Hey, Nikki You're So Fine, You're So Fine You Blow My Mind
Said no MAGA Republican ever. But South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley could still win the GOP nomination--here's how
Happy Monday, readers! Last week, I introduced a new feature for paying subscribers: a short post is accompanied by a short listen. Last week featured a conversation withThe Nation’s national political correspondent, Joan Walsh, and this week we’ll have an in-depth look at the Netflix drama Rustin with historian and Rustin biographer John D’Emilio.
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As we make the turn into the holiday season, and an intensified jockeying for the Republican nomination, it’s worth taking a closer look at Nikki Haley, the only candidate in the race for the Republican nomination who is making any progress. Good news, right? Well, not yet, or maybe even ever, but I think she has a path to the nomination. And please forget about the national polling: primary contests aren’t national.
OK, let’s start by checking in with our friends at FiveThirtyEight.com to recap the state-level polling, and what Haley’s opportunities are.
As of yesterday in Iowa, Haley has moved from The Single Digit Club, where she was in late September, to 14%, behind both DeSantis (18%) and Trump (44.9%.) But the leaders are moving in the opposite direction. Trump has dropped four points, and DeSantis has flatlined. So that’s good news. Here’s the bad news: while it looks like Haley is picking up Trump voters, she is probably collecting homeless Tim Scott voters.
This is the most likely scenario because Trump supporters dislike and distrust Haley, who represents what remains of the pre-MAGA Republican establishment. Som actively hate her. Earlier this year, Ann Coulter called Haley a "bimbo" and a "preposterous creature," and suggested she return to India (Haley was born in the United States.) Steve Bannon has said Haley is "is as ambitious as Lucifer." And last week, after major media praised her debate performances, Fox News host Laura Ingraham wrote Haley’s political obituary: “Politically, this is suicide for Nikki Haley,” Ingraham spewed. “There’s no future in the Republican Party for someone who’s been endorsed by Politico and The New York Times. So Nikki Haley can be a media hero or she can be a leader in the GOP, but she cannot be both.”
Granted, Haley has a history of consorting with Republicans that the populist wing of the party hates. In 2010, she was persuaded to run for Governor by outgoing Governor Mark Sanford (who, as you may recall, was going through a divorce because he was having an affair with a woman in Buenos Aires), and was endorsed by Mitt Romney. Trump turned on Sanford in 2018, as he was running for re-election to Congress, and Mitt Romney is Mitt Romney.
But there’s more.
Haley is well-known for saying that she was inspired to get into politics in 2003 by Hilary Clinton. As governor, following the massacre at the Mother Emmanuel AME Church, she engineered a successful bill to remove the Confederate flag from the state capitol building in 2015. In 2016, when Trump was considering Haley as a vice presidential candidate, she not only said she had no interest, she vetoed an ant-trans bathroom bill, telling reporters that it was not a problem that needed to be solved.
Haley seems to be with the anti-trans program now, but here’s the thing: MAGAs also hate flip-floppers. Although Haley is anti-abortion, she knows exactly how toxic that is in a general election, and has twice told the other fools on the debate stage with her that they are promising bans on the procedure that they cannot deliver. Finally, Haley is an unapologetic foreign policy hawk in a party riven by isolationism, and under Trump, she represented the United States at the United Nations—an institution that MAGAs loath.
So how could Haley possibly become the Republican presidential nominee? The answer to the question is that Trump has to fail, and her strategy, I think, is to hold on as long as possible and give him enough time to do that. Simultaneously, she must run against the other candidates and picking up their donors to stay alive into Super Tuesday and perhaps beyond.
In other words, she has to make a strong second-place showing. This is how it works.
With seven weeks until the caucuses, at 14%, Haley has hit her personal ceiling in Iowa. The other normies who caucus goers will choose from on January 15, 2024 (former governors Chris Christie, Doug Burgum, and Asa Hutchinson) comprise only 5.6% of the vote. DeSantis (18%) and Ramaswamy (4.8%) voters represent another 23% of caucus goers, but they aren’t up for grabs for anyone but Trump, or maybe Hitler. So, Haley’s best play here? Don’t even try to beat Trump. Capture the Christie, Burgum, and Hutchinson voters, bank on DeSantis losing more points to Trump as the action in Iowa heats up (I would put money on this) and leapfrog the Florida Governor—putting heavy pressure on DeSantis to get out of the race.
But let’s assume DeSantis either captures second place in Iowa, or stays in with a third-place finish, since he’s a stubborn bastard and we all know Iowa is not a predictive primary.
Yet, DeSantis will be tired. He will have burned a lot of cash, and will be losing donors. He will have no time, and few resources to make a big push in New Hampshire, where Haley is on the upswing. The New Hampshire primary is only a week after Iowa (political consultants and reporters literally get on airplanes heading to Manchester before the full caucus results are in.) In that state, Trump has dipped about three points, but is still running strongly at 44%. Haley (18%) and Christie (11%) have made marginal gains in recent weeks, while, in less than a year, DeSantis has fallen from 23% to less than 8% (Ramaswamy is at 6%.)
Even if Christie drops out, New Hampshire is not going to be Haley’s “It Girl” moment. But, again, the goal is to beat DeSantis, and he can’t survive a third-place finish in New Hampshire. And I predict she will do that.
