Trump pollster says Haley is threatening DeSantis
Tiana Lowe Doescher
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While former President Donald Trump remains the front-runner in the Republican primary, his preeminent pollster has warned that the candidate riding the most momentum after Trump skipped the first debate is not Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL), who has seen his second-place margin dwindle over the months. Instead, former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley is on the rise, according to Tony Fabrizio.
“The much hoped for DeSantis ‘bounce’ was really a ‘dead cat bounce’ in that it doesn’t exist,” Fabrizio wrote in a memo for Trump donors and allies. “Why? Because these voters didn’t see a DeSantis debate win — far from it. With Haley’s surge, DeSantis finds himself with another challenger for a distant second place besides Ramaswamy — Nikki Haley.”
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In Iowa, Fabrizio’s polling puts Trump at 44% support, DeSantis at 18%, and Haley at 10%. In New Hampshire, Trump has 48%, the Florida governor has 11%, and the former ambassador to the United Nations has 9%.
It’s true that Trump’s polling is essentially flat, as is DeSantis’s. The difference is that Trump has maintained a double-digit lead while DeSantis has continued to defy and disappoint the once sky-high expectations that he would quickly make the primary a two-candidate race.
The betting markets have internalized the narrative that DeSantis is in decline. Whereas markets give Trump a 2-in-3 chance of winning the primary, DeSantis has a 1-in-9 chance, or 11.5%. Vivek Ramaswamy, whose high-energy bombast overshadowed a rehearsed debate performance by DeSantis, has an 8% chance, while Haley’s odds have risen to nearly 6%.
DeSantis’s debate performance was not disastrous in the sense that he didn’t rattle on about “wokeness” or try and sprint to the right of the Overton window of Republican opinion, as he had attempted to do before his campaign reset. But if the debate was a make-or-break moment to prove to donors that he was the only one on the stage capable of countering Trump, let alone President Joe Biden, DeSantis failed utterly.
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On top of her obvious debate dexterity pumping second life into her campaign, Haley also has dumb luck on her side. It’s not hard to imagine Sen. Marco Rubio’s (R-TX) failed 3-2-1 strategy actually working out for Haley: a third-place finish in the evangelical bastion in Iowa, a second-place finish among the social moderates of New Hampshire, and a first-place triumph in her home state of South Carolina, which rewarded its former governor’s performance with packed houses in her latest appearances. This effect will be even more possible should the state’s senator, Tim Scott, continue his precipitous drop in the polls.
With over 100 days to go before Iowa, anything could happen. But DeSantis managing to turn the primary into a head-to-head matchup looks increasingly impossible.