around the Florida governor, even if they consider him too Trump-like himself.
The voters now drawn to Haley “share a goal in common with Governor DeSantis in that they want an alternative to Trump,” Bob Vander Plaats, a prominent Iowa religious conservative who has endorsed DeSantis, told me. “The more that DeSantis proves there is one alternative to Trump, he will start peeling off that lane as well.” By contrast, Vander Plaats argues, if DeSantis falls out of contention, his support is more likely to flow back to Trump than toward Haley. “I haven’t heard any supporter of DeSantis yet saying: ‘I’m deciding between him and Haley,’” he told me. “Basically, they are between Trump and him.”
DeSantis’s supporters anticipate that his strategy will pay off if he finishes strongly in Iowa. But so far, his decision to offer voters what amounts to Trumpism without Trump has returned few dividends. With his Trump-like agenda on immigration and foreign policy, and emphasis on culture-war issues such as transgender rights, DeSantis has alienated many of the centrist GOP voters most dubious of the former president while failing to dislodge many of his core supporters.
“Ron DeSantis should have consolidated the non-Trump wing of the party from the get go and then gone after soft Trump supporters,” Alex Stroman, a former executive director of the South Carolina Republican Party, told me in an email. “Instead, he tried to out-MAGA Trump from the right and alienated not only soft-Trump voters but also the more pragmatic wing of the party. It was a strategic blunder.”
Haley has filled that vacuum with the elements of the party most skeptical of Trump. Her approach has been to start with the primary voters who like the former president the least, with the hope of eventually attracting more of those ambivalent about him. Her backers believe she has a better chance than DeSantis to reach those “maybe Trump” voters. As the veteran GOP pollster Whit Ayres told me, DeSantis “has tried to appeal to some of the ‘always Trump’ voters, but the ‘always Trump’ voters are always Trump for a reason. Nikki Haley seems to have figured out the job is to consolidate the ‘maybe Trump’ voters who supported Trump twice but now … want a different style and different temperament.”
DeSantis still leads Haley in most national polls, though that may be changing. And he remains even or ahead of her in the polls in Iowa, where he has campaigned relentlessly, won support from most of the state’s Republican leadership (including Governor Kim Reynolds), attracted broad backing in the influential religious-conservative community, and spent heavily on building a grassroots organization.
But DeSantis is in a much weaker position in the other early states. A recent poll by CNN and the University of New Hampshire found him falling to fourth in the Granite State. That poll found Haley emerging as a clear second to Trump, as did another recent CNN survey in South Carolina. In each state, she attracted about twice as much support as DeSantis did. Polls also consistently show Haley running much better than DeSantis, or Trump, in hypothetical general election match ups against President Joe Biden.
All of these positive trends largely explain why DeSantis and Vivek Ramaswamy, another GOP contender, attacked Haley at the debate. Haley was right when she suggested that the attention reflected anxiety in DeSantis’s camp about her rise. But that motivation doesn’t necessarily make the attacks any less effective.
After delivering the most assured performances in the first three GOP debates, Haley seemed wobbly last week as DeSantis and Ramaswamy pummeled her from the right. Dave Wilson, a longtime Republican and social-conservative activist in South Carolina, told me that Haley had not faced that kind of sustained ideological assault from the right during her career in the state. “It hasn’t been used against her in South Carolina,” Wilson said. “Nikki has never been some kind of mainstreamer or a shill for the big corporations. That’s not who she has portrayed herself as, or how she governed, when she was governor of South Carolina.”
At the debate, Haley never seemed to find solid ground when DeSantis accused her of resisting the hard-line approaches he has championed in Florida on issues affecting transgender people. Haley neither embraced DeSantis’s agenda nor challenged it and instead insisted he was mischaracterizing her own record, without entirely clarifying her views. “Especially on those types of cultural issues, it is probably always going to be advantage DeSantis,” Vander Plaats told me. “I think if you turned down the volume and just [looked at] the physical appearance, Nikki was very concerned at that point, like she knew she was in a tough space, and DeSantis was in a very confident space.”
Her uneasy response on issues of LGBTQ rights was a stark contrast to the confident course she has set on abortion. One reason Haley has gained favor with more centrist Republicans is that she has so clearly argued that the GOP cannot achieve sweeping federal abortion restrictions and must pursue consensus around more limited goals. “I think Nikki Haley talks about social issues the same way that real people do: not through demagoguery or hysterics like some candidates, but having real policy disagreements while showing compassion for those affected—and I think that’s the winning formula,” Stroman said.
But at the debate, Haley was unwilling to apply that formula to LGBTQ issues, even as she seemed to seek a more empathetic tone than DeSantis.
“She has clearly thought through a more moderate, nuanced position on abortion that would have greater appeal in a general election,” Alice Stewart, a longtime GOP strategist who has worked for leading social-conservative candidates, told me. “It appears she has not mapped out her position on other culture-war issues, such as transgender procedures and school bathrooms.”
