NIKKI HALEY’S UNFIXABLE PROBLEM. Former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley is already in South Carolina, campaigning for the Feb. 24 Republican primary, four weeks from Saturday. As she ratchets up her campaign in South Carolina, where, as an ex-governor, she should have a strong advantage, Haley faces a number of problems. The most obvious is that former President Donald Trump has already won Iowa and New Hampshire and appears headed for victory in South Carolina. That’s almost surely the nomination clincher. Haley can hang around if she likes, but if she loses South Carolina, she’s not going to be the GOP nominee.
Maybe it is impossible to beat a former president, popular with his party, who is seeking his old job back. But Haley also faces a fundamental, probably unfixable, problem with her own campaign: By opposing Trump, Haley has alienated many Republicans, but her message remains essentially Republican, which means she does not appeal to Democrats or enough independents to make up the ground she loses among Republicans. She is neither fish nor fowl.
According to exit polls from New Hampshire, just 25% of self-identified GOP voters chose Haley, versus 74% who chose Trump. And that was in a state where a larger percentage of Republicans dislike Trump than in most other states. If the best that Haley can hope for is 25% of Republicans, she is doomed in her quest to win the GOP nomination.
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But Haley turns off Democrats, too. Why? Just look at her stump speech.
When discussing the U.S.-Mexico border in New Hampshire campaign appearances, Haley complained that the border “doesn’t even look like the United States of America anymore.” (It’s not hard to imagine other Republicans being accused of racism for saying something like that.) Haley advocates a return to Trump’s “Remain in Mexico” program. She wants to defund sanctuary cities. And she wants to get rid of President Joe Biden’s “catch and release” policy for illegal border crossers and go to what she calls “catch and deport.”
What Democrat is going to support that? The same holds true for Haley’s discussion of the environment, which includes her pledge to “get the EPA out of the way of energy exploration” and move to “more drilling, more pipelines, nuclear power, [and] an all-of-the-above energy approach.” That’s not in the Democratic playbook. And on Social Security, Haley wants to raise the retirement age for young people for whom retirement is years away.
That is simply not the way a candidate appeals to Democrats, who, amazingly enough, will prefer to vote for a Democrat, even if it’s Biden.
Yes, Haley won 86% of people who identified as Democrats in the New Hampshire exit poll, but they were only 6% of the electorate. And that small group voted for one reason: to stop Trump in a Republican primary. If Trump were out of the picture, would they vote for Haley over a Democrat? Unlikely.
But what about independents? There were a lot of them, called “undeclareds,” in the New Hampshire Republican primary — 44% of the electorate. Haley won the group with 58% to Trump’s 39%. But a lot of the “undeclareds” were not independent at all — most independents lean toward one party of the other — but rather voters who leaned Democratic and wanted to vote against Trump. And independents do not make up as large a portion of the electorate in coming Republican primaries or the general election.
So Haley’s problem is that she turns off a lot of voters of both parties, and of the groups that she does appeal to, there simply aren’t enough voters to win the Republican nomination. She just doesn’t excite enough people to win.
A common theme of Haley’s campaign in New Hampshire, and in Iowa before that, was a lack of intense enthusiasm for her campaign. In the last Des Moines Register poll before the caucuses, the respected pollster Ann Selzer asked respondents whether they were “extremely enthusiastic,” “very enthusiastic,” “mildly enthusiastic,” or “not that enthusiastic” about the candidate they supported. For Trump, 88% said they were extremely or very enthusiastic, while only 11% said they were mildly enthusiastic, and nobody said they were not that enthusiastic. For Haley, it was an entirely different story: Just 39% said they were extremely or very enthusiastic, while a huge number, 61%, said they were mildly or not that enthusiastic.
“Her enthusiasm numbers … I just think are on the edge of jaw-dropping,” Selzer told the Des Moines Register. “That 61% are just mildly enthusiastic or not that enthusiastic — it just seems at odds with a candidate moving up.” Indeed, Haley slightly underperformed the 20% support among caucusgoers that the Des Moines Register poll found.
In New Hampshire, a common observation among outsiders watching Haley’s rallies is that the crowds just didn’t seem that fired up. Yes, they applauded her applause lines, but not in the loud, raucous way that a truly enthusiastic crowd would do.
At her final rally on election eve, Haley got a good crowd at a big hotel in Salem. The room held about 500 people, and it was packed, with all seats filled and people standing along the walls and the media scrunched into the back. Anybody who has attended events in a room like that knows if 500 people want to make a lot of noise, if they want to be really, really LOUD, they can. But this was not that. It wasn’t exactly quiet. Haley received applause for her key points. But it wasn’t excited. The same thing happened, on a smaller scale, at a number of Haley’s other New Hampshire events.
Some observers pointed to the rote nature of Haley’s campaign appeal. She delivered the same speech, virtually word-for-word, at each appearance. At the end, music came up, and she spent a lot of time shaking hands and posing for pictures. In the final weeks of the campaign, after she was stung by the what-caused-the-Civil-War question, she took no questions. While they can sometimes lead to embarrassment, questions are a real source of spontaneity in campaign appearances. They allow the candidate to stretch and sometimes reveal his or her personality. Haley, an accountant by training, doesn’t stretch.
“It’s her lack of spontaneity that kills her,” the longtime political analyst Chris Matthews, who hoped for a Haley victory, wrote in the liberal Washington Monthly. “She is scripted … sticking to the script killed her.” A New York Times wrap-up of the New Hampshire campaign quoted an independent voter who considered voting for Haley but decided against it because he felt Haley never really asked for his vote. “She’s very scripted,” the voter said. “She’s not a very — I don’t want to say natural politician, but a natural person.”
On Wednesday night, when Haley appeared in North Charleston, her first rally since arriving from New Hampshire, she delivered a stump speech that was almost word-for-word the speech she delivered for weeks in New Hampshire. The script goes on.
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