Since the idea of President Biden being “replaced” as the 2024 Democratic nominee was all the rage for a moment, I took the opportunity to explore the little understood mechanics of the issue at New York:

A byproduct of the panic over Special Counsel Robert Hur’s suggestion that President Joe Biden is an “elderly man” with memory issues has been media efforts to understand and explain how Democrats could replace the 46th president as their 2024 nominee, either with or without his consent. From a political perspective, the idea that Biden might be dumped from the ticket is extremely far-fetched. But technically it is possible, though increasingly complicated, right up to Election Day.

When it comes to changing horses in the middle of a presidential race, Democrats differ from Republicans in one fundamental respect: While GOP rules bind delegates to the candidates who win primaries or caucuses, Democrats have a moral rather than a legal obligation to remain faithful to their candidate. Fourteen states have laws that seek to bind delegates to the winning candidate, but it’s reasonably clear that party rules supersede such laws when they are in conflict. And in most states, delegates are released from their obligations if a candidate withdraws from the race.

Another difference between the parties is that Democrats have an established set of “unpledged” delegates who hold convention seats by virtue of elected or party offices they hold. These “superdelegates” don’t get to vote unless there’s a second presidential ballot. At the 2024 Democratic convention in Chicago this August, there will be 744 superdelegates out of a total of 4,532 delegates.

The idea that superdelegates might vote for anyone they want is largely fictional. They are chosen by campaigns to be 100 percent loyal to their candidate. This loyalty is even fiercer when the candidate is the incumbent president of the United States. There’s a reason no sitting president has been denied renomination if he wanted it since Republican Chester Arthur in 1884. So the idea that Democratic delegates are going to look at the polls in August and decide they can do better than Biden is nonsense; it’s not going to happen. Even if faced with the emergency of avoiding a Trump presidency, the Democratic Party will remain a coalition of interests and principles, not just a vehicle for winning one election.

But if Biden, for whatever reason, chooses to “step aside” — as a self-defenestration is euphemistically described — it’s another matter altogether. The problem for Democratic delegates won’t be liberating themselves to look elsewhere (with the possible exception of those from a few states with stricter “binding” statutes than others); it will be agreeing upon a successor. And the closer to the convention that this decision has to be made, the likelier it is that these 4,000-plus Biden loyalists will back whoever he designated as his successor. Fantasies of a President Gretchen Whitmer or Gavin Newsom or J.B. Pritzker or Pete Buttigieg or Michelle Obama notwithstanding, that successor will almost certainly be Vice-President Kamala Harris. Any other choice would not only infuriate Harris and her supporters; it would also retroactively label Biden’s first decision as party leader in 2020 as a mistake. For better or worse, the party will unite around its new leader; the Trump factor will, if anything, give Democrats an abiding hope of victory no matter how things look a few months out.

It is possible, I suppose, that Biden and Harris could decide to “step aside” together as an act of patriotic self-sacrifice and help design a spanking new ticket that’s dressed for success. But that’s more likely the stuff of potboiling novels from the kind of writers who pretend there are such things as spontaneous candidate drafts and moderate Republicans.

The cleanest Plan B scenario would involve some cataclysmic event happening to Biden that leads him or the party to reconsider his candidacy after the Chicago convention. In that extremely remote contingency, the Democratic National Committee would have the power to name a replacement nominee, just as it did in 1972 when vice-presidential nominee Thomas Eagleton “stepped aside” after revelations of DUIs and shock therapy. The DNC isn’t going to dump a renominated incumbent president, no matter how poorly he’s doing in the polls; back in the days when presidential elections weren’t almost always desperately close or vulnerable to post-election challenges and insurrections, one party regularly went to battle after Labor Day knowing it was likely to lose. But if Joe Biden cannot take up the cudgels for the last stages of a rematch with Trump (assuming the 45th president isn’t himself dumped for his vast record of misconduct, if not for some physical ailment), the party can quickly move on with Kamala Harris.

When the brouhaha over Robert Hur’s slurs about Joe Biden’s mental faculties broke out, I took it personally, and replied at New York:

Like Joe Biden, I got my dream job at a stage of life when most folks are planning or entering retirement. After writing many hundreds of thousands of words for politicians and organizations without getting much credit for it, I became a rather geriatric blogger and then a political writer for New York Magazine (and The Democratic Strategist) and blew right by the age at which I could have packed it all in. Best I can tell, I still produce more words — though perhaps not higher-quality words — than my whippersnapper New York colleagues. So I am naturally sympathetic to the president’s desire to stay in the saddle as long as he can, and naturally hostile to partisan efforts to depict Biden as senile or incompetent, particularly when the beneficiary of undermining confidence in his abilities is Donald Trump.

