DeSantis/Haley or Ramaswamy/Haley Would Be a More Competitive Candidate

Obviously, the biggest thing that’s happened in the Republican race the last several months is that Ron DeSantis has collapsed down to the same level as the rest of the non-Trump field. So, now no one is remotely competitive with Trump in the polling. 

It’s a symptom of how far ahead Trump is that you can add up DeSantis and Nikki Haley in a new Iowa poll and it’d still be Trump 46, and DeSantis/Haley 26, but that looks much better than where it is now. 

Or in New Hampshire, combining Vivek Ramaswamy and Haley gets it to 39 Trump to 25 Vivek/Haley, which would actually be competitive. 

The problem is that to get to these kind of numbers, you’d need one candidate to surge and others to totally collapse. Perhaps this will happen, but there’s no sign of it yet. And a potential obstacle to it happening is that it’s not clear how transferable support is among the non-Trump candidates. If DeSantis went away, would all his support go to Haley or some of it go to Trump or Vivek? And would all of Haley’s go to Vivek or DeSantis? 

An advantage DeSantis has is that he still has the broadest potential appeal, although it can be hard to get a second look from voters. 

Haley has had a discernible, if small-scale, surge since the first debate, but it’s presumably going to be hard for her to attract enough MAGAish voters for a winning plurality. 

Vivek almost certainly has a ceiling, and in the unlikely event Trump ever felt threatened by him, he could probably destroy him in about three days. 

All this is why Trump’s support being softer than it looks now would be a necessary, but not sufficient, condition for a much closer race.