Doubling down on his message at the debate, DeSantis’s campaign told me afterward that “within the confines of the Constitution” he would support nationalizing the key laws affecting transgender people that he has passed in Florida, such as banning gender-affirming care for minors. Haley’s campaign still appeared focused mostly on deflecting this argument: In comments to me after the debate, her aides stressed that although DeSantis criticized her for opposing legislation as governor requiring students to use the restroom of the gender they were assigned at birth, he similarly indicated that the issue was not a priority for him not long thereafter, during his first gubernatorial campaign in 2018. Their message was that DeSantis is stressing these issues now merely out of expediency. But in an email exchange with me after the debate, Haley’s campaign drew a clearer distinction with DeSantis than she did during the encounter: rather than national action to impose on every state the restrictions Florida has approved on LGBTQ issues, the campaign said Haley would “encourage states to pass laws” that ban classroom discussion of sexual orientation or regulate bathroom use for transgender kids. The one exception the campaign noted is that, like DeSantis, she would also support national legislation banning transgender girls from competing in school sports.
The debate drew only a small audience and is unlikely by itself to significantly change the trajectory of the DeSantis and Haley competition. Wilson and Stroman both said they doubt that DeSantis’s ideological attacks will hurt Haley much in the South Carolina primary. “It’s going to be harder in South Carolina than he thinks, because everyone knows what Nikki Haley did in this state,” Wilson said. “Under her leadership, a lot of strong conservative stands were taken.”
But, of course, GOP voters don’t know nearly as much about Haley in the cascade of states that will vote in early March, after South Carolina. DeSantis supporters view her unsteady response to his ideological assault at the debate as validation of their belief that Haley can never attract enough conservative voters to genuinely threaten Trump. “There’s just no path for her to win the nomination,” Vander Plaats argued. “That lane doesn’t exist.”
The path for any alternative to beat Trump is a rocky one, but it’s premature to assume that Haley cannot outlast DeSantis to become the last viable challenger to the former president. She still has time to formulate better responses to the charge that she’s insufficiently conservative for the Trump-era GOP. Portraying Haley as too squishy in the culture war might help her in New Hampshire, the state where she’s hoping to emerge as Trump’s principal rival.
But the debate underscored her need to sharpen her answers on those issues as the race moves on. And for Haley’s supporters, it raised an ominous question: If she couldn’t respond more effectively to an attack on her conservative credentials from DeSantis and Ramaswamy, how would she hold up if she ever becomes enough of a threat for Donald Trump to press that case himself?
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.
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.
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.
The culmination of the Newsom-DeSantis bromance is upon us, the mano a mano matchup of two governors who depend on each other to whip up the kind of polarizing frenzy that feeds headlines and advances careers.
They will hold a debate Thursday night on Fox News, moderated by far-right provocateur Sean Hannity, an event that has been hyped so much you’d be forgiven for thinking the stakes were high, that this made-for-television stunt actually matters.
Which, of course, it does not.
“It’s political theater in its most ridiculous form,” Mindy Romero told me. She’s the director of the Center for Inclusive Democracy at the USC Sol Price School of Public Policy. “This doesn’t benefit the voters.”
If we wanted something substantial, something that might change the results of the next election, we’d put Republican hopeful Nikki Haley in the room with Vice President Kamala Harris — two daughters of immigrants (Haley is South Asian, Harris is mixed-race, South Asian and Black) with differing views of America but the shared ability to reach apathetic and disenfranchised voters. But I’ll get to that.
While the spectacle of Newsom and DeSantis going at each other may provide zingers and red-blue outrage, it is unlikely to sway voters because neither man is an actual contender for anything.
DeSantis’ presidential campaign is sinking, and not even platform shoes can keep his head above water. Even in the unlikely circumstance that he humiliated Newsom with an unexpected bout of superior wit and grasp of fact, it wouldn’t make up for his fundraising problems, falling poll numbers or the orange elephant in the room, Donald Trump, who is leaps and bounds ahead of any other Republican contenders when it comes to dedicated voters.
Then there is Newsom, who is absolutely, positively not running for president, though his team has put together a surprisingly successful and smart campaign to position him as a Biden surrogate, ready to step in if needed. And, as I have said before, I appreciate Newsom speaking out, and taking action, on issues including reproductive freedom.
The problem is he’s not needed, this time around, anyway.
And so, we have spectacle without substance when it comes to the Newsom-DeSantis drama. As the first female British prime minister Margaret Thatcher put it in 1965, “If you want something said, ask a man; if you want something done, ask a woman.”
Or as Romero said, “Isn’t that what we always see, two male politicians louder and bolder, taking the spotlight from women of color? I am not surprised by this at all.”
It may not be surprising, but it is concerning to see that spotlight in the wrong place.
The presidential election is going to be close. The votes on the margins will likely decide whether Biden holds the Oval Office or not. Key among those iffy ballots, for both parties, are younger people and voters of color.
Those are votes that Harris and Haley are well-positioned to earn — but also ones that, if left unattended, could cost the race for either side.
