But you don’t blow anyone’s mind
JV Last at the Triad (subsc. only —) says that Nikki Haley would be “fine” as president and I’m not going to argue because I don’t think she would be fine at all. She’s a creature of the Republican party and it is a toxic, neo-fascist institution that taints anyone who seeks to represent it. Sorry, that’s just how it is.
And Last makes that case for me when he discusses why Haley has no chance in hell:
The problem is that, as Sarah explained this morning, there is no constituency for Nikki Haley within the Republican party.
A Nikki Haley candidacy is premised on the idea that she is Not Trump. The theory behind this is that the Republican electorate’s preferences in 2024 can be divided into “Trump” and “Not Trump” lanes and that if Haley can win the “Not Trump” primary and then consolidate those voters, then she can win a head-to-head matchup against Big Orange.
But I want to put this in bold:
There is no “Not Trump” lane.
Let me explain.
The DeSantis challenge to Trump isn’t that Meatball Ron is “Not Trump”—it’s that he’s “Trump Plus.” The DeSantis electoral proposition is that he will give you everything Trump does—all of the fighting, the illiberalism, the culture war, the lib owning, the news cycle domination, the mean tweets.
The only difference is that DeSantis is more electorally viable.
In other words, Trump and DeSantis are fighting over the same 85 percent of the Republican electorate.
Nikki Haley and anyone else who jumps in trying to be Not Trump is fighting over the remaining 15 percent.
In The Bulwark’s 2024 primary poll last month we ran three ballot tests:
Two-way: DeSantis 52 percent, Trump 30 percent, undecided 15 percent, and 3 percent saying they would not vote if those were the only two options.
Three-way: DeSantis 44 percent, Trump 28 percent, a generic “other candidate” 10 percent, and 17 percent undecided.
Ten-way: DeSantis 39 percent, Trump 28 percent, Mike Pence 9 percent, Nikki Haley and Liz Cheney 4 percent, five other candidates at 1 percent, and 13 percent undecided.
If we wanted absolute, lock-stock-barrel proof, we’d need a fourth ballot test that put Trump and Haley head-to-head. But I think we can intuit with a fairly high degree of confidence that if we ran it we’d get a result close to:
- Trump 70 percent
- Haley < 20 percent
- 10 percent undecided
Or to come at this from a ranked-choice perspective and ask yourself: Among DeSantis voters, who is their second choice going to be?
Eventually someone will poll this question, but I can tell you the answer already: Overwhelmingly, it’s going to be Trump. Not Haley or Scott or Pence or anyone positioned as a Not Trump.
2. What Is “The Trump Lane”?
In order to be a contender to win the Republican nomination, you must live in the Trump lane. What does that mean?
I submit to you that at this moment, the Overton Window has moved quite a lot. To be in the Trump lane today, requires five checked boxes:
-You must agree to support him in the general election should he be the nominee, obviously.
-You must stipulate that he was a good and successful president.
-You must contend that Trump’s defeat in 2020 was, at the least, highly irregular and the result of nefarious forces unfairly tilting the playing field.
-You must performatively hate not only Democrats and the media, but also large swaths of America—especially the “coastal elites” who live in metro areas. You must publicly regard them as inauthentic Americans.
-You must make hurting these inauthentic Americans your highest priority, in both rhetoric and policy prescriptions.
That’s the Trump lane. And it’s no good to tick only one or two of those boxes. You have to hit all five just to ante up.
Now here are political postures which will do nothing to endear a candidate to the 85 percent of R voters in the Trump lane:
-Touting a record of economic growth.
-Arguing in favor of free enterprise.
-Being an absolutist on free speech, even for your political opponents.
-Advocating for a robust foreign policy that places America in a position of global leadership.
The corollary is that if someone is going to contend for the Republican nomination, they’ll have to come from the Trump lane.
I’m not sure who that could be. Kristi Noem, maybe? I could see a non-political celeb diving in and scrambling the Trump lane. Someone like Tucker Carlson or Candace Owens.
But that’s the pathway I’d be keeping my eye on. The rest of these pols—Haley, Pence, Scott, Pompeo, Christie, Sununu, Hogan, whomever—are non-factors except in how they might alter the dynamics around the actual contenders.
They’re not running to win. They’re running for the tertiary benefits of candidacy.
I think the jury is still out on DeSantis. He’s just a name to a lot of Republicans. In fact, there are a good number who can’t tell the difference between him and George Santos.