The Curious Case Of Nikki Haley And The Missing Democratic Also-Rans
Haley polls way better against Biden than Trump does; no credible Democrats poll better against Trump than Biden does; here are 16 scattered thoughts about this asymmetry.
Nikki Haley lost her home-state primary in South Carolina this weekend as public polling suggested she would. Yet in her concession speech, Haley pledged to stay in the race.
The logic of Haley’s candidacy remains as it was when I wrote about it a month ago: There’s a huge cloud of legal and political uncertainty around Donald Trump and if he becomes unviable, she will have a strong claim on the GOP nomination, even if she loses every state she contests.
But the case is even more robust than that—probably in large degree because Trump is such a liability. First, the anti-Trump vote in these primaries keeps exceeding public polls. Trump is the de facto leader of the GOP and has been for almost eight years but can only pull 60 percent in these primaries?
Second, Haley keeps putting up much better numbers in head-to-head polls against Biden than Trump does. And in this she is unique. No Democrats-in-waiting poll better against Trump than Joe Biden does. If one or more of them did, the liberal clamor for Biden to step aside to make way for a new ticket would grow, but faced with strong evidence that Haley is a safer bet than Trump, Republican leaders continue to endorse him, and most Republican voters remain unbowed.
What should we make of this strange contrast? Here are some scattered thoughts.
Trump is a lying asshole and a huge crook, who misgoverned the country horribly in his single term, something well known even to many of his supporters; Biden by contrast is a decent person who’s done a good job as president. At that level it’s not surprising that Biden faces no credible opposition, but Haley, as a crucible for bad feelings about Trump, can pull 30 - 40 percent of the GOP vote.
Trump is still leading Biden nationally. It’ll be interesting to see what happens over the next few weeks if Biden manages to pull ahead of Trump, even briefly, in polling averages. Haley’s case that Trump supporters should give her a second look suddenly becomes much more compelling if polls actually suggest Trump would lose. But for now at least they say Trump would win. Why settle for generic when you can get brand name for the same price?
Many if not most Republicans either don’t know Haley polls much better than Trump against Biden, or don’t believe the polls, or don’t care. Their information sources won’t tell them the truth. They think Trump won the 2020 election and is thus well suited to run against him again. (How Trump would avoid getting the election stolen from him again, when he no longer enjoys the power of the presidency, is a bit mysterious, but then cultism has strange effects on the mind. Maybe they’ll insurrect harder this time?)