If Americans under the age of 45 vote at the same rate as they did in 2020, a recent Brookings Institute poll found, they will account for more than one-third of the electorate.
In the past few weeks, Haley has gained momentum and won critical support in positioning herself as a post-MAGA candidate — even attempting, not always successfully, to find a less strident way to speak about abortion while still supporting bans.
Recently, Haley earned a critical endorsement from the conservative grassroots organization Americans for Prosperity Action, which was co-founded by billionaire Charles Koch and comes with not only money, but the political machine to back it up.
Her rallies are drawing bigger crowds and her poll numbers show that in places where DeSantis’ numbers are slipping, she is gaining.
She’s still nowhere close to being a real challenger to Trump, but she is offering up a path forward for Republicans who want a Trump-lite government, all the conservatism without the overt turn toward authoritarianism. Anything that pulls Republicans away from straight-up fascism should be considered significant, particularly as DeSantis tries to out-Trump Trump with anti-everything policies targeting history, LGBTQ+ communities, Disneyland and more.
For Democrats, the problem with young voters, especially people of color, is apparent around the Biden administration’s response to the fighting in Israel and Gaza. His administration, even with its commitment to climate change, gun control and economic priorities such as canceling student loan debt, seems out of touch.
About 70% of people 18 to 34 disapprove of Biden’s handling of the Israel-Hamas war, an NBC News poll found. Many of those young progressives see the Palestinian cause as linked to social justice issues for communities of color in the United States.
Dov Waxman, director of the UCLA Y&S Nazarian Center for Israel Studies, said he believes the anger of those young progressives may fade by the 2024 elections, but their apathy may still keep them from voting.
Biden “has kind of a broader, deeper problem with younger voters and certainly this has exacerbated it,” Waxman said.
Adrianne Shropshire, executive director of BlackPAC, which helps organize Black voters, said Harris is critical to countering that apathy, and is “uniquely positioned in many ways because of her identities,” to reach disaffected groups.
Despite endless attacks that Harris faces from Republicans (and even from within her own party), which often use the prospect of a Harris presidency as a kind of threat, “there is a real connection she makes with Black voters,” Shropshire said.
And though she faces a relentless narrative that she is unlikable, as Hillary Clinton did, the idea that she might be kicked off the ticket in favor of someone more palatable such as Newsom is a non-starter — a disastrous misread of voters of color, young, progressive voters and women.
“They’re not going to dump her. They can’t dump her,” Dan Morain told me. He’s the author of the definitive biography on Harris, “Kamala’s Way,”and has chronicled her career since she was a lowly prosecutor.
Instead, Morain, Shropshire and others said the administration needs to better use her identity and skills in the next campaign cycle, leaning into who she is — leaning into who voters are.
“You just look at Harris and what she does, She’s just she is more attuned to younger people than [Biden] ever will be,” Morain said.
And so we have two interesting women, closer to the Oval Office than either Newsom or DeSantis will likely be anytime soon (though I’d give Newsom a shot in 2028).
Haley and Harris are both seasoned, tough survivors who have more in common with most American voters — who are increasingly not white, much to the chagrin of some — but who are stymied by their sex as has been every woman who has ever run for office.
Trump has nicknamed Haley “birdbrain.” Harris’ laugh has been described as a “cackle.”
But Newsom and DeSantis are, as Hannity put it, are “two heavyweights” who are “stepping into a war.”
They definitely have something that Harris and Haley lack, but it’s not a shot at the presidency.
Does Nikki Haleyreally have a shot at beating Donald Trump? Does any Republican?
On Monday afternoon, a basketball gym in Bluffton, South Carolina, was packed with people who had come to hear Haley’s latest sales pitch. Hundreds more were waiting outside. No Republican candidate besides Trump can reliably draw more than a thousand attendees, but about 2,500 showed up for Haley. (Granted, this speech was in Haley’s home state, where she formerly served as governor. Also, the gym was a stone’s throw from the Sun City retirement community, a place where, gently speaking, people may have had nothing better to do at 2 p.m. on a Monday.) One of Haley’s volunteers told me this weekday event had originally been booked at a nearby restaurant, but that, given the current excitement of the campaign, organizers pivoted to the gym, on the University of South Carolina at Beaufort campus. Everyone in Haley’s orbit is understandably riveted. She’s squarely challenging Florida Governor Ron DeSantis for second place in the Republican presidential primary, no matter how second that place may be.
While the former president still floats high above his dwindling field of competitors, Haley is the only person who keeps rising in the polls. Her climb is steady, not a blip. Haley’s campaign and super PAC are planning to spend $10 million on advertisements over the next eight weeks across Iowa and New Hampshire. On Tuesday, she received an endorsement from the Koch brothers’ network, Americans for Prosperity Action, and along with it an undisclosed amount of financial support. (It will be a lot.) But this year-end, all-in effort to stop Trump ignores the fact that he is a singular vortex, a once-in-a-century figure, a living martyr with a traveling Grateful Dead–like roadshow. His abhorrent behavior and legal woes do not matter. Three weeks ago, at his rally in South Florida, vendors told me that items with Trump’s mug shot are their biggest sellers. How does a mere generational figure, as her supporters hope Haley might be, compete with that?