Let’s just get this right out on the table: Barring some unprecedented development, the 2024 presidential election choice will be between an 81-year-old Democrat and a 78-year-old Republican. In terms of grammar, syntax, logic, and recall of important events, the former is more cogent on his worst days than the latter appears to be on his best days. So anyone planning to support Trump is welcome to do so on policy or partisan-power grounds but should be ashamed to claim that they just cannot vote for Joe Biden because he’s too old. Is Trump more “vigorous” than Biden, in terms of self-confidence and aggressiveness? Yes, but in the way that Attila the Hun was more “vigorous” than St. Francis of Assisi. It’s also germane that while Biden is a pretty faithful representative of the mainstream views of his political party, Trump eccentrically defines the views of his political party, much as Attila defined the Hun Weltanschauung.

To put it another way, if a second-term President Biden becomes significantly afflicted by age or illness, his lapses are likely to be as mild-mannered as the man himself. I don’t think you can say the same about a second-term President Trump, who already seems to suffer from the malady once maliciously called “Irish Alzheimer’s” (or in some lore, “Appalachian Alzheimer’s”), wherein the victim remembers nothing but his grudges.

There is, of course, a more general and entirely legitimate debate over how old our presidents and presidential candidates should be. I personally thought both Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders were “too old” to run in 2020, though this judgment was mostly about their electability rather than their capacity to do the job. The advent of septuagenarian and even octogenarian presidents is in part a reflection of longer life spans (at least for people who aren’t too poor to receive decent nutrition and health care), as Alex Webb pointed out last year after Biden joked about being a contemporary of founder James Madison:

“When Madison became the nation’s fourth president in 1809, he was just 57. Bizarrely, however, Madison was by one measure considerably older than Biden when he took the hot seat: compared with the life expectancy of his contemporaries.

“Someone born in Colonial America in the 18th century had a life expectancy of just 28 — skewed heavily, of course, by the fact that so many people died in infancy. When Madison took office, he was already more than twice as old as most of those born the same year. He was, in relative terms, much older than Biden, who is just 15 years older than the average life expectancy of his year group.”

Biden (and for that matter, Trump) may also seem especially old because he happened to assume the presidency after a run (again, excepting Trump) of relatively young chief executives: Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama.

But the thing so often forgotten when we obsess about the age of our leaders is that there are qualities associated with what the AARP used to euphemistically call “modern maturity” that offset whatever is actually lost when an old goat “loses a step”: most obviously work experience, but also lived historical perspective, a wide range of useful role models and “best practices,” knowledge of personal limitations, and even fires of ego-driven ambition tamped down by accomplishment. I know I’m a better political writer for having observed multiple eras of American politics, dating back to the day in 1960 when I watched John F. Kennedy barnstorm through my small Georgia hometown. It should be obvious that Joe Biden learned something in his famously lengthy career in public office, as environmental activist (and himself a founder of an advocacy group for seniors concerned with climate change) Bill McKibben pointed out in the wake of the latest age scare over the president:

“Obviously you lose a step physically as you age, but the presidency doesn’t require carrying sofas up the White House stairs. And science increasingly finds that aging brains make more connections, perhaps because they have more history to work with. …

“Biden was socialized in an era when government took on big causes, and you can see it reflected in his first-term commitment to rebuilding infrastructure on a grand scale, boosting a new sustainable energy economy with billions of dollars for solar panels and battery factories, dramatically increasing the number of people with healthcare, and standing up for gun control, voting rights and reproductive rights.”

There are reasons, in other words, that most societies embrace gerontocracy to one extent or another.

Sure, there are, of course, limits to the value of experience. When Casey Stengel was managing the New York Mets at the end of his career, as the story goes, one of his players was asked what it was like to play for such a living legend. “Casey has forgotten more about baseball than I’ll ever know,” the player said. “But that’s the problem — he’s forgotten it.” His team’s showing proved the point.

At the moment, Biden’s Team America isn’t doing all that badly unless you choose to look at it through a partisan lens, or can’t cope with the traumas and disappointments of the recent past or the uncertainties we face in the immediate future. The president deals with many, many people in the course of an insanely busy day, and if he’s as around the bend as the nonexpert assessment by special counsel Robert Hur suggests, we’d almost certainly know it, unless you believe in a conspiracy of silence as vast as any in U.S. history. I know a lot of very smart, very young people who struggle with remembering dates and names; I’ve never been able to recognize faces other than those I encounter regularly. Sure, Joe Biden’s age and competence pose legitimate questions. But they should be answered with comprehensive, not anecdotal, evidence and by observers who are not followers of the wild man who will become president if Biden is put out on an ice floe by voters in November for being too old. Take it from this old guy: Sometimes the last gallon in the tank can get you to your destination.

One of the under-discussed topics of Election 2024 is the size, scope and impact of third-party or independent presidential candidacies. But it could become a big and (to Democrats in particular) eventful deal, which is all the more unfortunate insofar as these candidate’s can’t win, as I discussed at New York:

There’s no telling what the 2024 presidential general election is going to look like after what will probably seem like an endless campaign between Joe Biden and Donald Trump. But both the early polls and recent history suggest that the contest will be close, just like six of the last seven presidential elections. Thanks to widespread disgruntlement with this choice, the odds are also high that the non-major-party vote will be relatively high (more like 2016’s 5.7 percent than 2020’s 1.9 percent) — and that may decide the election.

