Haley barely mentioned DeSantis in her speech Monday night and said she won’t debate him again.
Nikki Haley is ignoring Ron DeSantis, willing the GOP primary into a two-candidate race between her and a dominant front-runner whose runaway-train momentum she hopes to derail with a win in New Hampshire on Tuesday.
The Iowa caucuses on Monday were a slam-dunk win for former president Trump, who ran away with 51 percent of the vote. Media outlets called the race for Trump just 30 minutes after caucusing began, as caucus goers in some precincts were still voting.
Given that DeSantis and his allied PACs invested heavily in Iowa to the exclusion of New Hampshire, Haley is claiming victory after finishing just two points behind the Florida governor in the Hawkeye State. Haley barely mentioned DeSantis in her speech after the caucus results came in, instead attacking Trump as a dead weight that will prevent the party from moving into the future.
Doubling down on the narrative that this is now a two-candidate race, Haley declined to participate in an upcoming New Hampshire primary debate against DeSantis, saying the next time she takes a debate stage, she’ll be on it with Trump or President Biden. The debates, which had been scheduled for Thursday and Sunday, were canceled as a result.
Certainly a third-place finish is less detrimental to Haley than DeSantis’s distant second-place finish is to him, as she did not stake her political life on Iowa and had tempered expectations there. But even if she does manage to squeak out a victory in the Granite State, where she’s been gaining on Trump in recent polls, Haley’s path to the nomination is exceedingly narrow.
“Trump’s a big winner, he didn’t really even campaign [in Iowa] that much and won overwhelmingly, and I think he’s going to win New Hampshire and win South Carolina and I think he’s going to march his way straight to the nomination,” GOP strategist John Feehery told NR.
He predicts the primary cycle will be over by Super Tuesday.
A RealClearPolitics average of New Hampshire polling finds Trump leading with 44.5 percent of the vote, with Haley following at 31.3 percent. The average still includes Chris Christie drawing 11 percent support before his exit from the race last week. Christie supporters are expected to get in line behind Haley, but as we reported last week, some of Christie’s most ardent supporters aren’t sold on the former U.S. ambassador to the U.N.
And to be sure, in recent cycles there has been little correlation between the Iowa caucus winner and the eventual winner of New Hampshire or the nomination.
In 2008, Mike Huckabee won in Iowa but came in third in New Hampshire. John McCain, the eventual nominee, won the primary in the Granite State. In 2012, Rick Santorum won Iowa but came in fourth in New Hampshire, where Mitt Romney, the eventual nominee, was the winner.
And in 2016, Ted Cruz won Iowa and Trump won New Hampshire.
But Feehery suggests this pattern is unlikely to hold true this cycle: “It only matters if an underdog wins Iowa. What happens is if a front-runner wins Iowa, then the front-runner usually wins.”
He acknowledges a Haley win in New Hampshire could send a wake-up call, but suggests it’s unlikely to slow down Trump. Haley would then head to South Carolina, where she trails Trump 30 points in the polls.
“No matter what happens in New Hampshire, she’s still got to win in South Carolina, her home state, and I don’t think there’s any chance of that happening,” he said. “I think the only chance of stopping Trump would have been a surprise upset for DeSantis in Iowa, and that clearly didn’t happen. I think Trump is pretty unstoppable at this moment.”
New Hampshire–based political analyst Scott Spradling said that the Iowa results came as no surprise and that the Granite State offers Haley a chance to reset.
“I don’t think she has to win New Hampshire, but I do think that she has to land a punch with the results, which to me means she’s got to be in low to mid single digits of a loss,” he said. “It’s not going to be good enough to be greater than ten points behind.”
As for winning South Carolina, he said, “I don’t know how you make an argument that you should stay in the race if you can’t convince your own home state based on a great result and new momentum from the first primary state.”
Still, even if Haley can eke out a win in both New Hampshire and South Carolina, she would then need to convince voters on Super Tuesday that she has national momentum and didn’t just win in the Palmetto State thanks to home-field advantage.
“Everything has to line up perfectly,” Spradling said. “It’s not impossible, but the Iowa results sort of confirm that sense of strength that Trump has in 2024, and so it does not bode well for any of his challengers.”
Vivek Ramaswamy and Asa Hutchinson saw the writing on the wall and quickly exited the race after the Iowa results came in. Ramaswamy immediately endorsed Trump.
DeSantis, for his part, is likely to hang on through New Hampshire, but after he put “all his eggs in the Iowa basket,” strategists told me his distant second-place finish is likely to prove a fatal blow to a campaign that was already on life support.
While DeSantis has publicly claimed he punched his ticket out of Iowa and is staying in the race, the pro-DeSantis PAC Never Back Down was hit by layoffs on Wednesday. It was unclear how many staffers were affected, according to the New York Times, which first reported the layoffs.
