Trump Is Still King, Ron DeSantis Is A Dead Man Walking, and Nikki Haley Will Punch A Ticket Out of Iowa
As campaigns and caucus-goers fight winter weather in the Hawkeye State, a narrower GOP field should propel Haley into New Hampshire. Then, can she get Trump to come out and fight?
Let’s start with why we had a debate at all this week: the Iowa caucuses are in two days, on Monday, January 15. While the nation is supposed to care what the people of Iowa think, and as a political writer, abstractly, I do, caucusing is cumbersome, undemocratic, and like most things MAGA, nostalgic. It has nothing to do with today’s world in which, no matter what your political affiliation is, both parents work and are exhausted by the end of the day; and someone’s got to mind the kids. This year, God has something special on order for Republicans: winter weather so severe that the final few days of campaigning have been effectively canceled, and caucus goers’ commitment to the process will be challenged.
That said, here’s why Iowa commands our attention. Even though it rarely predicts the nomination, being able to—as they say— “punch your ticket out of Iowa” remains a good test. In other words, coming in second or third matters, kind of like making it through a fraternity initiation even if you fell for the trick about the sheep in the next room. Does a candidate have the stamina to do retail politics in 99 counties and eat a deep-fried Oreo without gagging? Can a candidate build a statewide campaign organization, or not? Can a candidate raise enough money to support that organization, but not use it up in foolish, ineffective ways?
This last is exceptionally important to recruiting the new donors a candidate needs as they turn the corner into election year, not to mention getting new money out of existing donors. The ratio of money raised to money spent is called “the burn rate,” and ideally a campaign raises far more than it brings in and has a low burn rate. Having a high burn rate—which means the money is zipping out the door as fast as it comes in—has been the downfall of high-flying candidates from Vermont’s Democratic Governor Howard Dean in 2004 to Florida’s Republican Governor Ron DeSantis today. A high burn rate insinuates two things: that the candidate is not a good manager, which raises questions about fitness for the presidency; and it causes donors to withhold money until they can be reassured it is being spent effectively.
That said, the Iowa caucuses also distort the primary process. That’s not because all the voters are “too white,” which is a very partial analysis, but because the media treats the caucuses like a national event and they aren’t about the nation. They are about Iowa, which means they are tuned to one sector of the economy, agriculture, and one kind of social formation, rural. Slightly less than half of Iowans are rural, whereas only 20% of American voters live and work outside an urban or suburban environment.
This is why primary candidates talk endlessly about ethanol every four years, as if it really was the fuel of the future when everyone knows it isn’t. Ethanol is expensive and environmentally unfriendly to produce. Its only virtue is that it is made of corn, which Iowans grow. And while corn can be healthy in its raw state, it is bad for the soil. And mostly, consumers don’t see corn in its best incarnation, since it is largely steered into making high-fructose corn syrup, which is unhealthy for human beings, and to fatten cattle, which is horrible for the environment because cows are gassier than Rudy Giuliani.
For all these reasons, even if we disdain the Iowa caucuses, we political junkies can’t not pay attention to them. So, for two hours of a presidential primary debate last Wednesday, we joined voters across the country who had gathered to listen to two of the more unpersuasive voices in American political history, Republican primary candidates Ron DeSantis and Nikki Haley.
Hot take #1: It’s hard to understand why, given what we have seen of him, why DeSantis succeeded as a politician at all, even in a state as odd as Florida. He has a nasal, whiny tone that occasionally escalates to plaintive outrage: teachers in the audience might have been reminded of the class goody-goody who gets an A-, comes to office hours to say how “unfaaaaaaiiiiiir” his grade is, and that it is sure to keep him out of law school unless it is changed immediately. DeSantis also has incompetent people handling his debate prep: I have never heard so many lame “zingers” from any presidential candidate.