But as Jamelle Bouie of the New York Times points out in an important column, the one thing we know for sure is that none of these third-party or independent candidates is going to win:

“[T]o have any hope of fulfilling the constitutional requirement to win a majority of electoral votes, a third-party candidate would need at least a plurality of voters in a huge number of states. The party would need, on a state-by-state basis, to outcompete one of the other two parties, so that it could notch electors under the winner-take-all rules that apply in most states.

“This, unfortunately for anyone with third-party dreams, has never happened.”

Yes, there is an argument (being suggested most recently by the No Labels crowd, which is seeking ballot access for a yet-to-be-identified presidential candidacy) that a non-major-party candidate can crucially influence the direction of the nation by picking off a few states and deadlocking the Electoral College, thereby gaining massive leverage in the resolution of that deadlock in Congress. But to do that you need a very big regional base of support, as Bouie notes:

“In 1948, with Senator Strom Thurmond of South Carolina as its candidate, the States’ Rights Democratic Party — better known as the Dixiecrats — won four states and 39 electoral votes despite gaining just 2.4 percent of the national popular vote. Twenty years later, George Wallace and the American Independent Party won 46 electoral votes and 13.5 percent of the popular vote.

“What both results suggest is that under the Electoral College, the next best alternative to a large and well-distributed national constituency is to have a small and intense regional one. It is, it seems, the only other way to win electoral votes as a third party.”

Both those efforts failed, of course. And if you scan the list of likely non-major-party candidates in 2024 — independents Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Cornel West; Green Party aspirant Jill Stein; whoever the Libertarians choose to run; and the “centrist” worthies under consideration by No Labels — there’s no one with the kind of regional base Thurmond or Wallace (or Teddy Roosevelt in his Bull Moose run of 1912) enjoyed. There is a nascent argument that Kennedy might augment his already-significant but highly diffused support (13 percent in the national RealClearPolitics averages in a five-way race) by winning the Libertarian nomination. That’s a bit of a reach given Kennedy’s lefty background and erratic views; he’s just not the sort of person you can imagine as a hero in an Ayn Rand novel, and his support for strong environmental policies might be a deal-breaker for the Libertarian Party, which has plenty of true believers from whom to choose. In any event, whatever RFK Jr. might gain from the easy ballot access Libertarians might offer would be offset by the number of voters who are decidedly non-libertarian.

As for No Labels, the group may back away from its threat to run a “unity ticket” thanks to internal dissension and the fury of former allies who think the whole effort would just guarantee a Trump victory. But even No Labels’ own highly dubious polling shows any foreseeable candidate would struggle to win electoral votes. To cite one example, the West Virginia voters whose antipathy to Joe Manchin led him to give up his Senate seat aren’t going to back him for president against Donald Trump.

What all of this suggests is that non-major-party candidacies should be viewed by voters and pundits alike strictly in the context of how they affect the Biden-Trump binary choice. Sure, there are ideological reasons some voters might pull the lever for the candidates of parties like the Libertarians and the Greens; those voters may believe that in the broader scheme of things it really just doesn’t matter whether Biden or Trump is the 46th president. For everyone else, the choice to go independent or third-party isn’t really a choice of that candidate, but of either Biden or Trump.

Things could change by November, of course, and the implications of non-party candidacies may depend on how many of them there are and who they are. But current polling shows that the current five-way race we are contemplating will likely help Trump defeat Biden, which makes sense when you consider the cohesiveness of Trump’s MAGA base and his inability to win a popular-vote majority. As Bouie puts it: “If Americans want different choices, they will need a different system.”

There have been some odd twists already in the 2024 presidential contest, and today I wrote about one of them at New York.

After a nearly monthlong drought in public polling of South Carolina, the state whose February 24 Republican primary could for all practical purposes clinch the GOP nomination for Donald Trump, we finally have some fresh data. And the new Washington Post–Monmouth survey shows Trump still has a big lead over Nikki Haley in her home state.

The former president is up by a 58 percent to 32 percent margin among voters interested in and eligible to (we’ll have more on that below) participate in the open Republican primary, and he leads Haley comfortably in voter enthusiasm and on multiple issue-position and candidate traits, including electability. Fifty-seven percent of poll respondents say Joe Biden won the 2020 presidential election “due to voter fraud,” and 60 percent believe Republicans should stick with Trump as nominee even if he’s convicted of criminal conduct in connection with his efforts to overturn that election result. Trump’s favorable-unfavorable ratio is 66 percent to 28 percent; Haley’s is 45 percent to 41 percent. He leads among women as well as among men, and in every age category of voter. And Trump leads the former South Carolina governor by 60 points (77 percent to 17 percent) among those who call themselves “strong Republicans” and by 26 points (60 percent to 34 percent) among “soft” or “leaning” Republicans.

There is some good news for Haley in this poll: She slightly leads Trump (46 percent to 44 percent) among college graduates, and she leads him strongly (61 percent to 15 percent) among those who self-identify not as Republicans but as independents or as Democrats. These independents and Democrats make up 19 percent of the poll’s sample. Ifthey were a much bigger portion of the GOP primary electorate, Haley might have a chance at an upset win. That’s a very big “if,” though.