Haley bounded up onstage in a light-blue blazer and jeans. “We’ve been through a lot together,” she told the crowd. She meandered back and forth—no lectern, no teleprompter. When you ask people what they like about her, many point to her presence, her poise. Haley delivers her stump speech in a singsong voice. A few words, a pause, a smile. Speaking to the Low Country crowd, she seemed to be thickening her southern accent and peppering in a few extra-emphatic finger points for good measure. She’s just a down-home, neighborly southerner whose most recent job happened to be in Manhattan, serving at the United Nations. The volunteer who had bragged to me about the venue change later pulled out his phone and showed me a photo of himself and Haley at a wedding reception. He pointed to her bare feet. She’s so real, he said.
Several women in the audience were wearing pink shirts with a Margaret Thatcher quote on the back: If you want something said, ask a man. If you want something done, ask a woman. Sue Ruby, a 74-year-old attendee from nearby Savannah, Georgia, was wearing a WOMEN FOR NIKKI button on her sweater. “I feel like we’ve given men a lot of years to straighten our society out, and they haven’t done so great, so let’s try a woman,” she said. Ruby told me she’s a Republican who begrudgingly voted for Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden in the past two elections because she viewed Trump as a threat to democracy. A Sun City resident named Lorraine, age 79, told me that “it’s time for a woman,” but that she would nevertheless vote for Trump if he wins the nomination. “I don’t want to vote for the opposite,” she said, refusing to say Biden’s name. Carolyn Ballard, an 80-year-old woman from Hilton Head, South Carolina, told me she’s a lifelong Republican who voted for Trump twice, but that she believes he’s past his prime and that Haley is her candidate. “He just irritates people and he stirs up a lot of trouble,” she said of Trump. “Although he’s very smart, and he did a lot for the country. I mean, everybody was happy when he was president.”
Haley doesn’tlean as hard into gender dynamics as past female presidential candidates have. Nevertheless, she skillfully uses her womanhood and Indian heritage as setups for certain lines. “I have been underestimated in everything I’ve ever done,” she told the room. “And it’s a blessing, because it makes me scrappy. No one’s going to outwork me in this race. No one’s going to outsmart me in this race.” Or this: “Strong girls become strong women, and strong women become strong leaders,” which had a surprise left turn: “And none of that happens if we have biological boys playing in girls’ sports.” (Huge applause.)
Courting Never Trump voters, exhausted Trump voters, and, yes, even some likely Trump voters simultaneously is not an easy trick. She hardly ever criticizes her former boss. Here’s her most biting critique from Monday: “I believe President Trump was the right president at the right time … and I agree with a lot of his policies. But the truth is, rightly or wrongly, chaos follows him.” (Note the passivity; she won’t even say Trump catalyzes the chaos.) Having already served as his ambassador to the UN, she may be under consideration for vice president. Compared with his attacks on Ron DeSantis, Trump has gone relatively soft on her, opting for the mid-century misogynistic slight “birdbrain.” Like most of her competitors, Haley has said she would pardon him.
Whereas Trump has tacked authoritarian and apocalyptic, Haley has mostly kept her messaging grounded. At the rally, she bemoaned the price of groceries and gas. “Biden worries more about sagebrush lizards than he does about Americans being able to afford their energy,” she quipped. (She also called out her fellow Republicans for adding to the deficit.) She’s a military wife, and spoke about her husband’s PTSD and the persistent problem of homeless veterans. Though she lacks Trump’s innate knack for zingers, she landed one about how things might change if members of Congress got their health care through the VA: “It’ll be the best health care you’ve ever seen, guaranteed.”
Although many of her fellow Republicans have adopted a nativist view of the world, Haley waxes at length about America’s geopolitical role. (And subsequently gets tagged as a globalist.) “The world is literally on fire,” she said Monday. She affirmed her support for both Israel and Ukraine, and went long on the triple threat of Russia, China, and Iran, paying particular attention to China as a national-security issue. In doing so, knowingly or not, she began to sound quite Trumpy. “They’re already here. They’ve already infiltrated our country,” Haley said. “We’ve got to start looking at China the way they look at us.” She called for an end to normal trade relations with China until they stop “murdering” Americans with fentanyl. She chastened the audience with images of China’s 500 nuclear warheads and its rapidly expanding naval fleet. “Dictators are actually very transparent. They tell us exactly what they’re going to do,” she said.
