Would you risk a Haley Presidency if it guaranteed no more Trump Presidency?
With Nikki Haley having a real shot at winning New Hampshire, it's time to choose.
Before Christmas I wrote about polling data showing Nikki Haley starting to gain traction in New Hampshire ahead of the Republican primary, and argued that Chris Christie should drop out of the race and throw his support to Haley.
Christie hasn’t done so, and some people smarter than I have argued that he shouldn’t. God knows, that race needs someone who’s going to tell the truth about Donald Trump while everyone else - Haley included - attempts to ride the tiger.
At the same time, if you really believe Trump is a uniquely dangerous individual even compared to other Republicans, it beggars belief that you’d propose a course of action which might ensure his re-election.
Anti-anti-Trumpers like to accuse Never-Trumpers of secretly wanting Trump once again nominated for President, and while I think there’s a huge amount of projection going on there, I concede that asking Chris Christie to be the John Kasich of 2024 isn’t a good look.
That said: if current trends continue - that’s a big “if,” and I fear I’m jinxing it just by writing about this and expressing something resembling hope, a bad habit you’d think decades of being a Chicago Bears fan1 would have beaten out of me by now - we may get the best of both worlds. Christie stays in and keeps attacking Trump, and Haley actually wins New Hampshire.
Seriously, she actually has a shot:
Former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley has trimmed former President Donald Trump’s lead in the Republican primary race in New Hampshire to single digits, according to a new CNN Poll conducted by the University of New Hampshire.
Trump still holds a meaningful lead in the poll, with the backing of 39% of likely Republican primary voters in New Hampshire compared to Haley’s 32%. The rest of the field lags far behind in the poll, with former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie at 12%, entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy at 8%, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis at 5% and former Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson at less than 1%.
Support for Haley has risen 12 percentage points since the last CNN/UNH poll in November, continuing an upward trajectory that began last summer, while her opponents –- including Trump – have seen their numbers remain stable or tick slightly downward since autumn.
Haley’s support has grown dramatically among those voters registered as undeclared, New Hampshire’s term for independent registrants – she’s up 18 points with this group since November. It has also grown 20 points among those who are ideologically moderate. Those gains come amid a push from her campaign in the state, including an endorsement last month from New Hampshire Gov. Chris Sununu. The Granite State’s GOP primary is January 23.
The strength of Haley’s challenge to Trump in the state speaks to the contours of New Hampshire’s primary electorate, in which those more moderate and less staunchly partisan voters make up a larger share of participants than they do in Iowa’s first-in-the-nation caucuses, which are happening next week. Trump has crossed the 50% mark in most recent polling on the Iowa caucuses, and he holds wider majorities in national polls on the Republican nomination.
Let me get all of the throat-clearing out of the way right now:
Haley has embarrassed herself with her Civil War comments, blatant pandering to Trump and his followers, and is overall much further to the right on almost every issue2 than I’m comfortable with;
she’s still several points behind Trump in New Hampshire;
New Hampshire is New Hampshire, always stubbornly going its own way, and Haley is much further behind - even trailing DeSantis, who by this point has become the political equivalent of an orphaned DC cinematic universe movie, in some state primary races;
to the best of my knowledge, no Haley supporters believe she is literally Christ’s representative on Earth, which means her floor of support is much softer than Trump’s.
I acknowledge and agree with all of these points. Even winning New Hampshire doesn’t mean she’ll win a primary anywhere else - though once someone proves Trump is not invincible, who knows where that will lead - and it certainly won’t make her someone I’d want in the Oval Office.
And yet, whatever complaints I have about Haley, she’s not…this:
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