South Carolina has no voter registration by party. Registered voters can choose either party’s primary in any given election cycle (though the registration deadline for this year’s presidential primaries has already passed), but once they choose one, they are barred from the other until the cycle is over. As it happens, South Carolina’s Democratic presidential primary will be held on February 3. President Joe Biden has made a real effort to turn out the Democratic vote to resolve some doubts about his intraparty support in the state that gave him his big breakthrough in 2020. Nikki Haley really needs a lot of Democrats and Democrat-leaning indies to pass up that opportunity and turn out for her on February 24, says Monmouth polling director Patrick Murray:

“Haley’s hopes appear to hang on pulling in Democratic-leaning voters who would never support her in a general election but simply want to stop Trump. Our sampling frame for this poll did not include voters who have participated only in Democratic primaries. If a sizable number of those voters decide to skip this week’s primary and show up for the Republican contest instead, she could narrow the gap. It would remain a tough challenge, though, for her to actually close it.”

Keep in mind that for all of Nikki Haley’s self-portrayal as a beacon of civility and potential bipartisanship (at least as compared to the savage 45th president), she was the very partisan governor of South Carolina for six years after winning the election in 2010 as the candidate of the hard-core conservative DeMint-Sanford wing of the GOP and the high-profile tea-party protégé of Sarah Palin. As governor, she was known as a fierce advocate for big-business interests and for absolutely hating organized labor. Her one big enlightened gesture, the removal of the Confederate flag from the statehouse, was finally taken after a racist massacre at a Charleston church made the step largely noncontroversial.

For South Carolina Democrats to enter a Republican primary en masse to save Nikki Haley from a humiliating loss on her home turf would require either a great deal of amnesia or a fear of Donald Trump that makes all things possible. It would also represent a level of strategic voting that is rare in practice.

With three weeks to go before the GOP primary, we should be able to discern a major movement of South Carolina Democrats into the enemy camp if it happens. You can bet Team Trump will again warn (as it did prior to the New Hampshire primary) that Haley is inviting Democrats to “infiltrate” the Republican contest because they fear the former president. Sooner or later, of course, if Haley is to remain in the contest, she’s going to have to beat Trump among the “strong Republicans” who will dominate most primaries down the road. For the present, though, she needs a miracle and a lifeline from the other side of the partisan barricades.

One of the more fascinating battles in politics is between the centrist Democratic group Third Way and the allegedly centrist non-partisan group No Labels, which I examined carefully at New York:

The ideological polarization of the two major political parties that took place during and after the civil-rights era fed a partisan polarization as voters began to sort themselves out into dual tribes with contrasting points of view on a broad range of issues. As interparty disharmony increased, it was inevitable that there would be a widespread craving for more cooperation across party lines. That has been the mother’s milk of “centrism” in both major parties (more prevalent among Democrats than Republicans, to be sure) and absolute rocket fuel for bipartisan and nonpartisan organizations like No Labels. That group has flourished since its founding in 2010 as a vehicle for Republican and Democratic centrists to signal their interest in, and in some cases actually work on, joint policy projects, particularly in Congress (where it sponsored the bipartisan House Problem Solvers Caucus).

In the Trump era of hyperpolarization, the craving for bipartisanship on which No Labels feeds has intensified along with voter fatigue with the traditional parties and the gerontocracy that often seems to rule them. Unfortunately, this development has seduced the leadership of No Labels to consider a fateful plunge into its own electoral project at the very highest level: a presidential candidacy in 2024. A significant segment of its original “centrist” supporters and sympathizers — especially those whose “label” being put aside was the Democratic donkey — has objected vociferously. These include the founder and CEO of the once-formidable Democratic Leadership Council, Al From, and, most of all, the organization that is in many respects the DLC’s successor, Third Way, which has become the Paul Revere of Democratic opposition to No Labels. Centrist policy intellectual and former No Labels booster Bill Galston has best explained his and other Democrats’ estrangement from No Labels, as reported by David A. Graham:

“’The initial premise was: We have no choice but to make the two-party system better,’ the political scientist William Galston told me. Galston helped found No Labels, but he parted ways with the group in 2023 because he feared that a presidential bid would help reelect Trump. ‘The current effort rests on a different premise altogether — namely, that we have to go outside the two-party system to make things better,’ Galston said.”

Running its own presidential candidate arguably makes the nonpartisan No Labels a third party, even though the group rejects that … label. In theory, the idea is to jolt Democrats and Republicans into cooperation by beating them to the White House, presumably just once. The premise seems to be that a No Labels president — or, in some iterations of the group’s shadowy 2024 plans, a president who takes office via a deal with No Labels after its candidate has denied either party an Electoral College majority — will retreat from the field after forcing the old parties to play pretty with each other. That scenario requires a degree of trust in No Labels’ leaders that they really haven’t earned, as Graham observes:

“No Labels isn’t offering much information at all about how it will choose its ticket without a primary. The group says it will make the decision about whether to field a candidate after Super Tuesday, based on an analysis of whether such a candidate would have a real shot. Many experts outside No Labels see such a calculation as basically impossible …

“Assuming No Labels does decide to nominate a candidate, how will the group choose that person? That’s a mystery too. Originally, the group planned an in-person convention of supporters this April in Dallas, but in November, it announced plans to hold the convention virtually instead. But No Labels hasn’t said what such a convention would look like or what role delegates would play in choosing the candidate.”