An unnamed official with the PAC told the Times that the group is “evaluating and paring down” consultants, vendors, and some staff members.
And at DeSantis’s election-night party, the mood was grim. “I personally have found that Ron DeSantis is the candidate I’ve been praying for my entire life. I’ve been involved in policy and politics my entire life,” Rebecca Hagelin, who told National Review she is advising Never Back Down, said in an interview. “But in America, you can’t beat a reality TV star, I guess, right now. And especially an entertainment guy. And the Left knows that and I think they just take advantage of that.”
A staffer for a Republican lawmaker who endorsed DeSantis echoed that sentiment: “You can’t beat somebody who knows exactly how to get the ratings. He’s spent his whole career working on getting people to watch him on TV.”
In a speech celebrating his win on Monday night, Trump espoused a message of positivity and unity and even offered kind words to his challengers.
“It would be so nice if we could come together and straighten out the world, and straighten out the problems, and straighten out all of the death and destruction that we’re witnessing. It’s practically never been like this. It’s just so important,” Trump said.
He congratulated DeSantis and Haley for “having a good time together. We’re all having a good time together.”
He said Ramaswamy did a “hell of a job” after he notched 8 percent of the vote.
Audrey Fahlberg contributed reporting.
Around NR
• Jeffrey Blehar comes out as a DeSantis supporter, making it all the more meaningful when he says there’s no path left for the candidate:
There’s no other way to put it: It’s over for the DeSantis presidential campaign after going “all in” in Iowa and getting thumped by 30 points, with Trump reaching a majority in the state. Yesterday, after narrowly edging out Haley for a distant second place, DeSantis put on a brave face in his concession speech and said that “in spite of all of that that they threw at us, everyone against us, we’ve got our ticket punched out of Iowa.” I guess you can’t go out and deliver a speech saying, “We staked it all on winning and we lost it all, hard,” so I won’t hold it against the campaign for remaining quiet for a decent interval of mourning. But given the catastrophic failure of its primary strategy and well-known money problems, it’s hard to see how the DeSantis campaign makes it to New Hampshire, much less South Carolina or beyond, unless as a purely rhetorical exercise.
• Dan McLaughlin admonishes the media outlets that made near-instantaneous calls for Trump in the Iowa caucuses:
The Associated Press and other media outlets interfered in the election last night in Iowa by calling the state for Trump while Iowans were still casting votes in the caucus. Trump’s win wasn’t close, so any effect was on the margins. But that’s no defense. It’s happened before; there are predictable ways to avoid doing it, which were ignored; and there are real reasons to worry about the destabilizing effects in this climate if it happens again in a closer election.
• Trump allies who suggest the former president’s strong win in Iowa is evidence that Democrats’ efforts to weaken Trump have failed are missing the Left’s true plan, which is actually working to perfection, Andrew C. McCarthy writes:
The plan was built on the four indictments and sundry civil suits, all brought by Democratic partisans (led by the Biden Justice Department). The point of the lawfare siege, which is the target of Trump’s constant ire and is thus scoffed at by his fans as ineffective partisanship, was to get Trump nominated. In that sense, the siege has been effective beyond the Democrats’ wildest dreams.
• Turnout mattered in Iowa, Dan McLaughlin writes, noting that nearly 187,000 votes were cast in the 2016 Iowa caucuses, compared to around 110,300 votes cast in Iowa on Monday night. Donald Trump’s vote total was 56,260, up from 45,427 in 2016.
The horrendous weather certainly didn’t help turnout at the margins, both in terms of deterring voters and limiting the ability of the campaigns to send out volunteers to turn out voters — something Ron DeSantis had banked on heavily, as had the Americans for Prosperity Action plan to boost Nikki Haley. Polls showing Trump far ahead probably convinced people it wasn’t worth coming out as well. But at the end of the day, it’s also down to DeSantis and Haley that they couldn’t fire up enough people to show up and counter Trump. Of all the elements that traditionally go into voter turnout, nobody has ever found a substitute for enthusiasm for the candidates themselves.
• Noah Rothman says Nikki Haley’s failure to adequately respond to a recent question about Trump’s sexual-assault allegations shows why Republicans have been underserved by the primary:
If Donald Trump is destined once again to be the Republican presidential nominee, the GOP deserves to know what it’s getting into. And if Haley is actually running for president, she would be better served in the long run by making an honest pitch to Republican voters. Her reluctance to level with Republicans about what they’re getting themselves into is patronizing. Her pathway to the nomination was already extremely narrow, but one thing is for sure: Nikki Haley will not condescend her way into Republican hearts.
• On The Editors podcast, Noah Rothman predicted that Haley has a 50–50 shot at winning New Hampshire, while Rich Lowry, Jim Geraghty, and Charles C. W. Cooke were less optimistic about her chances, putting them at 25 percent, 40 percent, and 20 percent, respectively.
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