The long-awaited first Republican challenger to Donald Trump for 2024 is apparently arriving shortly, and I wrote about her at New York:
Ever since Donald Trump formally announced a 2024 presidential comeback bid last November, the big question has been when, exactly, one of the large number of potential Republican rivals would jump into the turbulent waters with him. There were credible reports that potential candidates were afraid to draw Trump’s concentrated fire. But now the Charleston Post & Courier reports that Nikki Haley, the former South Carolina governor and Trump’s ambassador to the United Nations, will take the plunge on February 15.
The timing of the Haley announcement is odd, coming right after a show of force by Trump in South Carolina. At his January 28 event in Columbia, he demonstrated his support from the state’s Republican governor, lieutenant governor, treasurer, senior U.S. senator, and three U.S. House members. Perhaps Haley is just playing catch-up or is concerned about preempting a rival presidential bid by the junior U.S. senator from South Carolina, Tim Scott (whom she appointed to the Senate). The Dispatch’s David Drucker believes she actually relishes the prospect of a one-on-one fight with Trump in the early going:
“What better way to distinguish herself versus Trump, DeSantis, and anyone else, than by becoming the second declared candidate in the primary? The contrast is stark. Republican voters can choose between a white, male, soon-to-be 77-year-old defeated former president who has led the GOP to three consecutive electoral disappointments, or a nonwhite woman in her early 50s, born of immigrant parents, with conservative bona fides on most critical issues that are unassailable.”
Being the first official Trump challenger will definitely provide priceless advertising for Haley’s on-paper credentials. In addition to the qualities Drucker mentions, Haley has checked the foreign-policy-qualifications box via her service at the U.N., something Ron DeSantis can’t match. She has shown excellent political instincts over her lengthy career (she got massive positive publicity for removing the Confederate flag from the South Carolina State House grounds long after it had become a low-risk endeavor). Most of all, she has excelled in the essential Republican art of staying on good terms with Trump without looking like his toady.
Indeed, Haley’s odd relationship with Trump may soon be in a bright spotlight. She has offended him on multiple occasions, first by endorsing “L’il Marco” Rubio in 2016 while criticizing Trump, then by unsubtly letting it be known while serving in his administration that she was an independent player, then by harshly attacking his conduct on January 6. You can add to her sins against the 45th president that she is now breaking a promise to back him in 2024 if he ran. Yet he’s never gone medieval on her, and he seems strangely affectionate toward her even now, according to the Post & Courier:
“During his weekend campaign swing that included a stop at the S.C. Statehouse, Trump told national reporters he recently received a phone call from Haley. Trump said Haley told him ‘she’d like to consider’ a 2024 run of her own.
“’I talked to her for a little while. I said, “Look, you know, go by your heart if you want to run,'” Trump told reporters, adding that he would welcome the competition.
“’She called me and said she’d like to consider it, and I said you should do it.’
“Trump then reportedly told Haley, ‘Go by your heart if you want to run.’”
It’s possible this last comment from Trump should be translated as “Go ahead! Make my day!,” suggesting that he is prepared to tear her a new one in the weeks and months ahead. Or maybe he’s simply not that worried about Haley compared to the bigger threat posed by DeSantis.
So what kind of threat to either of these men is Haley ’24? Yes, she is the sort of candidate that might have been thought up by central casting. Originally, she was a politician from the hard-core, Jim DeMint-Mark Sanford wing of the South Carolina GOP who fit the Tea Party mood like a glove. But then she gradually made herself into a national-media icon of what post-Trump Republicanism might look and sound like. To conservatives of every hue, she’s unimpeachable on cultural issues, unobjectionable on foreign policy, and especially distinguished in the evergreen hobby of union-hating (she anticipated DeSantis’s attacks on perfidious corporations back in 2014 by telling potential investors in her state that they could take their “union jobs” elsewhere).
Haley’s ultimate problem as a presidential candidate is that she’s from a crucial early primary state. As Tom Harkin (whose presidential candidacy in 1992 took Iowa right off the table) could tell her, you don’t get much credit for winning your home state. But if she loses South Carolina, her candidacy will be dead as a mackerel.