Based on Joe Biden’s own centrist credentials and the tight-knit Republican-base vote that Donald Trump commands, most of No Labels’ Democratic detractors echo Galston’s fear that any candidate sponsored by the group will take more votes away from the incumbent and pave the way for another Trump plurality win even more egregious than his 2016 election. And No Labels’ secrecy about the donors who have paid for its extensive ballot-access operation (which has succeeded in 14 states despite no one knowing the identity of its candidate) has fed the suspicion that a Trump victory could be the whole idea.

Even if you don’t believe the No Labels 2024 initiative is a sinister MAGA plot and instead think it’s a well-meaning but dangerously naïve undertaking (as Third Way’s leaders suggest), it’s just bizarre that its plans have gone so far without a clear plan of what they will actually produce. But there are signs the wheels are falling off this particular bandwagon, as CNN’s Edward-Isaac Dovere reports:

“Larry Hogan, the Republican former governor of Maryland, quit the No Labels board last month over frustration that power and information were being hoarded by group leadership — and not to, as reported elsewhere, clear the way for a presidential run of his own.

“’It’s been far less organized than he expected it to be’ and ‘he doesn’t see a plan coming together,’ a person familiar with Hogan’s thinking told CNN. ‘You don’t know where this train is going, and you’re signing up for something you didn’t necessarily sign up for.’

“Asked for his own assessment of the No Labels plan, [West Virginia Senator Joe] Manchin told CNN on the road in New Hampshire as he kicked off a national tour, ‘I don’t think anybody knows. I think it’s changing day by day, hour by hour.’

That’s significant since Hogan and Manchin are the two names mentioned most often as potential No Labels presidential candidates. Pretty clearly the organization has veered off course, arguably because it tried to change missions overnight. Historically, those who try to harness discontent with major political parties seek to break the mold by creating their own “third” party in hopes of realigning politics or actually aim at “reforming” one of the old parties in a more productive direction. No Labels’ ostensible strategy of knocking Democratic and Republican heads together and then fading away makes no sense and thus naturally arouses suspicion. It’s probably going nowhere fast in 2024, and that’s a good thing even for those unhappy with the Democrats and the Republicans. No Labels lost its original purpose and as a result has lost its soul.

I try not to share too much content here that’s strictly about intra-Republican political matters. But I’ll make an exception today because Nikki Haley’s shape-shifting habits are relevant to political deception in every kind of election, as I explained at New York:

During her aggressively upbeat speech on primary night in New Hampshire, presidential candidate Nikki Haley obliquely acknowledged the fact that the overwhelming majority of Republican-elected officials in her home state of South Carolina — the next and perhaps final stop of the competitive phase of the 2024 GOP nomination battle — are backing Donald Trump.

“Every time I’ve run for office in South Carolina, I’ve beaten the political Establishment. They’re lined up against me again, that’s no surprise,” Haley said. “But South Carolina voters don’t want a coronation, they want an election.”

It was a bit of an odd note for a politician who was twice elected governor of the Palmetto State. Yes, it’s doubtless been difficult for Haley to watch her former home-state allies — including her successor, Governor Henry McMaster, and the man she appointed to the U.S. Senate, Tim Scott — climb aboard the Trump Train. But without question, it’s Trump’s intense popularity in South Carolina, not some sort of “Establishment” disdain for Insurgent Nikki, that has led to her embarrassing lack of elected official support back home. There haven’t been any public polls from the state since early January, but Trump’s smallest margin over Haley during the entire cycle has been 26 percentage points, and he’s at 52 percent there in the RealClearPolitics averages. It’s no surprise: Trump won the state’s primary in 2016, beating out Marco Rubio, the preferred candidate of the South Carolina Republican “Establishment” at the time (he was endorsed by both Scott and Haley).

So perhaps Haley has no real choice but to seek to re-acquire the mantle of the scrappy underdog fighting “the man,” a role she really did assume back in 2010 in her first race for governor. That contest, in which she came from the back of the pack to win a tightly contested Republican primary and runoff (and then a tough general election fight, a bit of an afterthought in that deep-red state) is now overtly becoming the model for Haley 2024 in South Carolina, as The State reports:

“’She’s always been the outsider, she didn’t have endorsements in 2010, she doesn’t have them now, she is running as the outsider anti-establishment candidate, same as 2010 and I think ultimately they have their endorsements and their Washington insiders and that’s totally fine,’ said [Olivia] Perez-Cubas, spokeswoman for the Haley campaign. ‘Nikki is focused on earning the votes and supporters and everyday Americans.’”

