Never Haley?

I won’t vote for her. Will I?

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133
Nikki Haley speaks to guests at the Republican Jewish Coalition annual leadership meeting on November 19, 2022 in Las Vegas. (Photo by Scott Olson/Getty Images.)

A few weeks ago I was listening to The Dispatch Podcast, as all right-thinking people do, when Sarah Isgur asked the panel for predictions to ring in the new year.

Neither Donald Trump nor Ron DeSantis will be the 2024 Republican nominee, said Jonah Goldberg, calmly.

By the time I regained consciousness, they had moved on to a different topic. Jonah’s bombshell forecast somehow went unexplored.

I’m still flabbergasted. Who on the American right might conceivably have the mojo to dethrone the king of the GOP and his heir apparent, the only two politicians who reliably poll in double digits in early primary surveys?

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  1. Philip.R.M.Hunt

    I don't know why so many ordinarily savvy pundits don't consider the obvious - Haley, Pompeo, et. al. are not running for President, but for Vice President. Once Vice President, they actually will run for President.

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  2. Jdoughtync

    Alright, this has been in my head for a while, but after reading Nick’s piece I think it’s time to debut it.

    Offered for use by whomever.
    Hat tip/apologies to Toni Basil.


    Oh, Nikki, you’re so done
    You’re so done it can’t be fun
    Hey Nikki! (clap clap)
    Hey Nikki! (clap clap)

    Oh, Nikki you’re so done
    You don’t think you still can RUN, Nikki …?

    Oh, Nikki, such a pity
    You don’t understand
    You threw away your shot
    When you threw in with that man

    Now Nikki’s just another backup in his band
    It’s pols like you, Nikki…
    Who make us spew, Nikki
    Eww, Nikki
    Go home you’re through, Nikki

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      Will I Am

      Well done!

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    CJ

    "In all probability, Haley will either help slay the Trump dragon in 2024 or finally get her electoral comeuppance after having alienated Trump fans and anti-Trumpers at various points with her cynical maneuvering. The only truly bad outcome involving her that we might plausibly see is a Trump/Haley ticket landing in the White House. "

    I don't think Trump/Haley is probable or even really plausible. She's certainly on his enemies list, and once you're on it, you're never truly off it. I think Tulsi Gabbard is a much more likely female candidate, or MTG or Boebert, most of them have insulted him less.

    Her odds of polling more than maybe 10% in her best GOP primary look pretty slim to me. Who does she appeal to? Her polling is craptastic; I don't believe I've ever heard a single normal person gush about her the way that lifetime conservatives gush about DeSantis or cultists gush about Trump. She's going to become yet another perennial GOP run-with-no-chance grifter, because that's the game now and she has bills to pay and a lifestyle to maintain.

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  4. Wes.Bridges

    Mitch Daniels. Sniff.

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  5. Dougrhon

    I am a fan of Haley. Or rather I don't loathe her. I am not a fan of any politician. If we require every candidate to be pure as the driven snow we will get decades more of leftist mismanagement. So Haley is careerist. Who isn't? She was a good governor and an excellent UN ambassador in the one area that the Trump administration really excelled, standing up to that nest of vipers. I think she would be a very strong VP candidate for DeSantis. But yeah, eventually she (And DeSantis) are going to have to get off the fence and go after Trump head on, making that irrevocable choice.

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    Jaredmanly77

    This seems a bit unfair. I would prefer Nikki had made some other choices…but compared to Trump (or even De Santis…) this seems overheated.
    She was a good ambassador and better Governor of SC. Had voters better sense we’d she’d probably campaign differently…but obviously they do not. I’d prefer she was more a leader…but those seem to be college presidents in Indiana or Florida these days…

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  7. Jim S

    Nikki Haley. The Republican version of Hillary Clinton.

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      Phil H

      Ouch! Even after Allapundit's withering description, that's cruel.

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    JohnF

    It seems to me that there is entirely too much focus right now on the battle for the hearts and minds of less than thirty percent of the electorate. To use a sports analogy, this is like seeing one team focus all its efforts on beating a single divisional rival. It acquires players, structures the team, and designs its plays all with the goal of winning against this particular rival. Meanwhile, the rest of the league goes in a different direction - with the result that neither of the two adversaries has a chance of making it past the divisional playoffs.

