Biden had best pray that Trump makes it out of New Hampshire with a win that buries Haley, because she would eat Biden’s lunch in the general.
Watching Nikki Haley’s Thursday New Hampshire town hall hosted by CNN’s Jake Tapper, one can walk away with two ideas of her that are partially correct. What is certain is that Haley’s broad acceptability with the non-Twitter base and moderates would allow her a real shot at the presidency if she can topple Donald Trump. I reckon Haley has the best general-election electability since Barack Obama.
For those looking for a hard-right candidate, Haley isn’t that — she rejected the idea of preemptively pardoning Trump, she was more than comfortable using the racial descriptors one associates with social liberals (e.g., “black and brown children”), and she reiterated on matters as divergent as those of term limits, marijuana, and education policy that the best thing to do is acknowledge the limits of the federal government and allow states to answer most questions of governance.
For those hoping for a true squish, Haley wasn’t that either. The former South Carolina governor reconfirmed that she would pardon a convicted Trump, she has no patience with Iran’s and the Biden administration’s dalliance, and she emphatically rejected the notion that the U.S. was established as a racist country (Jake Tapper’s framing of the debate here was especially poor).
Her best line of the night was her least politic: “We don’t need to have our options be two 80-year-olds running for president. We’ve got too many issues.” Herein is her gift: Haley can succeed in New Hampshire just as well as she could in South Carolina. She’s a big-tent pragmatist who can assuage the fears of the moderate while still giving the party’s purists enough small-government bromides to satisfy. Maybe most of all, she’s willing to say that some things aren’t the president’s job — a refreshing departure from the “on Day One we’re going to . . . ” nonsense that candidates often toss the voters’ way.
I think about the race this way: If each candidate were a tradesman, Haley would be an electrician. She thinks a little too much of herself and she doesn’t always sweep up her messes, but she’s also the most capable at managing the fiddly bits across a wide range of products (and exclusively uses Klein equipment). DeSantis is a carpenter — there’s nothing he likes more than whaling away on ten-penny nails and timber while the radio is playing classic rock oppressively loud. A guy much happier giving directions than receiving them, DeSantis doesn’t like electricians, OSHA, or drywallers getting in his way. Trump is the investor demanding changes to the home and is annoyed when physics defies his brilliant suggestions — unfortunately, the general contractor and his group love to tell him he can do anything he imagines.
Haley is the most dynamic of the bunch, and her work will be the most appreciated on a daily basis by the tenants, but nothing she does is striking or brilliant — it simply works. The design language of the investor and the finished work of the carpenter are enticing but also have more variability in their quality and popularity. What Haley does well is use the language of the un-newsed, the less-tuned in American. She’s able to calibrate for various audiences in a way that her competition cannot match. She’s inoffensive enough for Americans of many stripes to see themselves in her, but she’s also sympathetic enough to make her opponents look even coarser than they do naturally. The fact that her husband wouldn’t be some sort of kept man but rather an active-enough serviceman would also thread the needle of a masculine first husband who has his own thing going while Haley runs the country. But sometimes the conference championship is a tougher contest than the Super Bowl, and right now, Haley is backpedaling as the polls are showing Trump holding first (46 points to Haley’s 33 points) in New Hampshire.
Really, Biden had best pray that Trump makes it out of New Hampshire with a win that buries Haley, because she would eat Biden’s lunch (mushy peas) in the general election. Haley’s ability to appear competent and earnest in front of any and every audience would match too well against Biden’s swings from doddering to umbrage and back again.