There are some big problems, however, with that analogy, other than the obvious fact that Haley was an obscure state legislator in 2010 and has been a dominant figure in Palmetto State Republican politics ever since. In 2010 Haley was the candidate of the hard-core Tea Party conservatives in what might be called the Jim DeMint–Mark Sanford wing of the GOP, systematic ideologues often at odds with the former Dixiecrats who were slowly dying out. Sanford’s bizarre 2009 extra-marital affair conducted under the guise of “hiking the Appalachian Trail” made him damaged goods in 2010, but his estranged wife, Jenny, was an important force behind Haley’s ascent. Her real stroke of luck, however, was becoming the very favorite candidate of the then-red-hot right-wing folk heroine Sarah Palin, the veritable Queen of the Tea Party, who designated Haley a fellow Mama Grizzly, as the Washington Post recently recalled:

“Former congressman J. Gresham Barrett (R-S.C.) still remembers what he calls the ‘seismic’ quake that upended the 2010 South Carolina Republican primary for governor. …

“[F]ormer vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin came to town, holding a raucous rally for Haley on the steps of the South Carolina State House in downtown Columbia.

“’We felt a tectonic shift, honestly, to the point where we actually went back into the field the next week, because it was that earth-shattering,’ Barrett said.”

Palin’s high-profile backing perfectly set up Haley to campaign as the “conservative reformer” battling the state party’s “good ol’ boys” (code for former Democrats who had drifted into the GOP in opposition to civil rights measures). She beat Barrett in a runoff in which she won crucial backing from third-place finisher Henry McMaster (the same Henry McMaster who’s being deemed an “Establishment” figure for backing Trump), and the rest was history.

So how does this translate to 2024? Not very well. Trump is now the candidate of the right-wing insurgents, and he’s in the process of executing a hostile takeover of the Republican Establishment, with last-ditch resistance from beltway types and donors who are almost invariably backing Haley. In New Hampshire, Haley’s very best state going into the January 23 primary, Trump won (according to the exit polls) 71 percent of self-identified conservatives, and 89 percent of those who describe themselves as “very conservative.” These are the kind of Republicans Nikki Haley and Sarah Palin were appealing to in 2010. They are now populating the MAGA movement, which in many respects is the Tea Party on steroids and with a very bad attitude.

You can’t blame Haley for trying to make a virtue of necessity by treating her lack of elite and popular support in South Carolina as the product of an arrogant Establishment she is bravely battling, just as she did 14 years ago. To a limited extent, it might even work. A wild card in her 2010 victory was an ugly spate of racist and sexist comments and rumors about her (most notably undocumented claims of extramarital sexual activity) that reinforced her image as a courageous woman of principle fighting piggy rednecks. Trump’s strange decision to savage her personally for refusing to fold her tent, along with his penchant for racist nicknames for her, will bring back some unsavory Palmetto State memories of those early smears.

But in that respect as in others, Haley cannot expect Trump to win this or any other primary for her with his excesses. If nothing else, Trump’s crude antics will remind primary voters that no matter how many endorsements he gathers from elected officials, he’s the unrivaled King of Chaos, and his “establishment” is based on the very ideological extremism that gave Nikki Haley’s political career its first big lift.

 

After watching the returns from New Hampshire on the evening of January 23, I offered a take on the rogue Democratic primary at New York:

Despite lots of irresponsible talk about Joe Biden potentially getting ambushed in an officially unauthorized New Hampshire primary where he wasn’t on the ballot, the president brushed aside two opponents and won a primary for the first time in this influential state. He won even though he didn’t campaign there and even though Democrats had to go to the trouble to write in his name. And he won about two-thirds of the vote against two challengers who essentially camped out in New Hampshire, hoping lightning would strike. Some predicted he would underperform and get knocked out of his reelection race like Lyndon Johnson in 1968. Instead Biden called into question whether Dean Phillips and Marianne Williamson have any reason to continue their unsuccessful candidacies.

In fact, Biden won a double victory in New Hampshire. Aside from winning his own primary, his general-election strategy is being vindicated by the continuing success of his preferred general-election opponent, Donald Trump. No, Trump didn’t (or so it seems) knock Nikki Haley out of the Republican race. But the former president’s nomination seems really inevitable now. And the fact that he may have to grumpily stalk the primary campaign trail for at least a month before it’s official will give the White House fresh opportunities to remind voters (including Haley supporters) of the fateful choice they will have to make in November.

Meanwhile, Joe Biden can move on to his first official, non-rogue primary in South Carolina, where Democrats will vote three weeks before the Trump-Haley battle there. The Palmetto State Democratic primary should be a real love-in as Joe Biden campaigns among the voters who absolutely saved his bacon in 2020 and put him on the path to the presidency. The contrast with the glowering Trump and the Republicans who are on a white-knuckle ride with him should be richly rewarding for the 46th president.