    The problem with the "DeSantis is the only one who can save us from Trump" logic, is that his current path to doing so is also going to make it much more difficult for him to pivot down the road to try to appeal to the general electorate. I see comments from Floridians saying that he's actually been a very good governor (and I'm perfectly prepared to accept that at face value), but that's not the image that most of the rest of the country is seeing. By the time the GOP gets to the 2024 convention, the image of DeSantis as essentially a "performative a-hole" is going to be pretty entrenched and hard to turn around, particularly because (by many accounts) he may only be able to claim to not be "performative."

    The national battle to become the Federal equivalent of the next Doug Mastriano is only going to result in the election of whoever happens to be running as a Democrat. Of the six states that Trump challenged in 2020, only Wisconsin elected a Trump-Supporter to the Senate in 2022 (and that was largely due to a combination of incumbency and a very bad opponent). Barring some sort of miraculous turnaround, Trump himself is highly unlikely to be able to win the Presidency. Overall, the current battle to win the GOP nomination is more than likely to turn into a years-long effort to finish second.

    If Haley can manage the delicate act of straddling the fence well enough to at least avoid turning the MAGA hordes against her, she might be able to convince the rest of the GOP that she has a reasonable shot at defeating a Democrat opponent, particularly if it happens to be Joe Biden.

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    1. Avatar photo
      O.W.L.

      From your lips to God's ears.

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    2. Ilisachac

      I am a registered (socially liberal, fiscally conservative) Democrat in Florida. I did not vote for Gillum in the primary and did not want to vote for him for Governor (he had no experience and there were some rumblings about FBI investigations & I am not a progressive), but had to choose one. After DeSantis' obsequious Trump ads, I reluctantly gave Gillum my vote. That being said, until DeSantis lost his mind during the pandemic, I thought he was doing a very good job. Even during the beginning of the pandemic I thought he was doing as well as anyone could given the amount of elderly citizens in the state, many of whom were housed communally in nursing homes and at incredibly high risk. He wasn't perfect, but who was? Then, its like a switch flipped, and he went off the rails . Since that time, I have disagreed with almost every single thing he has said & done. Worst of all, his stances have induced so many Trumpers and like minded authoritarians to move to Florida that I barely recognize my neighborhood and neighbors and am seriously considering leaving the State. He IS a living & breathing example of a performative A-Hole. In fact, DeSantis is WORSE than Trump because he is so much smarter than Trump. This is a self-made man that graduated from Yale undergrad and Harvard law school. Do you think for one second that he doesn't know that all this culture warrior crap is destined to be overthrown by the courts? Of course not, he is counting on it to fool all the Trumpy rubes. And since when do Conservative think its okay for the GOVERNMENT to tell a private company how to run/conduct its business? It cracks me up to see Rs defend his schtick. Nikki Haley is just a real life Tracy Flick. She's not winning either.

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      Jeff Younger

      The reason you’re not getting a good impression of DeSantis outside of Florida is that the media is lined up against ANY Republican who has the potential to win in 2024. I’m a Florida resident,and I’ve found DeSantis to not only be an excellent governor, but to care about a lot of issues that most elected Republicans don’t (such as the environment, where his record has been solid). Sure, he puts on a bit of a show, but the Democrats perform 24/7/365, and with DeSantis, the “show” is just lagniappe, not the primary focus (which for him, ahas been effective governance and creating an environment for economic growth). You can believe your local paper or the national fish wraps, but Americans have been voting with their feet. In droves. And my new neighbors all love the fact that Florida’s government views its roll as serving Florida residents, rather than ruling over them.

      That being said, I’d gladly vote for a number of GOP candidates not named Trump, including Haley. I’m willing to give most Republicans a pass on supporting Trump in the past, provided they now realize the threat he poses to both the GOP and the nation. It’s either that, or suffer through 4 more years of Democrat rule, which is crushing my investments and my retirement lifestyle thanks to inflation and an anemic market.

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        CJ

        "And my new neighbors all love the fact that Florida’s government views its roll as serving Florida residents, rather than ruling over them."

        Really? I left Florida with my spouse because we encountered quite the opposite. As did several of my millenial and GenX and GenZ friends and coworkers, with many others planning to as jobs/life events allow but before November 2024.

