Nikki Haley:
"I proudly serve in this administration, and I enthusiastically support most of its decisions and the direction it is taking the country.”
Now she wants to replace Trump.
Everyone saw what happened to Liz Cheney. There is no room in the Republican Party for someone who openly disapproves of Trump. Cheney is an old school conservative. Cheney says it is wrong to make false claims of election fraud to try to overturn an election. It is wrong to bully election officials into doing illegal acts. Trump calls her a RINO. A majority of Wyoming's Republican voters agree. They replaced her in Congress. Nearly all Republican officeholders go along with Trump. To replace Trump one needs to be Trump.
Nikki Haley is suspected of running for Vice President, not President. The way to win either office is to attack and crush Ron DeSantis. She was a governor and the UN Ambassador. She is a confident, articulate speaker. She is the daughter of immigrants from India and she is dark complected. She wears a silver cross around her neck. It may be a sweet spot on identity.
Haley condemned Trump when she supported Marco Rubio's campaign in 2016. Now she says Trump was "a great President, the best President in my lifetime." She is attempting to be not-Trump, without criticizing Trump. She says she is running because the country needs "a new generation of leadership." Her positioning is to be a more appealing version of Trump. "America is strong and proud, not weak and woke," she says. She elevated herself nationally by taking down Confederate flags at the South Carolina statehouse following the murders of Black worshipers in a Charleston church. It seemed moderate and gracious, again a sweet spot.
It is the wrong sweet spot. GOP primary voters don't want kinder, gentler. They want a fighter. Bill Kristol observed GOP voters insist on five things to be a Republican contender for president. I agree.
1. One must agree to support Trump if he is the nominee, even if you believe he is dangerously unfit for office.
2. One must say Trump was a good, successful president.
3. One must say that the 2020 election was irregular in some way, thereby justifying or mitigating extra-constitutional legal pretexts to overthrow it.
4. One must oppose the media and Democrats, including coastal elites, liberals, academics, and representatives of "woke" values. One must call them inauthentic and illegitimate Americans.
5. One must make attacking those illegitimate Americans one's highest priority in message and policy.
Haley is soft on numbers four and five. She is presenting herself as the next generation of Trump--Trump minus the flaws. Ron DeSantis is not a cleaned-up version of Trump. He is the meaner and more confrontational version of Trump. He is Trump-plus. DeSantis finds enemies that Trump hadn't considered: Martha's Vineyard residents, Walt Disney, the College Board, gays and trans people, vaccines, masks, and Blacks who were inaccurately told by state officials they could vote. DeSantis is out-Trumping Trump. "Florida is where woke goes to die," DeSantis says.
Haley is positioned incorrectly. She needs to be even more brutal than DeSantis. DeSantis has a record. He was soft in his opposition to COVID vaccines, having at first recommended them to elderly Floridians. DeSantis was soft on protecting Social Security, having entertained sunsetting it when he was in Congress. Trump went low this week, twice tweeting the suggestion that DeSantis preyed upon underage high school students. Haley needs to take over the go-low job.
There is no policy consensus among Republicans. The emerging base of blue-collar non-college voters have opposite goals than do the Main Street and corporate business people who formerly shaped the GOP message. Wall Street Journal readers want free trade with low wage countries, more immigration, less consumer protection, less regulation, lower taxes on the wealthy, and privatized Social Security and Medicare. White working-class Americans prefer the opposite. There is a common denominator, though, that unites Republicans. They resent judgmental scolds on the left who advance uncomfortable ideas on race and gender. A plurality of Republican primary voters doesn't care about elections and democracy--the kinds of things important to Liz Cheney. A democracy that elected a liberal like Biden, who would seek to appoint a Black female Supreme Court Justice, opposed by every Republican senator except Romney and Murkowski, is a flawed democracy and deserves no respect. Not when the main threat to democracy is leftist pressure for diversity, equity, and inclusion. A Republican who disagrees with this is a RINO, not a Republican at all.
Nikki Haley will either step up her game as a social warrior and displace DeSantis, or she will get, as Trump predicts, her 1% of the vote.
What most Republicans want, I believe, is someone who is angrily aggrieved, not just someone who is merely perceived to be a "fighter". Trump cashed in on this, because he is constantly aggrieved, but not for the same reasons that his supporters are.
Trump is aggrieved because he has been treated "worse than any president, ever"--presumably worse than Lincoln, Garfield, Kennedy, et al. Bette Midler dissed Trump, and he's still bitter.
His base is aggrieved at their real and imagined losses in the culture wars, economic challenges, and so on--none of which hurt Trump and his family.
But Trump and his base share performative grievance. They are dangerous. They seek to destroy "wokeness"--empathy, awareness, information, science, institutions--and to identify and destroy those responsible, a la the Charlottesville mob. They seek to find someone to blame, and Trump gives them that.
Haley is going to have an impossible time plausibly articulating grievance. So she really has to take the sane, "team normal" approach and hope that the crazy becomes less ascendant. I wish her good luck in her senior year.
Another good post, Peter. Haley is just another fading comet.