It’s not unusual for Donald Trump to just make up stuff that’s not true, but in this case I wanted to set the record straight at New York:

In her very long-shot effort to get in the way of Donald Trump’s third consecutive Republican presidential nomination, Nikki Haley really needs to overperform in the New Hampshire primary on January 23. Fortunately for her, it’s probably her best state in the entire country. For one thing, she’s spent a lot of time there and is benefiting from the strong support of popular lame-duck governor Chris Sununu. But more basically, the GOP primary electorate is relatively light on Evangelicals (a mere 25 percent in the 2016 presidential primary), and GOP moderates are a small but visible breed (27 percent in 2016). Plus, independents (42 percent of GOP primary voters in 2016) are allowed to participate in the Republican contest.

Trump has seized on this last data point in an effort to discredit Haley’s showing on the chance that she really does beat expectations, as the Washington Post reports:

“Trump argued during his rally here [in Portsmouth] that Haley is ‘counting on Democrats and liberals to infiltrate your Republican primary.’

“’A vote for Nikki Haley this Tuesday is a vote for Joe Biden and a Democratic Congress this November,’ Trump said. (He went so far as to suggest that Haley would abandon her party, stating at one point: ‘I actually think she might go to the Democrat Party.’”)

As is often the case with the 45th president, he didn’t exactly get his facts right. Registered Democrats cannot vote in the GOP primary in New Hampshire, and they couldn’t even switch party registration after the October 2023 deadline (reportedly 4,000 voters — or less than 2 percent of the anticipated primary vote — did so). Still, as Ben Jacobs noted at New York recently, there has been an organized effort to get Democratic-leaning independents to vote against Trump in the GOP primary, and according to the polls, they are contributing to Haley’s base of support.

A new St. Anselm College poll this week shows Haley leading Trump by 52 percent to 37 percent among registered independents, who represent 47 percent of likely Republican primary voters (Trump leads Haley 65 percent to 25 percent among registered Republicans). Ten percent of likely GOP primary voters, moreover, told the pollsters they self-identify as Democrats, and among them Haley wins 90 percent.

There’s nothing illegitimate, much less illegal, about independents voting in a partisan New Hampshire primary (six other states allow independents to vote in either party’s primaries, and another 16 states — including South Carolina, which is holding the next big primary on the calendar — don’t have registration by party, which means you just show up at the polls and pick a primary). And a significant majority (81 percent, according to a Pew study in 2019) of independents nationally lean strongly toward one party or another. So there’s no “infiltrating” going on in New Hampshire, and the vast majority of GOP primary participants will likely support the party nominee in November. Team Haley, of course, will argue that her popularity among non-party-affiliated and even some self-identified Democratic voters is a token of how well she would do in a general-election contest with Joe Biden.

Having said all that, Trump’s superior performance among self-identified Republicans could pay off for him down the road in states with closed primaries in which independents — no matter which way they lean — cannot vote. That’s assuming he hasn’t already clinched the nomination much earlier, which will certainly happen if he beats Haley in New Hampshire and then in South Carolina, as appears likely. That St. Anselm poll showing Haley doing so well among independents also gives Trump a 14-point lead overall. To invert the old Sinatra song, if she can’t make it there, she can’t make it anywhere.

Now that the results are in from the Iowa Caucuses, it’s worth pausing for a moment to consider what if anything they mean for the general election, so I assessed that issue at New York:

Donald Trump’s landslide victory in the Iowa Caucuses sealed his position as the overwhelming favorite to win a third straight Republican presidential nomination. For the millions of Americans who either hope or fear that our most-impeached and most-indicted president will consummate his comeback in November, the big question is what the Iowa results can tell us about the general election, beyond the high odds that Trump will be on the ballot.

The clearest answer is that Trump will be the nominee of a relatively well-united Republican Party that is familiar with his act in all its outrageous permutations and is fine with it. That’s quite the contrast with where he was the last time he participated in contested Iowa Caucuses, in 2016. Then he was an insurgent candidate who lost to the more conventional (if hard-core) conservative Ted Cruz, and eventually won the nomination by wearing down the opposition and taking a number of steps (including the choice of the hyper-conventional Mike Pence as his running mate) to win over skeptics. But even as the nominee he had a lot of intraparty problems; 33 percent of Republicans gave him an unfavorable rating in mid-October of 2016, according to Gallup.

The latest such poll this year, from YouGov, showed just 16 percent of Republicans giving him an unfavorable rating, despite eight intervening years of relentless mendacity, shout-outs to authoritarians, erratic (at best) management of a pandemic, and then the 2020 election denial followed by an attempted coup d’état via thugs invading the Capitol. And that’s just the high spots of a record that you’d think (and think wrong) might give a lot of Republicans pause about going to war with this particular general in the lead tank.

Yet as Iowa showed, they are plunging straight ahead. He won there by a record 30 points, with 51 percent, despite being heavily outspent by opponents on campaign advertising. Yes, caucuses like Iowa’s draw a very small percentage of voters, even within the limited universe of the GOP. But here’s the thing: Trump is actually doing a lot better in national polls of Republicans, registering the support of 61.4 percent of them in the RealClearPolitics averages. And the entrance polls in Iowa do indicate that Trump is winning broad support within the GOP, across ideological and geographical lines. Nothing happened there that should make you doubt the general election polling that shows him leading Joe Biden.

