Nikki Haley’s Rise Will Clinch Donald Trump’s Victory

The only person happier with Nikki Haley’s recent rise in polls and buzz is her former boss. Photo: Logan Cyrus/AFP via Getty Images

For a lot of anti-Trump Republicans, the perfectly timed rise of Nikki Haley in polls and buzz as the voting phase of the 2024 GOP primary approaches is heaven-sent. Without having definitively broken with Donald Trump or his supporters, Haley projects the kind of personality and message that doesn’t embarrass respectable GOP elites, and that could in theory provide an appeal beyond the ranks of the party base. Perhaps just as important, Haley appears fresh and interesting, in sharp contrast to the rival she seems poised to displace as Trump’s most serious challenger: Ron DeSantis. The Florida governor’s act is getting stale. The 2022 reelection triumph at the center of his electability argument is receding into the rear-view mirror. His tales of tormenting schoolteachers, diversity consultants, and Mickey Mouse have lost their punch. And his efforts to convince Republicans that the 45th president is a RINO squish just haven’t worked at all.

Thanks to a couple of solid debate performances, her fine instincts for pandering to multiple audiences without looking desperate, and the weaknesses of her opponents, Haley has ascended as DeSantis has descended in New Hampshire, in her native South Carolina, and most recently in Iowa. Is she the Trump rival non-MAGA Republicans have been waiting for?

The answer could be “yes,” but there’s a very big catch: There just aren’t enough non-MAGA Republicans to sustain a successful challenge to the front-runner, which means her vote is probably capped at a level far below Trump’s. DeSantis had the right strategy for defeating Trump by depicting himself as more authentically right wing, a natural successor and perfecter of the MAGA movement. He just didn’t have the chops to displace the movement’s founder.

As anti-Trump conservative Rich Lowry admits in Politico, Haley really isn’t the candidate to steal Trump’s thunder or his share of the primary electorate:

Haley has been gaining exclusively among voters who are unfavorable to Trump. The problem for her is that this is only 20 percent or so of the party.

The hot-button issue of Ukraine illustrates the dynamic. DeSantis has played to the skepticism of the party’s base for continued aid, but alienated the traditional element of the party when he over-sauced the goose by calling the war a “territorial dispute.” On the other hand, Haley has been stalwart in favor of supporting Ukraine. This has pleased the traditional element of the party, but at the cost of further defining herself as too establishment and moderate for MAGA voters.

Looking at the contest on a more granular level, Haley isn’t going to inherit a whole lot of voters who are abandoning the once-formidable DeSantis bandwagon — mostly voters poached from the front-runner. Polling consistently shows Trump as the second choice of a plurality of DeSantis voters (in Iowa’s authoritative Selzer poll, for example, DeSantis supporters prefer Trump to Haley by a 41 percent to 27 percent margin). So as Haley rises, so does Trump, and only one of them has anything close to the kind of support necessary for victory. Of course, if the Trump campaign suffers some catastrophe before he nails down the nomination, as his GOP rivals have been vainly counting on, Haley could win as the last rival standing. But as Lowry observes, we’ve seen this movie before:

It’s hard to resist seeing the current race through a 2016 prism — with Trump as Trump, DeSantis as Ted Cruz, and Haley as Marco Rubio or John Kasich. In 2016, none of those non-Trump candidates had the strength to escape their “lane” and match Trump’s breadth of support.

Haley was a big Rubio supporter in 2016, and like Rubio that year, she might exceed expectations in Iowa just enough to hang on as a potential vanquisher of Trump. But the Florida senator was forced out of the race when he badly lost his home state to the MAGA mogul. The exact same fate is likely to await Nikki Haley, assuming she makes it that far.