Perhaps Haley’s biggest advantage right now is her relative youth. She’ll turn 52 three days before the New Hampshire primary. Trump has lately been making old-man gaffes, drawing comparisons to Biden, who was first elected to the Senate the year Haley was born. She speaks wistfully of “tomorrow,” of leaving certain things—unspecified baggage—in the past. “You have to go with a new generational leader,” Haley proclaimed. Onstage, she endorsed congressional term limits and the idea of mental-competency tests for public servants older than 75. The Senate, she joked, had become “the most privileged nursing home in the country.” Throwing shade at both Trump and Biden, she spoke of the need for leaders at “the top of their game.” Hundreds of gray-and-white-haired supporters before her nodded and murmured in approval.
Monday’s event took place roughly 90 miles south of Charleston, where, in 2015, Dylann Roof murdered nine Black parishioners at Emanuel AME Church, hoping to start a race war. At the time, Haley was governor of South Carolina, and Trump—who had descended the golden escalator and announced his candidacy for president just the day before—still seemed like a carnival act. Photos of Roof posing with a Confederate flag ricocheted across social media. Haley had the flag taken down from the South Carolina statehouse, a reversal from her earlier position on the flag. Five years later, after the murder of George Floyd, Haley tweeted that, “in order to heal,” Floyd’s death “needs to be personal and painful for everyone.” During Monday’s rally, though, she sounded much more like an old-school Republican: “America’s not racist; we’re blessed,” she said. “Our kids need to love America. They need to be saying the Pledge of Allegiance when they start school.”
As her audience grows, she continues to tiptoe along a very fine line: not MAGA, not anti-MAGA. In lieu of Trump-style airbrushed fireworks and bald eagles and Lee Greenwood, she’s going for something slightly classier (leaving the stage to Tom Petty’s “American Girl”) while still seizing every opportunity to own the libs. At the rally, she attacked the military’s gender-pronoun training and received substantial applause. “We’ve got to end this national self-loathing that’s taken over our country,” she said. Early in her speech, she promised that she would speak hard truths. As she approached her conclusion, one hard truth stuck out: “Republicans have lost the last seven out of eight popular votes for president. That is nothing to be proud of. We should want to win the majority of Americans.” It was the closest thing to a truly forward-thinking message that any serious Republican has offered this cycle.
In the most generous of interpretations, the race for the GOP nomination is now among three people: Haley, DeSantis, and Trump. Mike Pence is already out. Tim Scott, Haley’s fellow South Carolinian, dropped out two weeks ago. Vivek Ramaswamy, who has struggled to break out of single digits in the polls, recently rented an apartment in Des Moines and will almost certainly stay in the race through the Iowa caucuses. Ramaswamy has also unexpectedly become Haley’s punching bag: Her campaign said she pulled in $1 million in donations after calling him “scum” during the last debate.
At next week’s debate in Alabama, the stage will likely be winnowed to Ramaswamy, Haley, and DeSantis. (“When the stage gets smaller, our chances get bigger,” Haley told her rally crowd.) DeSantis seems to be betting his whole campaign on Iowa, and has secured the endorsement of Iowa Governor Kim Reynolds. This weekend, DeSantis will complete his 99-county tour of the state. Haley needs to beat DeSantis, but she also needs his voters if she has any serious shot of taking on Trump. If DeSantis drops out before Haley, his supporters are far more likely to flock to Trump. So maybe Haley needs a deus ex machina. In 2020, Biden’s campaign was viewed as all but cooked when, here in South Carolina, with the help of Representative Jim Clyburn, everything turned around, propelling him to Super Tuesday and the nomination.
Haley’s campaign declined to let her speak with me. A spokesperson, Olivia Perez-Cubas, instead emailed me the following statement: “Poll after poll show Nikki Haley is the best challenger to Donald Trump and Joe Biden. That’s why the largest conservative grassroots coalition in the country just got behind her. Nikki is second in Iowa, New Hampshire, and South Carolina and is the only candidate with the momentum to go the distance. Ron DeSantis has a short shelf life with his Iowa-or-bust strategy.”
As rally-goers made their way to the parking lot, I struck up conversation with a man in a T-shirt that read NOPE NOT AGAIN, with Trump’s hair and giant red necktie decorating the O. He wore a camouflage baseball hat with an American flag on the dome. The man, Mike Stevens, told me he was a 25-year Army veteran, and that he was disgusted with Trump.
“He’s a bully. He’s not good. He causes hate and discontent,” Stevens said. “I mean, he didn’t uphold the Constitution. And now we’ve had a judge say that. First time ever—no peaceful transfer of power? Even Al Gore did it. I’ve always been a Republican, but if it’s him and Biden, I’ll vote for Biden, I guess.”
He was excited about Haley, and had been texting his friends and family about her rally—trying to wean them off their Trump addiction. But he also told me he had written Haley a letter: He was dismayed by her promise to pardon Trump, and he needed her to know that.
“We’ve become a party of losers,” the conservative businessman Vivek Ramaswamy declared during the opening minutes of tonight’s Republican primary debate in Florida. He bemoaned the GOP’s lackluster performance in Tuesday’s elections, and then he identified the Republican he held personally responsible for the party’s defeats. Was this the moment, a viewer might have wondered, that a top GOP presidential contender would finally take on Donald Trump, the absent frontrunner who hasn’t deigned to join his rivals on the debate stage?
