It’s been evident for a good while now that Donald Trump is the overwhelming favorite to win his third consecutive Republican presidential nomination with just two rivals having even a ghost of a chance to knock him off his stride. In August, eight challengers to Trump made the stage in the first GOP debate in Milwaukee. Two weeks before the first official 2024 contest in Iowa, the only significant candidate debate on the immediate horizon (sponsored by CNN) will feature just Nikki Haley and Ron DeSantis. Yes, Chris Christie and Vivek Ramaswamy are still active presidential aspirants, and technically Asa Hutchinson is still in the race. But by any realistic measure, these are zombie candidacies, accounting for a combined 8 percent of the vote in the RealClearPolitics national polling averages.
Barring some totally unprecedented development, Trump is going to win the Iowa caucuses on January 15 (his lead in the RCP averages there is currently 32.7 percent). The big question is whether DeSantis can keep his campaign temporarily alive by finishing second after focusing all his resources on Iowa or if he will instead give way to Haley, who has a remote but distinct path to viability in New Hampshire and then in her home state of South Carolina. That makes the head-to-head debate between these two survivors on January 10 at Drake University in Des Moines a genuinely interesting and significant encounter. It will offer DeSantis one final chance to deploy his more-conservative-than-anyone message in hopes of peeling off Trump loyalists while depicting Haley as too RINO-ish for a GOP defined by the MAGA movement, even as Haley seeks to consolidate anti-Trump voters and advertise her allegedly superior electability to Republicans starved for power. Trump, of course, will skip the debate and, in fact, hold a town-hall event in Des Moines sponsored by Fox News on the same evening.
If Haley does finish behind DeSantis in Iowa (as most, though not all, polls currently project), the Florida governor will stay in the race at least through New Hampshire (just eight days after Iowa) and Christie will almost certainly be emboldened to stick it out as well in hopes of challenging Haley’s hold on anti-Trump voters. If, however, Haley edges DeSantis out in Iowa, there will be enormous pressure on both DeSantis and Christie to withdraw and give the former South Carolina governor a clean shot at Trump in New Hampshire and then (a month later) on her home turf in the Palmetto State.
Add it all up and Haley likely poses the only real threat to Trump wrapping up the nomination before his legal problems — now including possible exclusion from general-election ballots in some states — may begin to hurt, rather than help, his standing among Republicans and general-election swing voters alike. That also seems to be the calculation of Team Trump, which has abruptly shifted from ignoring or dismissing Haley (whom Trump himself has nicknamed “Bird Brain”) to attacking her for alleged tax heresy during her gubernatorial tenure and drawing attention to her recent gaffe in omitting slavery when asked about the origins of the U.S. Civil War.
It says a lot about the asymmetric dynamics of the Republican race that even as Trump assails Haley as an empty-headed taxaholic, Haley’s main recent comment about Trump was that, as president, she would pardon him for any and all federal criminal charges of which he might be convicted. While her stated rationale for this position is that it will divide the country to “have an 80-year-old man sitting in jail,” her implicit message is that she agrees with the majority of Republican voters who think Trump has done nothing to deserve his many indictments, much less the possible convictions he faces. For Haley as for DeSantis (who has also promised a Trump pardon), this is simply the price of admission for anyone seriously aspiring to the GOP presidential nomination. And that’s one reason neither of these remaining challengers is going to succeed barring a big upset once voters begin voting.
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