We can skip an analysis of Nevada, where Trump dominates, in part because the Nevada GOP has literally rigged the election. Nevada used to be a caucus state, but switched to a regular primary in 2021, and that contest (with Haley on the ballot) is on February 6. The state GOP didn’t care for that change, so it will award delegates on the basis of caucuses held on February 8, which presumably, they are paying for, since Nevada law no longer provides for them.
The play for Haley? Just skip Nevada, and go all in on the primary in her home state on February 24.
South Carolina is where things get interesting. It’s where Haley has a chance to shine, and she has almost a month after New Hampshire to make her case to a voter base that she has owned in the past. South Carolina voters are also far more diverse: 22% of Black registered voters are either Republicans or independent; a whopping 23% of white voters are independent. And here’s the best part: South Carolina is an open primary state, so the polls there are suggestive, but not predictive.
Unsurprisingly, this is the state where Haley is on the move: it’s where she is popular, and has a donor base enhanced by Tim Scott dropping out. It’s also where strong, second-place finishes in Iowa and New Hampshire will pay off, particularly if it thins the herd down to three candidates plus Trump. Haley’s debate performance in September bounced her up to 20% in South Carolina, which is where she has hovered ever since. Trump is at almost 50%, and I don’t have to do the math for you to say this is a big deficit.
Obviously, if Haley defies these odds, she upends the Republican nomination contest, and the whole 2024 presidential cycle. There’s only a small chance this could happen. However, South Carolina’s 50 delegates are delivered by a hybrid system, and Haley will pick up delegates here. It is also likely that she will come in second, because even if DeSantis is still there, his numbers have gone nowhere but down (currently, he is at 12%.) So, the big win here is to knock DeSantis out of the race and pick up what delegates she can.
The question, how strong a second? And will it give Haley the momentum she needs to make a strong showing on March 5? That’s Super Tuesday, with a total of 784 delegates at stake in 15 races. This is always the big prize, the “Heartbreak Hill” of presidential ambitions, and there are still two possible good outcomes for Haley. One is what Ross Douthat of the New York Times calls “the stampede scenario,” in which Haley improves her performance, contest by contest, and Republican voters wake up on election day and overthrow Trumpism.
That is unlikely. But what is possible is that Haley comes out of Super Tuesday with another set of strong second place showings and enough delegates to lay a legitimate claim to the nomination should Trump be convicted in the Georgia trial, or even just be damaged enough that the superdelegates in the party worry that he will literally be campaigning in an ankle monitor, and they throw the nomination to the convention. Remember: Ted Cruz tried to engineer this in 2016, and it didn’t work. But that was seven years, 91 indictments and 21 impeachments ago, not to mention a string of consequential electoral losses ago, losses that can be put directly on Donald Trump’s doorstep.
Yes, MAGAs hate her, but the argument for Haley in the world beyond MAGA—which is where the majority of voters live, even in the Republican party—is obvious. Haley is young, smart, experienced, conservative in all the recognizable ways, not an extremist or a felon, attractive to voters of color, and could win back Republicans who have fled the GOP in horror. And mark my words, much as I dread it, she has the potential to give Biden a run for his money in a way that Trump won’t a year from now.
So, can Nikki Haley win the nomination? I think she can. All she has to do is come in second.
Looking for a holiday gift for someone who wants to understand our election landscape?
Consider a copy of my book, Political Junkies: From Talk Radio to Twitter, How Alternative Media Hooked Us on Politics and Broke Our Democracy (Basic Books, 2020.). You can buy it on Amazon and have it sent direct as a gift or order it through Bookshop.org for a slightly lower price and longer wait.
Short takes:
In a stirring manifesto that everyone should read, Cass Sunstein argues that liberalism is consistent with other ideological positions, not a flimsy resting stop in between left and right. “Fascists reject liberalism. So do populists who think that freedom is overrated,” Sunstein writes in the New York Times. “Perhaps more than ever, there is an urgent need for a clear understanding of liberalism — of its core commitments, of its breadth, of its internal debates, of its evolving character, of its promise, of what it is and what it can be.” And then he goes on to say what that really looks like. (November 20, 2023)
Have you ever wondered how sexism hurts everyone? Here’s a good example: Liz Mundy, who has just published a book about women in the CIA, discusses how the devaluation of women, and whole departments seen as too female, led to the marginalization of pre-9/11 intelligence about Osama bin Ladin. “Over three years of book research, I interviewed more than one hundred female officers at the agency, including at least a half dozen who were involved in the bin Laden effort—some of whom had not spoken previously about their work, or not extensively—as well as many of their male colleagues,” Mundy writes in The Atlantic. “What became clear in these conversations was that many of the women who charted al-Qaeda’s rise felt that their work was undervalued or ignored and that their gender was part of the equation.” (November 18, 2022)
In Made by History, now in residence at Time magazine, historian Benjamin Allison examines the dilemmas and frustrations that Biden is navigating in Gaza and sees important parallels to how the Israeli tail is wagging the American dog today. “As was the case with Begin in 1980, over the decades, numerous Israeli governments have proved unwilling to make substantial concessions to the Palestinians—even when Arab states made it clear that they would not normalize relations without respect for Palestinian sovereignty and rights,” Allison writes. “Yet, once the Arab states demonstrated increased willingness to make peace without serious concessions, Israel had even less incentive to address Palestinian sovereignty.” (November 17, 2023)
The Democrats has better think seriously about the prospect, because if she wins the GOP nomination, she wins the Presidency in the current match-up, no question.
Great headline!