Of course not.
Ramaswamy proceeded to blame not the GOP’s undisputed leader for the past seven years but Ronna McDaniel, the party functionary unknown to most Americans who chairs the Republican National Committee. After calling on McDaniel to resign, Ramaswamy then attacked one of the debate moderators, Kristen Welker of NBC News, before turning his ire on two of his onstage competitors, Nikki Haley and Ron DeSantis.
The moment was a fitting encapsulation of a debate that, like the first two Republican primary match-ups, all but ignored the candidate who wasn’t there. Five Republicans stood on the Miami stage tonight—Ramaswamy, Haley, DeSantis, Chris Christie, and Tim Scott—and none of them are likely to be elected president next year. The candidate of either party most likely to win the election is Trump, who held a rally a half hour away. His putative challengers barely uttered his name.
NBC’s moderators tried to force the issue at the start. Lester Holt asked each of the candidates to explain why they should be president and Trump should not. Haley and DeSantis, who are now Trump’s closest competitors (a modest distinction), offered some mild criticism. The Florida governor chastised Trump for increasing the national debt and failing to get Mexico to pay for his Southern border wall. “I thought he was the right president at the right time. I don’t think he’s the right president now,” was the most that Haley, who was Trump’s ambassador to the United Nations, could muster. Only Christie, the former New Jersey governor who has become Trump’s fiercest GOP critic on the campaign trail, assailed the former president with any relish. “Anybody who’s going to be spending the next year-and-a-half of their life focusing on keeping themselves out of jail cannot lead this party or this country,” Christie said.
And with that, Trump became an afterthought for the remainder of the debate. The evening featured plenty of substance, as the candidates offered mostly robust defenses of Israel in its war with Hamas, denounced rising anti-Semitism on college campuses, and disputed how much support the U.S. should give Ukraine. At the behest of moderator Hugh Hewitt, they spent several minutes discussing the optimal size of America’s naval fleet.
The spiciest exchanges involved Ramaswamy and Haley, who made no effort to hide their disdain for one another. Ramaswamy drew boos from the audience after he criticized Haley’s hawkish foreign policy by calling her “Dick Cheney in three-inch heels.” Later he invoked her daughter’s use of TikTok to accuse her of hypocrisy on China’s ownership of the social-media platform. “Keep my daughter’s name out of your voice,” Haley shot back. “You’re just scum.” Ramaswamy and Haley also went after DeSantis, though in less personal terms.
That Ramaswamy would target Haley was not a surprise. She came into the debate as the challenger of the moment, having displaced Ramaswamy, whose candidacy has lost momentum since his breakout performance in the first GOP primary debate in August. He can partly blame Haley for his slide: Her mocking retort—“Every time I hear you, I feel a little bit dumber”—was the highlight of the last everyone-but-Trump pile-up in September. The former South Carolina governor’s consistency across both debates has helped her overtake DeSantis for second place in New Hampshire and gain on him in Iowa. Haley also fared the best in a hypothetical general-election match-up with Biden in a batch of swing-state polls released this week by The New York Times and Siena College.
As my colleague Elaine Godfrey reported this week, Haley is appealing to primary voters who are “yearning for a standard-issue Republican”—a tax-cutting, socially conservative foreign-policy hawk who won’t have to spend the next several months fighting felony charges in courtrooms up and down the Eastern Seaboard. Her performance tonight—as steady as during the first two debates—seems unlikely to hurt her standing. The problem for Haley, as for the other contenders on tonight’s stage, is that less than half of the GOP electorate wants a standard-issue Republican. Trump still has a tight grip on a majority of GOP voters, and his lead over Biden in recent polling undermines his rivals’ argument that his nomination could cost the party next year’s election.
If nothing else, each of these Trump-less debates offers his opponents a free shot to make the case against him, a platform to criticize the frontrunner without facing an immediate rebuttal. For the third time in a row, Haley and her competitors mostly passed up their chance. If they’re angling to be Trump’s running mate or emergency replacement, perhaps they’ve advanced their cause. But if their goal is to dislodge Trump as the nominee, opportunities like tonight’s are slipping away.
For some Republican voters, to attend a Nikki Haley campaign rally is to dive headfirst into the warm waters of an alternate reality—a reality in which Donald J. Trump is very old news.
Last Thursday, this comfortable refuge could be found at the Poor Boy’s Diner in Londonderry, New Hampshire, where a few dozen white retirees wedged into booths adorned with vintage license plates and travel posters suggesting a visit to sunny Waikiki. The crowd, mostly Republican and “undeclared” voters wearing sundry combinations of flannel and cable-knit, clapped along as Haley—a youthful 51-year-old—outlined her presidential priorities: securing the border, supporting veterans, promoting small business, and “removing the kick me sign from America’s back.” Haley’s voice was steady; her words were studied; and the attendees beamed from their tables as though they couldn’t believe their luck: Finally, their relieved smiles seemed to say, here was a conservative candidate who didn’t sound completely unhinged.