Haley’s other big challenge is to overcome the perception that she’s really running for vice-president. She has been regularly featured on veep lists for Trump (even back in the 2020 cycle, when there were reports that the then-president wanted to dump Mike Pence in favor of her). And there’s not much question that Republicans need help with women voters, having placed a woman on their national ticket only once. And maybe that is her goal, or at least an acceptable consolation prize; despite years of being treated as a Republican star, Haley is only 51. But she’d better not wind up looking too weak in her home state, or the largely superficial image she has built as a political world-beater could vanish like a rare snowfall in the Carolina sun.
So when will the exit polls finally say that Bush lost?????
(and what Joe said above)
Joe: That’s easy. For one thing, the Hispanic vote wasn’t as large as billed but it was still a gain for Bush — same with Catholics.
More importantly, Republican and conservative turnout was way up, women voted much more Republican, and upper income people both increased their turnout and voted more Republican.
There you go, Joe. The mystery of Bush’s 3 point margin all cleared up!
You know, Ruy did explain that one (look for his immediate post-election posts): we got absolutely hosed among non-college whites (evangelical and otherwise), who broke Republican more than they have before, and we didn’t improve our national performance among Latinos (although we did improve in NDN-targeted swing states like CO and FL). We need to become competitive again among non-college whites outside the Northeast, so that the “southwestern strategy” doesn’t become our only possible path to 270 next time out. And we need to improve our Latino performance, rather than patting ourselves on the back because we’re not slipping all that much. Ruy and almost everyone else here know all these things already. (Simon Rosenberg knows them backwards and forwards, which is why he’s my pick, right now, for DNC chair.)
I’ve always suspected that the hispanic vote was less Republican than those early polls showed. And looking at the county results, they aren’t significantly different than the 2000 results; in Texas, Kerry gained about 1 percent from Gore’s Texas numbers, and Bush improved by about 1.5 percent. Only a handful of counties changed sides, mostly a few western counties switching to Bush, while Austin’s Travis County switched Democrat.
And to answer the question above, the black vote is only about 19 percent of the national vote, at most, and the hispanic vote, while about the same, is not as monolithically Democrat as the black vote. Hispanics in 2000 favored Gore, true, but 1 in 3 voted Bush, while less than 1 in 10 blacks voted Bush in 2000.
The evangelical percentage for Bush was the same, but the actual number of evangelicals voting was slightly higher. Statistics can be so slippery!
And the Catholic vote was still 50/50. Frankly, I’ve always thought that it was odd to still treat as broad a religion as Roman Catholic as if it were a monolithic group. To use an anecdotal example, one of my friends is a white pro-choice Catholic Democrat, and another is an asian pro-life Catholic Democrat. One is from VA and one os from OH. All they have in common is that they got baptised the same way. I think it’s time we stopped calling “Catholic” a group the same way we call races groups.
Does this mean that Bush catered to the wrong folks with his Commerce and AG pick??
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1. Re Ruy and Steve — as I understand it, the state exit polls and the NEP are separate and autonomous; as such… while one can be used to call into question the other, I don’t understand why changes in one mean that the other number, reliable or not, is to be altered commensurately.
2. Joe — because white married Protestants without college degrees are both numerous and shifted really strongly against the Dems.
And because we ought to remember that going from +0.5 to -2.8 – the Dems didn’t do THAT much worse.
Maybe those nomination announcements were made a bit prematurely… A.G. Gonzales and Commerce Secretary Gutierrez’s days may already be numbered.
Ruy: Can you please explain how,
if the Hispanic vote wasn’t as high for Bush as previously thought,
if the African American vote still went Democratic,
if the Catholic vote for Kerry wasn’t as low as it was thought to be and
that the Evangelical vote for Bush wasn’t measureably higher than 2000,
how, in 2004, did Bush win and Kerry lose?
I’ve been saying this, the future of the Democratic land base lies in the Southwest, not the Southeast. New Mexico, Nevada, Colorado, and eventually even Arizona will come our way. Many years from now, even Texas may become a swing state.