In my final column of last year, I outlined a longshot scenario in which Nikki Haley could defeat Donald Trump for the Republican presidential nomination. It requires her to pull off a strong second-place finish in Iowa, the first state to vote in the primary contest next week, parlay that performance into outright victory in New Hampshire a week later, beat the former president on her home turf of South Carolina in late February and then achieve a narrow nationwide win on Super Tuesday in the first week of March.
Less than two weeks into election year, the tumblers of that improbable lock are slipping into place for the former South Carolina governor. She has started 2024 in the company of that most munificent of US election benefactors, the fickle lady of fortune that George Bush Sr called the Big Mo: electoral momentum.
Early indications in 2024 are certainly good for her. Iowa, where dedicated Republican voters will attend caucuses on Monday, was never naturally favourable territory for her. In September the polls put her fourth behind not only Trump and Ron DeSantis, the governor of Florida, but also Tim Scott, a fellow South Carolinian who later dropped out. But astute campaigning has worked: the latest Real Clear Politics average puts her second, far behind the former president, for sure, but well ahead of early expectations. In New Hampshire, which is her territory, she has moved into a strong second. A poll last week had her just 7 points behind Trump.
Events seem to be moving her way too. On Wednesday Chris Christie, the former New Jersey governor whose campaign has been a one-man Trump indictment, pulled out. He had been averaging about 12 per cent of the vote in New Hampshire. Most of that now probably goes to her. DeSantis himself continues to fade: in their head-to-head debate this week, he displayed a desperation that may indicate he too is out of the race soon. One of the keys to Trump’s success has been a multi-way split in his opponents’ vote – in 2016 he won the nomination with less than 45 per cent of the vote. If this race quickly comes down to Trump v Haley, who knows?
But having talked up Haley’s prospects, I feel an obligation to lower expectations. It’s not just that her trajectory to the nomination still proceeds through the eyes of several needles. It’s that Haley herself is not the saviour of American conservatism her admirers want her to be. She is instead a more familiar American politician of the pre-Trump age – an opportunist, a cynical crowd-pleaser, moistened finger permanently in the wind, eye rigidly fixed on the main chance. Don’t let your aversion to the man blind you into thinking that America has a reincarnation of Margaret Thatcher in its future.
No one denies her political talents. It takes some skill to be the first woman of colour elected Republican governor of a southern state. But her career suggests little in the way of principled stands for some brand of conservatism, more a calculated positioning for maximum preferment.
For a start, the idea some have of her as an explicit repudiation of Trump is flat wrong. She was elevated to national status by Trump himself, as his ambassador to the UN, despite a thin-to-non-existent background in foreign policy. She has carefully woven a path through the primary election posing not as Trump’s opponent but his successor, avoiding denouncing him for his 2020 election denialism. The closest she comes is accusing him of creating “chaos”. Not exactly Profiles in Courage stuff. But it gives a hint about what’s really going on. She doesn’t want to risk alienating her former boss in case of the likely event he wins – and offers her further advancement.
This cynicism was on vivid display over Christmas when during a town hall in New Hampshire, she was suddenly asked what she thought was the cause of the Civil War. Instead of saying something along the lines of “Slavery, of course,” she gave a nonsense reply, saying it was about differences over “how the government was going to be run”. Evidently eager not to risk offending the sensibilities of confederate-sympathising Republicans, she concluded: “What do you want me to say about slavery?”
Given that as governor she led the effort to remove the confederate flag from South Carolina’s state standard, this seemed odd. But if you think about it, this too becomes a carefully calibrated political decision, a move that garnered her oodles of favourable press nationwide. The biggest problem with the Haley candidacy though is that, whatever foundational beliefs she may once have had, camouflaged as they now are, they seem ill-suited for the temper of modern conservatism.
Like Trump or hate him, you must acknowledge he has brilliantly tapped into the radical ideological changes flowing through conservative politics. What has the Trump ascendancy really been about? Is it, as the left and their media friends insist, the product of some monstrous ego strutting the national and global stage? Or is it a recognition that the conservatism that dominated since the 1980s – tax cuts, deregulation that favours big business, policies that promote globalisation and mass migration, acquiescence in the advance of cultural progressivism through public institutions, disastrous US-led wars of intervention – has failed?
Haley, for all her efforts to disguise it, was an avatar of that conservatism. You still get occasional glimpses in her neoconservative rhetoric about Ukraine, for example. But mostly, she has tried to accommodate it.
That probably won’t win her the nomination. It may well win her the slot as Trump’s vice-president and likely successor, however. Which is perhaps what this was really always about in the first place.
The Times
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