The voters I met had had it up to here with the former president, they told me: the insults, the drama, the interminable parade of indictments and gag orders. They’ve been yearning for a standard-issue Republican with governing experience and foreign-policy chops, and Haley, the former accountant turned South Carolina governor turned ambassador to the United Nations fits their bill and then some. When Haley finished speaking, voters scrambled to secure a campaign button reading NH ♥ NH. Some of them waited in line for half an hour to shake her hand.
If you haven’t checked the scoreboard lately, Haley’s support has been ticking up steadily for weeks. New polling shows her at nearly 20 percent support in New Hampshire, up more than a dozen points since August, and knocking Florida Governor Ron DeSantis out of second place. She also leads DeSantis in her home state of South Carolina. In Iowa, Haley’s support has grown to double digits, putting her in third.
Haley is not exactly gaining on Trump. In all three states, he’s leading the pack by roughly 30 points, which is a heck of a lot of ground for any candidate to make up. But in New Hampshire, voters were hopeful—even confident—that Haley could win this thing. Maybe, some told me, with a hint of desperation in their eyes, their Trump-free alternate reality could soon be the one we all live in. “She’s normal,” Bob Garvin, a lifelong Republican who had driven up with his wife from Dartmouth, Massachusetts, told me outside the diner. With a sigh, he said, “I just want somebody normal to run for president.”
Some of Haley’s new support comes from her strong performance in the first two GOP primary debates, where she often stood, stoic and unimpressed, as the dudes shouted over one another. When Haley did speak, she generally sounded more measured—and frankly, more relatable—than the others. In the second debate, she turned, eyes rolling, toward the cocky newcomer Vivek Ramaswamy and channeled the exasperation many watching at home felt: “Honestly, every time I hear you, I feel a little bit dumber for what you say.”
Haley has a clear lane. She’s seeking to build a coalition of Never Trump Republicans who’d really rather not pull the lever for Biden and onetime Trump voters who now find him tiresome. She also seems to be appealing to the types of Americans the GOP needs to win in a general election: the college-educated, women, suburbanites. DeSantis, who was once expected to bring the strongest primary challenge to Trump, no longer seems to have a lane at all: Voters who love the former president don’t need DeSantis as an option, and many of the voters who hate Trump have come to see DeSantis as a charmless, watered-down version of the big man himself. “He’d be Donald Trump in a Ron DeSantis mask,” one GOP voter told me in Londonderry.
Haley and DeSantis are surely both well aware that they’re vying for second place. The two have traded attack ads throughout the past month, and a few days ago, Haley was on the radio mocking the governor’s alleged use of heel lifts in his cowboy boots. Overall, though, the trend seems to be that, as the candidates introduce themselves to more and more Americans, DeSantis is losing fans and Haley is gaining them.
At a town-hall event that Thursday evening in nearby Nashua, Haley channeled Stevie Nicks in a white eyelet top and flared jeans—a look that probably worked well for her audience of a few hundred more silver-haired New Hampshirites. The vibe was decidedly un-Trumpian. At one point, the audience burst into admiring applause when a scheduled speaker highlighted Haley’s past life as an accountant.
In a disciplined, 30-minute stump speech, she laid out her conventionally conservative plans for shrinking the federal government, securing the border, and lowering taxes—but she also tossed in a few ideas that might appeal to Democrats, including boosting childhood-reading proficiency, reducing criminal-recidivism rates, and adjusting policy to support “the least of us.”
She took questions from the crowd, and when abortion inevitably came up, Haley was ready. “I am unapologetically pro-life,” she said. “But I don’t judge anyone for being pro-choice.” As president, she elaborated, she’d restrict abortion in late pregnancy and promote “good quality” adoption.
Haley tends to speak with such a straight face that she appears almost stern. And she begins many sentences as though she is imparting a very wise lesson: “This is what I’ll tell you.” The voters I met found this appealing. Three separate women told me that they like Haley because they see her as a “strong woman.” One of them, Carol Holman, who had driven from nearby Merrimack with her husband, had voted for Trump in 2016 and 2020. But she’s ready for a change.
“People are getting tired of hearing about Trump’s problems,” Holman told me, as she buttoned up her leopard-print coat. Holman loved Haley’s performance in the second debate, and couldn’t wait to hear from the candidate in person. “She knows how to do it; she’s not just a blowhard,” she said, citing Haley’s time as a governor. “She made up my mind tonight!”
The unfolding war in the Middle East also seems to have prompted more voters to take a second look at Haley’s campaign, given her two years of experience at the UN. “People are nervous right now, and she acknowledged a little bit of that fear,” Katherine Bonaccorso, a retired schoolteacher from Massachusetts, told me.