There are some shadows in the Iowa numbers for Trump, however, as the ever-insightful Ron Brownstein points out at The Atlantic after looking at the entrance polls:

“[N]oteworthy was voters’ response to an entrance-poll question about whether they would still consider Trump fit for the presidency if he was convicted of a crime. Nearly two-thirds said yes, which speaks to his strength within the Republican Party. But about three in ten said no, which speaks to possible problems in a general election. That result was consistent with the findings in a wide array of polls that somewhere between one-fifth and one-third of GOP partisans believe that Trump’s actions after the 2020 election were a threat to democracy or illegal. How many of those Republican-leaning voters would ultimately support him will be crucial to his viability if he wins the nomination.”

This confirms that Trump’s conduct on January 6, along with the criminal charges he faces, could have a crucial effect on the general election, even though these same factors may have actually helped him win the nomination (in part by forcing his most formidable rivals to defend him!). But it is very, very difficult to assess at this early point where exactly the various court procedures involving Trump will be just before and on Election Day, much less what exactly they will reveal and how the revelations (or the unprecedented spectacle of a presidential nominee in the dock) will affect the campaign and the outcome. You cannot just assume the people (in Iowa or elsewhere) who now say a criminally convicted Trump isn’t fit to serve as president will vote for Joe Biden or some other non-Republican candidate. How many of them said in October of 2018 that the swinish man revealed by the Access Hollywood tape would never get their vote for president … and then voted for him anyway just weeks later? Yes, Trump’s conduct and efforts to hold him accountable will become part of a powerfully presented comparative case by the Biden campaign to make voting for the Republican difficult if not impossible even for voters who aren’t happy with the incumbent’s performance. But it’s one of many variables that will determine how many swing voters there are in November and which way they will swing.

Trump’s hold on a majority of his partisans is fierce, though like Biden he is going to have some defectors, and it’s likely to be a close general election unless conditions in the country improve enough to lift Biden’s job-approval ratings significantly. Anyone hoping that Trump would stumble early on the road back to the White House is likely going to be disappointed.

Watching the now-customary chaos among House Republicans, I predicted at New York that this time all the dysfunction may prevent rather than trigger a government shutdown:

Since Republicans won narrow control of the U.S. House a year ago, the most important dynamic affecting the 118th Congress has been utter disarray within the GOP ranks. The only real leverage the House GOP has over big national policy issues is its ability by inaction to shut down the federal government, since affirmative legislation in both congressional chambers is required to enact the annual spending measures necessary to keep Washington humming. Because Republicans only have a tiny majority (down temporarily to just one seat thanks to recent resignations), it only takes a few rebels to keep their conference from any particular course of action. Within the hard-core conservative House Freedom Caucus there are enough members willing to risk a government shutdown to make very basic decisions on federal spending levels impossible. They’re also happy to wreak vengeance on any Speaker who cooperates with the hated Democratic enemy to avoid disaster, as Kevin McCarthy did last fall.

So Congress lurches from stopgap spending bill to stopgap spending bill, and now Speaker Mike Johnson is in very much the same position that led to McCarthy’s defenestration by a maneuver to take away his gavel. He’s agreed with Senate Democrats on general spending levels for defense and nondefense programs (known in beltway jargon as a “top-line spending deal”) and wants now to translate the agreement into individual appropriations bills before the last stopgap spending measures expire on January 19 (for part of the federal government) and February 2 (for the rest of it, including the Pentagon). Predictably, Freedom Caucus hardliners don’t think the deal cuts spending nearly enough, and they also want to pass some right-wing “policy riders” on issues like abortion and the alleged persecution of conservatives by federal law enforcement officials. But Johnson’s their guy, unlike McCarthy, and they really don’t want to go through another “motion to vacate the chair” and then another impossible search for a Speaker who can somehow meet their demands without the power to force Democrats to go along with them.

Ironically, the continuing disarray in the House GOP conference may produce enough paralysis to keep the federal government operating. At the moment Johnson wants another stopgap spending measure (known as a “continuing resolution” or CR) to buy enough time to implement the top-line spending agreement. After issuing some threats to blow everything up, the Freedom Caucus rebels now seem inclined to favor a CR so they can buy time to unravel that agreement and unite Republicans around something more to their liking. Conveniently, Senate Democrats are moving a CR that would kick the can down the road until March. It’s looking more and more like a House GOP (and more generally, a Congress) that can’t agree on anything else might be able to agree to disagree at least a bit longer without dire consequences for the federal government. It’s even possible that the closer they get to November elections, the more Republicans will become inclined to just let voters decide how to resolve their differences with each other and with Democrats.

If Johnson is indeed rescued from a fatal revolt by the irresolution of the very rebels who took down McCarthy, there will be some observers who credit the novice congressional leader with Machiavellian talents not possessed by his wily predecessor. It’s more likely Johnson is Mr. Magoo, blundering through potential disasters by sheer luck. It remains to be seen if his luck runs out before this exhausting session of Congress ends.