You cannot stake your hopes on only one candidate.
News of Nikki Haley’s impending presidential-campaign announcement broke last night. Haley, the former two-term governor of South Carolina and ambassador to the United Nations under President Trump, looks set to be the second Republican (after Trump) to officially take the plunge into the 2024 whirlpool.
And when she did, my initial reaction (as memorialized on Twitter) was “well okay . . . but why?” The answer to that is simple enough, in one way: Why not? As a two-term governor of an early primary state, one with credentials that could be pitched either to more establishment-minded GOP voters (serious executive; foreign policy credentials; never dined with Kanye post-antisemitism) or to Trump supporters (she served in his administration as his U.N. ambassador), she can certainly tell a story about how she is a dark-horse competitor for the nomination, especially if Trump should fail to gain traction in his revanchist campaign.
Upon further consideration, however, the case becomes weaker. Haley is a politician long out of her executive spotlight (the story of how she rose to the governorship of South Carolina is quite the improbable tale, involving prior governor Mark Sanford’s endorsement of her as his successor after his legendary decision to “hike the Appalachian Trail“). She inspires no strong feelings among voters, most of whom are unaware of who she is, except for a vaguely uneasy sense that her opportunism (in particular her variant relationship with Trump and the administration she served in) marks her as someone without locatable core principles. She checks certain demographic boxes, can deliver a reasonable stump speech, and has a record as an executive. All of these threshold qualifications will melt away into nothingness the second she makes a play for the loyalties of Trump supporters and Trump reminds those same voters of her “disloyalty” to him.
That said, my feelings about this have been affected somewhat by the point Michael Brendan Dougherty made earlier, about how the state of field at present — with Ron DeSantis as the obvious (yet still undeclared for prudential reasons) standard-bearer many non-Trump conservatives are eager to coalesce around — might actually be beneficial to Trump. DeSantis has been tested as governor of Florida and has passed the test. But he has not been tested on the national stage in a presidential campaign, with its dual requirements of both personal charisma and pressure under incoming fire from competitors of your own party. For those building their hopes on him, here’s a warning: The Spruce Goose never really got off the landing strip; Marco Rubio in 2016 — boy, that was a beautiful idea until it all fell apart in New Hampshire, wasn’t it? To pull another historical quote from the quiver, I’ll end by echoing Charles de Gaulle: “The graveyards are full of ‘indispensable men.'” You cannot stake your hopes on only one candidate. So, the more the merrier.