Nikki Haley briefly dreams a dream

Somebody should have had a stopwatch on Nikki Haley as she came out on the stage after losing the New Hampshire primary to Donald Trump. Records for the 50-metre dash in high heels were surely broken as she scrambled towards the microphone. But she had good reason to get out early. At that moment, the major news networks were predicting that she would finish just 6 per cent behind Trump, which made the result something of a mild upset. She was within striking distance of the man who was supposed to have had the Republican nomination all wrapped up. 

Yet those predictions also suggested that the margin wouldn’t last. Counties favourable to the former President had yet to declare. Haley only had a few minutes in which to offer traditional Republican voters a vision of an alternative timeline, in which the party was no longer under the yoke of Trumpism. 

And it was remarkable to see, as if Haley were attempting to change time and space simply through an act of willpower. Through the kind of big optimistic grin usually trademarked by politicians called Kennedy, she spoke of defiance and decried the “chatter of the political class”, promising that the race is not over. “The first party to retire its 80-year-old candidate,” she said, “is going to be the party that wins this election”.

It was an impressive speech that briefly gave a vision of a different Republican future.

But then the dream window closed. An hour later, projections put Trump 13 per cent ahead, though that later settled to a slightly less emphatic 11 per cent. Either figure still represented the double-digit lead that the former President’s campaign had been promising for much of the last week.

These things matter, though they shouldn’t. Objectively, Haley was going to lose by however much she was going to lose. Getting out to claim a moral victory should not have altered the reality of the result. Yet it does and it reflects the peculiar place that Haley occupies, still facing a likely drubbing but also sensing a change in the Republican race which might now last days, weeks, or even months. 

Haley needed a justification to carry the fight to the next key primary, which will be held in her home state of South Carolina. (Nevada will hold both a primary and a caucus before then but, due to internal state battiness, the two candidates aren’t even running against each other. Haley is running in the primary and Trump in the caucus, with only the caucus’s vote being binding.)

Haley’s logic is sound. The departure of Ron DeSantis had been long coming (some of us were muttering about it the moment his candidacy was announced, noting that he was a candidate that people would soon learn to loathe) but it helpfully clarified the contest in the minds of the public who now have a straight choice between Haley and the man she’s trying to define as chaos personified. And her attacks appear to be working, especially among independent voters.

Trump had a very bad week which was almost entirely the result of his own mistakes. More remarkably, he seems to have suffered among independents at the polls, which is not something we can always say about Trump who has earned his Teflon reputation. He gave a campaign speech in which he confused Haley with Nancy Pelosi. He then gave a speech in which he seemed to lose his place on the teleprompter, leaving him sounding like he was rambling and, perhaps, slurring his words. Trump suddenly looks like a candidate with cognitive problems.

In fairness to Trump: much of this we’ve seen before and some of what we’re witnessing is his habitual laziness writ large. He is also not losing many Republican voters despite his putting almost no effort into his campaign. Yet he has had little reason to alter a winning strategy. Nearly all his rivals have fallen away and even Haley is struggling to make a real impact. Trump is running a bare-bones campaign and it’s been working for him.

Yet the gaffes did hurt him. He was also photographed with some strange marks on his hands, which led people to speculate about his health. For a candidate who prides himself on being the big healthy brute on the campaign trail, he’s looking vulnerable. There’s just a hint of frailty about Trump which is new.

This also comes as Joe Biden’s fortunes looked to have turned. Polling is beginning to improve for the President, reflecting a better economic situation but also, perhaps, reflecting a growing sense in the country that it will be Biden vs Trump. That’s certainly something that the Biden team have been leaning into. It looks increasingly like they’re already fighting the general election as if they are now certain it will ultimately be a matchup of Bidden against Trump. They have certainly improved their messaging over the past few weeks. A raise is surely owing to the person who wrote the attack line in the light of Trump’s confusion: “I don’t agree with Nikki Haley on everything, but we agree on this much: She is not Nancy Pelosi”.

The only danger for Democrats – though it’s still remote – is that they somehow aid Haley’s defenestration of Trump. Although a prolonged fight against Haley hurts Trump and will ultimately help the Democrats, the Biden campaign needs Trump to win. The sooner that happens, the sooner they can start to message the American people about the dangers of a second Trump presidency, as well as exploiting Trump’s huge strategic weakness around abortion. The logic of their calculations is that Biden can beat Trump. It’s not so clear that he can beat Haley. Because if Haley does do the impossible and turns this into a proper race and emerges victorious, then all bets are off. Biden would suddenly look like the poor pick (in this other timeline, Democrats would prefer to see somebody like Gavin Newsom go up against Haley). 

But that’s the stuff of dream windows and we’re only contemplating it because Nikki Haley made it to the microphone in record time, creating an illusion of a victory that wasn’t quite there. One thing is certain: Trump will feel threatened and come out fighting, no doubt with a deep dive into the politics of birtherism. 

If Nikki Haley offered voters a dream, we can be sure that Donald Trump is about to make it resemble a nightmare. 

@DavidWaywell

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