        Try being LGBTQ in Florida these days. Or Black. Or just a classical liberal. For someone who doesn't want to "rule" he sure has signed a lot of pre-emption bills preventing local control of just about anything. It might be a great place for retirees or people who want to avoid taxes, but it does come at a cost: lawsuit after lawsuit from DeSantis's stunts like sending SWAT teams to arrest Black ex-cons who voted after the state told them they could (which is why the charges are dropped immediately after arrest). Plus the state's 10,000 other problems like a severe teacher shortage that his administration has only made worse by trying to "rule" every single classroom, or the insane corruption and criminal activity within the FL GOP (2020 FL Senate "ghost candidates" anyone?) that he's helped cover up.

        DeSantis is a live, armed nuke. I did not want to be in Florida when/if he goes off. Neither did my retiree parents, who moved back north. Neither do ~75% of people I know under the age of 35. You've been warned!

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        JohnF

        I agree with much of that, but I'm less inclined to blame "the media" for DeSantis' reputation outside of Florida. If he wants to be President, it's up to him to manage his media image, and so far he seems to be content to focus that image on the MAGA hordes. As long as he is flying would-be migrants from Texas to Martha's Vineyard, passing soon-to-be-overturned laws against Social Media companies, and banning the teaching of black history, national reporters are not going to put in the effort to find out about his environmental policies.

        That was my main point. By this point, he's likely done enough to establish his "street-cred" with MAGA (at least enough to be able to pass among them unscathed). At some point, however, he reaches a point of diminishing returns whereby he might make himself more and more popular with MAGA, while making himself less so with the rest of the electorate.

        As for your investments, I'd suggest that the current state of the market has much more to do with an extended (decade-long) period of misguided monetary policy that kept interest rates artificially low and resulted in significant asset inflation and an overheated economy fueled by ever expanding deficit financing than with anything that the Government's done lately.

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        1. Dougrhon

          He's doing some theater to gain some traction among not just the Trump rump of the party but among those for whom the culture war led by the left matters. This is necessary in today's political climate. We already know he is a responsible and effective governor because we have seen the evidence of it. I will excuse the theater.

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    Lawrence D'anna

    Mussolini would have led the insurrection, not watched it on TV like Trump did. He’s a game show host, not a fascist. Trump was god’s punishment on us for allowing our politics to turn into a game show. Trump didn’t do it to us, we did it to ourselves. He was only the instrument.

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      LBernard

      Apparently, Trump was going to lead it but his own Secret Service stopped him.

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      1. Philip.R.M.Hunt

        Trump was too old and fat and lazy to walk the short distance to the capital. If he had, I don't think the Secret Service would have stopped him. Once he got into a car he was at their mercy. He tried to grab the wheel, but the driver said he easily brushed him off. Ceasar, Napolean, Hitler, Franco, and Mussolini were decorated combat veterans, were younger and were still in good shape at the time they made their moves for dictatorial power. Cadet "bone spurs" Trump lied to avoid military service. Oh well, I guess you go to the insurrection with the dictator-want-to-be that you have, not the dictator that you might want or wish to have.

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        Lawrence D'anna

        Mussolini told his bodyguards what to do, not the other way around.

        Trump and all his fans, cronies, and mini-me's are totally incapable of actually planning and executing an authoritarian takeover. The first thing actual fascists do when they get some power is to take over and assimilate institutions and civil society. Newspapers, schools, media, bureaucracies, churches. Anything and everything that has an independent voice. Anything that people belong to or depend on, or are loyal to. Any rival center of power. They take over everything. They all have to publicly show their loyalty to the leader and do his bidding, or else. The or else is backed up by state coercion and a very credible threat of mob violence.

        Take the effect Trump had on Marco Rubio and Fox News and imagine it applied to every form of media, education, entertainment and culture. Imagine left wing cancel culture except 1000 times worse, led by a cult of personality, backed up by the threat of mob violence not just in the center of Portland, but everywhere, with nowhere to hide. And then stack state violence on top.

        That's what fascism looks like. It requires organization and planning. It requires people at the center of it that devote the kind of relentless work that Jeff Bezos devotes to making billions of dollars to political terror instead.

        Trump is too lazy and too stupid to do any of that.

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    Pastorfbt

    And so it begins - Pompeo alleges NH was maneuvering to be VP on the 2020 ticket.

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      Rjosephpaquette

      Funny I thought Pompeo was maneuvering to be the VP on the 2024 ticket.

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