Despite conventional wisdom, this nation is not necessarily destined to inaugurate either Joe Biden or Donald Trump as president next Jan. 20. The Republican nomination battle really isn’t over. And an independent candidate really could win the general election.
For now, let’s examine why former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley has a real chance to win the Republican nod, even though such a result admittedly isn’t likely. The model for her is Ronald Reagan’s uphill campaign to wrest the 1976 nomination away from incumbent President Gerald Ford. Then, it took many dozens of invitations to individual delegates to attend Oval Office meetings with the president, along with a series of barely legal promises of “consideration” for pet projects and causes, for Ford to win the nomination by just a handful of the 2,258 conventional delegate votes.
Those who say the race is over because Haley lost the first two contests (Iowa and New Hampshire) should consider that Reagan ended up winning an actual majority of the national votes cast, and very nearly the nomination itself, after losing the first five state contests. While Haley doesn’t enjoy anything like the united, hungry conservative movement consolidated behind her the way Reagan did, and while Ford hardly inspired the passionate following that Trump does, there are some ways in which her path is not much more implausible than Reagan’s was.
Unlike Trump, Ford didn’t inspire fierce opposition, but instead was generally well liked even by political opponents. Unlike Trump, Ford was assumed (perhaps wrongly) to have a better chance to win the general election than his challenger did. Unlike Trump, Ford had the power of the presidency itself to use for political purposes. Ford did not face indictments on 91 counts and tens of millions of dollars of court-ordered damages. And most importantly, unlike Trump, Ford was not constantly on the knife’s edge of statements or actions so outlandish, abrasive, unethical, or downright frightening that the risk of finally imploding was always a possibility.
In the past few weeks, Haley seems to have gotten “under Trump’s skin,” as the saying goes. She has him once again indulging his weakness for sounding unhinged. Trump seems stressed, increasingly experiences “senior moments,” and looks unhealthy. And at some point, his refusal to participate in a debate with Haley will start to make him look weak and afraid. With Haley now goading him to “man up,” the chances that he will commit a politically catastrophic overreaction increase substantially.
Political fortunes can change remarkably quickly. Twenty months before the 1992 election, President George H.W. Bush had an 88% approval rating. He lost, badly. In the summer of 1976, Ford trailed Carter by an astonishing 33 points in the Gallup poll, but even after one of the worst gaffes in campaign history, he came within just 18,490 votes in Ohio and Hawaii combined of winning. In August of 1988, the elder George Bush trailed Democrat Mike Dukakis by 17 points, but Bush won handily. In the nightmarish Louisiana governor’s race in 1991, neo-Nazi David Duke and the crooked Edwin Edwards were in a statistical tie in polls with just three weeks remaining, but Edwards won by more than 22%.
Sometimes such huge shifts occur when one candidate, Trump-like, does something horrible. Other times, a trailing candidate finally finds an issue that resonates. After losing the first five primaries in 1976, for example, Reagan hit pay dirt by concentrating fire against Ford’s work to craft a treaty forfeiting U.S. control of the Panama Canal. Reagan suddenly moved from a huge deficit in North Carolina polling into an upset win, completely revitalizing his campaign.
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Haley hasn’t yet tried such a concentrated issues-approach, instead preferring to warn about Trump’s “chaos” and a collection of his randomly problematic utterances. Trump’s record and positions, though, including his pathetically inept handling of the pandemic, provide plenty of fodder for a well-crafted political attack. Most of Trump’s backers actually want him to be a chaos agent, for example, but they won’t like that Trump continues to praise Russia’s Vladimir Putin even as Putin supports Iran while Iran gives missiles to Houthis to fire at American ships.
Fewer than 3% of all Republican delegates have yet been chosen. Haley has good reason to try to earn a victory while giving the other 97% of the nation a chance to cast their votes.