DeSantis succeeds in making Nikki Haley—who manages to pull off “feminine” and “tough” in ways that require further study—look good. I have not, for example, seen any journalist call her unlikeable, something that was common for female candidates in the last cycle. Haley isn’t cutesy or cringey in the ways DeSantis is, for which I am grateful: that said, a woman would never survive laugh lines like: “When you need someone standing and fight for you, don’t look for Nikki Haley, you won’t be able to find her if you had a search warrant.” (Wut?) No one finds anyone with a search warrant.) At the same time, Haley is annoying in her own special way. She’s the smartest kid in the class, and never lets you forget it. She’s the student in the front row, her hand is poised and tense, so it shoots into the air before the professor has finished asking a question. She rushes through information dumps impatiently, rarely shifting to a humorous or personal remark, even when she is talking about her family.
Ideologically, there’s no real difference between DeSantis and Haley: he’s Ivy League extremist, and she’s extremist-lite. Nor is there much difference between the policies they would pursue and the MAGA agenda. So, it’s easy to see why Trump voters find both of them more unlikeable than a twice-impeached, multiply indicted, pudgy man with funny hair and tiny hands who may not be able to read.
And yet, I found myself enjoying the debate. One reason? With only two candidates on the stage, it was easier to focus on what was said. Tech entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy, a nasty little guttersnipe who was given to filling the air with falsehoods and wild statements, is still nominally in the race but did not qualify; nor did former Arkansas Governor Asa Hutchinson, who always seems more or less bewildered by the new political world his party has ushered in. Chris Christie, who never cracked low double digits anywhere, dropped out on the day of the debate, and on his way out the door, lobbed a few choice insults on a hot mic. “She’s going to get smoked, and you and I both know it. She’s not up to this,” Christie said about Haley. DeSantis, he continued, sounded “petrified” on an earlier phone call.
Here, I have to deliver rare praise for the GOP. Their debate rules have weeded out the hopeless and the hapless early on, something that did not happen soon enough in the 2020 Democratic primary and produces a needlessly cumbersome 2024 field.
And I think Christie is right: Haley will not win this nomination unless Trump is critically disabled, dies or is disqualified by a felony conviction in the next six months. DeSantis is probably petrified, not of any one individual like Haley or Trump, but because he has never lost an election. DeSantis has sold himself as a winner, is now losing (very) badly, and he doesn’t know how to deal with that. My guess is this has a lot to do with why DeSantis is so stiff, scripted, and puppet-like on stage. As one friend said to me after the debate, he hasn’t even learned how to look into a camera without twitching and making funny faces. The guy may be barely holding it together. You don’t need a crystal ball to know that the campaign in unsalvageable, and if he were not Ron DeSantis, he would quit now, because every day he stays in this race diminishes him more. Instead, DeSantis is continuing to bleed campaign money on the thinnest of hopes that he can pull a rabbit out of his hat (“And now, here’s something you’ll really like!”)
Haley, on the other hand, appears to be thriving, and not just because she has mastered the Southern art of being cheerful as the Yankees torch the city, but because DeSantis is actively failing. She is the only candidate left who will say on national television that Joe Biden won the election, and she can duke it out like a boy. As DeSantis was fibbing at length (she’s right—he does lie a lot, she lies less obviously), shaking her head and saying calmly: “You’re desperate. You’re just so desperate” and “Ron’s lying because Ron’s losing.” Haley also repeatedly referred us to a website that debunks things he has said about her: desantislies.com, otherwise known as Welcome to Ron DeSantis’ World of Lies, where her campaign rebuts his fibs with independent fact checking.
So, what’s the state of play? Haley and DeSantis are fighting for second place. The day after the debate, they were statistically at around 17% of caucus goers; now, Haley seems to be pulling away at 20%, with DeSantis at 13%, despite an endorsement from evangelical leader and Iowa kingmaker Bob Vander Plaats. Both are behind the Belle of the Ball by 35 points, on Wednesday, and experts have said that Christie caucus-goers will go to Haley.