Haley sees the attacks on Ukraine and Israel “as a security issue” for America, Jeanene Cooper, who volunteers as a co-chair for Haley’s campaign in Rockingham County, New Hampshire, told me. “She believes in peace through strength.” In a television interview after the Hamas assault in southern Israel, Haley advised Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to “finish them.” Haley has long been hawkish on foreign policy; it’s one of the major differences she has with Trump and DeSantis, who tend to be more isolationist.
The more people hear Haley, the more she’ll rise, Cooper said. It’s time, she added, for the lower-polling candidates—such as former Arkansas Governor Asa Hutchinson, North Dakota Governor Doug Burgum, South Carolina Senator Tim Scott, former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, and Ramaswamy—to drop out and endorse Haley. As for DeSantis, she added, he can’t fall that far and “think that somehow it’s going to come back.” (The DeSantis campaign has countered such assessments recently, saying they’re confident in the governor’s potential in Iowa—and arguing that polling at this stage in the primary season is not always predictive.)
The third GOP primary debate, which will be held Wednesday in Miami, could give Haley a further boost. And new rules for the fourth debate in December would reportedly require candidates to have reached 6 percent in the polls, which, if their present numbers hold, would narrow the stage to three candidates: DeSantis, Haley, and Ramaswamy (assuming that Trump continues to boycott the debates).
The path for Haley to progress requires DeSantis to fall flat. If she can knock him out of the way, Haley could come in second to Trump in the Iowa caucus and the New Hampshire primary, and then score strongly in her home state of South Carolina, where voters know her best. Trump’s legal standing is an important variable: At least one of the former president’s criminal trials is scheduled to begin just before Super Tuesday, which could cause some of his supporters to switch candidates. If the more mainstream Republicans drop out and endorse her, that could theoretically bring her close to beating out Trump to clinch the GOP nomination.
That’s a lot of ifs. The added national scrutiny that comes with being a primary front runner could send Haley’s star plummeting just as quickly as it rose. But the biggest problem for her and her supporters is the same conundrum that Republican candidates faced in 2020, and again in the 2022 midterm elections: The stubborn core of the GOP base wants Trump and only Trump, even if others in the party are desperate to wake up in an alternate reality.
The increasingly crowded 2024 Republican presidential field is up to 12 relatively well-known contenders. The latest to declare his candidacy is former Texas Rep. Will Hurd, who entered the race Thursday.
Hurd singled out both President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump in his announcement, saying Biden would win re-election if Trump secured the GOP nomination. Trump has a big lead in polls of Republican primary voters.
The ex-congressman joins several other presidential hopefuls who have thrown their hats in the ring this month. Miami Mayor Francis Suarez launched his bid last week, and two weeks ago, former Vice President Mike Pence, former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie and current North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum all formally kicked off their campaigns.
Meanwhile, Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin said last month that he won’t be on the presidential campaign trail in 2023 because of elections to his state’s legislature in November, but he appears to have left the door open to a 2024 White House run.
Below is MarketWatch’s list of Republican presidential contenders and the status of their candidacies.
On the Democratic side, Biden officially launched his re-election campaign in April, even as most Americans don’t approve of his performance. The president has been talking up the strong job market and his legislative record.
The first official debate of the GOP presidential primary is slated to be held in Milwaukee on Aug. 23. The Republican National Committee said there will be a second debate on Aug. 24 if “enough candidates qualify to make it necessary.”
The list above features relatively high-profile names, but there are lesser-known GOP presidential hopefuls as well, such as Aaron Day, who is known in part for his 2016 run against former Sen. Kelly Ayotte of New Hampshire, a fellow Republican; Perry Johnson, a former gubernatorial candidate in Michigan; Steve Laffey, a former mayor of Cranston, R.I.; and former Montana Secretary of State Corey Stapleton.
A number of other Republican politicians have also been talked about as potential 2024 contenders but haven’t said they are running. That group includes Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, who has passed on speaking in the key primary state of Iowa; John Bolton, a former national-security adviser and former ambassador to the United Nations; former Rep. Liz Cheney of Wyoming, who has run an ad in New Hampshire, another key state; South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem; and former Rep. Mike Rogers of Michigan.
Among the prominent Republicans who have said they’re not seeking their party’s presidential nomination in 2024 are Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas, former Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan, Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp, former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and New Hampshire Gov. Chris Sununu.
The contest to become the Republican Party’s 2024 presidential nominee is heating up, with Nikki Haley, a former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, and longshot candidate Vivek Ramaswamy each announcing runs since the beginning of the year, and former Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson joining the fray in a Sunday-show appearance on April 2.
And former President Donald Trump appears to be getting a political lift from a Manhattan district attorney’s case against him, though some analysts don’t see the boost lasting.
Biden gave a fresh hint on Monday about his re-election bid at the annual White House Easter Egg Roll, saying in an interview with Al Roker of NBC’s “Today” show that he aims to take part in “at least three or four more Easter egg rolls. Maybe five. Maybe six.”
“I’m planning on running, Al, but we’re not prepared to announce it yet,” the president said.
