Trump Foes Find New Doomed Champion in Nikki Haley

Looking better than Ron DeSantis isn’t enough. Photo: Peter Zay/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images

We’re in a week whose events, from the terrifyingly significant (the Israel-Hamas war) to the puzzlingly comedic (the House GOP Speakership deadlock), have all but obscured the 2024 Republican presidential contest. But there have been a couple of newsworthy developments. First, front-runner Donald Trump keeps making crazy remarks (most recently calling the terrorist group Hezbollah “very smart”) that give his rivals hope that the GOP electorate will reconsider its current determination to give the former president a third straight nomination. Second, an all-but-forgotten GOP candidate, Texas congressman Will Hurd, dropped out of the race and endorsed Nikki Haley.

Normally an endorsement from someone like Hurd wouldn’t amount to a hill of beans. The most notable thing about his candidacy was that his hostility to Trump led him to refuse the RNC’s loyalty-pledge requirement for participating in two debates he wasn’t going to qualify for in any event. But it arrives at a moment when Haley is hovering on the edge of marginal relevance in the GOP contest. After two creditable debate performances and amid the growing realization among anti-Trump Republicans that Ron DeSantis is not wearing well on voters, Haley has risen in both national and early-state polls to a position challenging the Florida governor. That is not to say, however, that she represents a serious challenge to Trump.

In the national RealClearPolitics polling averages, Haley is now in a reasonably solid third place at 7.3 percent while DeSantis is at 12.8 percent. From a momentum perspective, she’s probably at her all-time peak, while RDS is near his all-time low. None of the other candidates seem to have shown much progress since Vivek Ramaswamy’s brief late-summer surge subsided. There are two early states, moreover, where Haley is now ahead of DeSantis: New Hampshire, where RCP shows her at 14.2 percent as opposed to DeSantis’s 10.4 percent; and her own home state of South Carolina, where she’s at 15.3 percent and RDS is at 11.3 percent.

Unfortunately for Haley, she is still significantly trailing DeSantis in Iowa, the first state to vote; he’s at 17.3 percent in the RCP averages while she’s at 9.5 percent. And Haley still trails Trump everywhere (again using RCP averages): by 50 points nationally; 40 points in Iowa; 30 points in New Hampshire; and 32 points in South Carolina. While some desperate anti-Trump Republicans (like Hurd) may have concluded Haley has the least-impossible path to a position challenging the former president, others may plausibly think a DeSantis shocker in Iowa (where he is closely following in the strategic path of past Iowa winners Mike Huckabee, Rick Santorum, and Ted Cruz) is more likely. If Trump wins the first state or two, he will have a head of steam it’s hard to imagine anyone matching and a clear opportunity to croak Haley’s candidacy once and for all in her home state.

In his Wall Street Journal op-ed endorsing Haley, Hurd doesn’t so much praise her as dismiss DeSantis and argue for a much smaller field, saying, “The time is now. If we wait much longer, we will anoint Mr. Trump as the leader of our party.” The question is whether the time for that was actually last year, or maybe during Trump’s second impeachment trial, when a universal condemnation of Trump by his party might have banned him from a 2024 race.

As for Haley herself, the central dilemma of her campaign has not gone away with her modestly elevated standing in the polls: She can’t resolve her own ambivalence about the 45th president, whom she has both cravenly served and carefully disrespected. She can’t even come close to beating Trump without going after him more aggressively than before, but if she takes that path she will almost certainly lose votes to him when the field of candidates winnows. But you can’t even think about a path to the nomination without surviving the invisible primary first. If Haley does that, then maybe she is worth seriously considering as a presidential candidate rather than just the symbolic champion of her party’s losing faction.