If that’s true, it may push DeSantis out of the race before the New Hampshire primary, which is only eight days later on January 23, and the day after the debate, it looked like Haley had bumped up and DeSantis had bumped down in Iowa. As long as she can get her caucus-goers out, she will win second place there. Which means…what?
Last night, as part of his weekly exchange with the Washington Post’s Jonathan Capehart, New York Times columnist David Brooks gamed out a path to the nomination for Haley that presumes that she can put together a coalition in the GOP. You might want to watch it, in part because it demonstrates how unlikely that outcome is.
As yet, we’re not seeing much movement in New Hampshire. Yet, New Hampshire is where things get interesting for Haley. She is in shooting distance of a victory, and where Christie’s voters could push her past Trump. The Former Guy is down three points since the first of the year, and Haley is up 10: in other words, she is within 11 points of Trump’s 41%. And at last count, the Christie vote was—11%.
My hope? That Haley’s momentum makes New Hampshire, which actually votes, a dogfight that Trump did not anticipate and that finally brings him out of his cave to confront her. That is where things could get interesting, because one of the reasons I believe he is not on the campaign trail is that his lawyers and handlers want to keep him out of volatile environments where he could incriminate himself further in any one of the legal cases he is fighting.
And I think Nikki Haley may be just the woman for the job.
Short Takes:
The last serious poll in the California Democratic Senate primary, which is on March 5, was in November, and it showed Representative Katie Porter hammering her colleague Adam Schiff by 11 points. And according to Politico’s Dustin Gardner, their new ad buys suggest that both candidates are fighting for San Francisco Bay-area women and gay men. “Their ad buys include cable TV stations catering to audiences that are — to varying degrees — heavily made up of women and LGBTQ people,” Gardner writes. “Bravo, Hallmark, TLC, HGTV and the Food Network. One consultant working on the race quipped that the channel selection shows the camps are targeting `women, gays and the straight men who love them.’” (January 12, 2024)
A Quinnipiac University poll from last week is good news for Pennsylvania’s incumbent Senator, Bob Casey: he’s got ten points on hedge funder David McCormick, who made news two years ago by losing to Trump-endorsed TV Doc Mehmet Oz in the Republican primary (Oz then lost to John Fetterman.) Although Casey’s funding dipped a bit in the fourth quarter of 2023, the campaign is brushing it off. “Casey received more than 59,000 contributions from more than 36,000 donors, and 92% of contributions were under $100,” writes J.D. Prose at the Pennsylvania Patriot-News, a pattern that demonstrates, according to the Casey campaign, the strength of “Senator Casey’s grassroots network.” Expect the Democratic party to pump money into this race as needed. It’s not just a must-have Senate seat—Pennsylvania is a must-have win for President Biden. (January 12, 2024)
Where’s a real nail-biter for people who love democracy? Arizona, where former Democrat Kirsten Sinema may or may not have vacated her Senate seat by becoming an independent: should she run, she currently commands 20% of the vote. If the election were held today, the real Democratic candidate, Representative Ruben Gallego (AZ-07), would be in a statistical tie with the leading Republican: super-MAGA former TV news anchor Kari Lake. But that could change. Lake, who is said to be in Iowa as a Trump surrogate, will spend a lot of time in court fighting a defamation suit connected to her 2022 election loss (which she claims was a win.) Furthermore, Gallego is winning the fundraising battle. According to Alexander Bolton at The Hill, Gallego “raised an impressive $3.3 million in the fourth quarter of 2023, collecting an average of $29 from more than 114,000 donations.” Lake raised $2.1 million—and with $6.5 million in cash on hand, Gallego is well positioned to take on both Sinema and Lake. (January 8, 2024)
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I love your description of Haley as the tense, smartest girl in the room whose hand is always ready to shoot up into the air. She is smart. And she is also proof that intelligence doesn't make a person ethical or decent.