The Republican presidential race is at a crossroads. The month between New Hampshire and the next competitive primary in South Carolina will determine whether it is a contest or a coronation.
Former President Donald Trump has won the first two states. The primary fight has narrowed to a two-person race. Former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley provided some resistance to Trump in New Hampshire, outperforming her poll numbers. The question is whether she can replicate or surpass this performance in her home state — or anywhere else.
On the one hand, the first two early states have shown substantial lingering discontent with Trump as the nominee. In Iowa, 49% of Republicans caucused for a candidate other than Trump. Haley received 43.4% by herself in New Hampshire.
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These are unimpressive numbers for a quasi-incumbent who has been the nominee in the last two presidential elections. Trump did slightly better than the 53% George H.W. Bush won as an incumbent in the 1992 New Hampshire primary, a result that was widely viewed as signaling trouble for his reelection prospects, and the 48% that led Lyndon Johnson to withdraw after the 1968 primary. But Haley received a higher percentage of the vote than Pat Buchanan or Eugene McCarthy.
On the other hand, Trump won Iowa by 30 points. The previous record margin in the caucuses was less than 13. He won New Hampshire by 10 points even though exit polls showed a breakdown of 47% independent to 49% Republican, close to ideal conditions for Haley. It was the highest turnout for Granite State primary in recent memory and he received a record number of raw votes.
New Hampshire was also always supposed to be one of Trump’s worst states. It was the only primary where he for weeks polled under 50%. Instead, he won an absolute majority of the vote for the second straight contest, 3 points better than he did in Iowa. There are no reputable polls showing him trailing anywhere afterward. We have come a long way from the conventional wisdom that Trump could only win by pluralities in a crowded primary field.
One question is whether Trump is about to start winning by landslides. Two of the last three polls in New Hampshire found Trump at 60%. The third pegged him at 58%. If the electorate was more Republican, might he have reached this threshold?
We may soon find out. Trump is at 66.4% in the national RealClearPolitics polling average, with Haley at 11.3% and the withdrawn Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) at 10.8%. Haley and DeSantis combined would stand at 22.1%, but a substantial slice of the Florida governor’s voters are likely to migrate to Trump.
There is no national primary, but as the race rolls toward Super Tuesday, it is possible that Trump starts putting up those kinds of numbers in individual states. Haley will no longer have the luxury of campaigning in a single state or just a few media markets at a time.
The RealClearPolitics average for Michigan, for example, is Trump at 61.3% to DeSantis’s 13.7% and Haley’s 10.7%. That polling isn’t very recent. But in December, Trump led the field by 50 points. That was consistent with results dating back to October.
For this reason, South Carolina is important to Haley. She did well enough in New Hampshire to justify staying in the race. But she must do something somewhere to alter the basic trajectory of the primary battle. Her home state, where she served as governor, would be a good place to start.
That would require either some kind of bounce from New Hampshire, a good use of her time mending fences in South Carolina, or both. Trump is leading her there by an average of 30.2 points and is above 50% in three of the last four polls. The sole exception is a Trafalgar poll where Trump receives 49%.
Many of these polls are old. But Trump has the endorsements of the state’s governor, lieutenant governor, and attorney general. He has the support of both South Carolina senators. He delivered the keynote address at the state GOP fundraising dinner last year. Haley did not even attend.
Trump also won the South Carolina primary in 2016. This ended Jeb Bush’s campaign and put others’ on life support. Favorite daughter Haley would like to avoid this fate.
After DeSantis dropped out of the race, many of his allies rejected the campaign postmortems that found fault with his candidacy and team. They argued that none of these things — the botched launch, complaints about the governor’s retail politics, the super PAC’s turnover and spending habits, the culture war focus of his messaging, his campaign’s mistaken belief it was running ahead of the public polls — mattered because the party’s base was so in thrall to Trump.
Haley now gets to test this theory. In a way, she already has. She has taken a different approach on a number of strategic questions than DeSantis, not least on how to deal with Trump. Since the start of the Republican National Committee-sanctioned debates, which Trump boycotted, her trajectory has generally been upward while DeSantis stalled or declined, though he did finish ahead of her in Iowa.
Can what worked against DeSantis and the rest of the field make a dent in Trump’s support? Haley clearly gets under her former boss’s skin. He lashed out at her in his New Hampshire victory speech, angered by her taking to the cameras early in a Bill Clinton “Comeback Kid” maneuver.
Haley’s campaign promptly contrasted her conventional, and in spots gracious, speech with Trump’s rant. “Unhinged or unprecedented — that’s the choice voters have. They can choose a conservative leader who will save our country or they can choose a candidate consumed by investigations, grievances, and court cases,” Haley communications director Nachama Soloveichik said in an accompanying statement.
It is possible that voters who laughed off Trump repeatedly calling DeSantis a “son of a b****” on the stump may not take as kindly to the former president labeling a woman a “birdbrain.” Even if it doesn’t have that kind of impact on Republicans, perhaps it will further damage him with suburban women, hurting his general election poll numbers and reinforcing Haley’s electability argument.
The Trump campaign has so far been able to manage the delicate balance of having its candidate continue to suck up all the oxygen in the room without being as overexposed as he was for most of 2016 and 2020. Haley could possibly upset this equilibrium. And in the unlikely event that she can bait him into debating, it would inject a level of uncertainty into a race that has become increasingly stale.
There are risks for Haley as well. She is now leaning heavily into Trump criticisms. The reason most other Republicans, including Haley, have avoided full-frontal attacks on Trump in the past is that they are often received as attacks on the wider Republican base.
The only evidence that this will work better for Haley than former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie and the lesser Never Trumpers is a single primary where nearly half the voters weren’t Republicans. Even in New Hampshire, exit polls found Trump beating Haley 74% to 25% among self-identified Republicans.
South Carolina may be Haley’s home state. It is also more conservative than New Hampshire. It has voted for the front-runner or a conservative alternative in every competitive GOP primary since 1980.
None of this will matter if donors and volunteers conclude Haley’s campaign is futile. The euphoria of her stronger-than-expected showing in New Hampshire could fade if the polls don’t suggest she can win anywhere soon. A campaign only gets so many moral victories, if any. Haley won’t have many chances to prove to any wavering financial backers that she can actually defeat Trump.
There is also a possibility that Trump tries to end the primary campaign by offering Haley the vice presidential slot on the ticket despite the opposition of many supporters, including Donald Trump Jr. and Tucker Carlson, and his own anger at her. It would be a logical move, whatever Haley’s merits relative to other prospective candidates.
Haley may not want to be vice president under Trump, having already experience working for him before. She may be convinced he will lose in November if nominated, giving her little to no leg up in 2028. And she may recall how poorly former Vice President Mike Pence did in his own White House campaign after breaking with Trump, much later than most.
But Haley also frequently notes Trump’s age and legal difficulties. He is also ineligible to run again in 2028, having already served one term. The fact that Haley has worked for Trump before, publicly backed him twice for president, and equivocated somewhat on his fitness even during this campaign suggests her openness to working with him to increase her odds of becoming president one day cannot be completely ruled out.
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This could become a genuine race over Trump’s legacy, the general tone and disposition of the Republican Party, the need for a generational change in leadership, and the party’s stance on crucial issues such as foreign policy and entitlements. Or it could soon be over.
Nevertheless, Haley has gotten what she and so many other Republican presidential candidates have said they truly wanted: a two-person race against Trump. It remains to be seen whether she can capitalize on the opportunity.
W. James Antle III is executive editor of the Washington Examiner magazine.