Does America like aggressive, feisty, playing-to-win Nikki Haley?
There was no “breakout moment” at Wednesday night’s debate. The genuine disagreements on policy and substance were there if you squinted, but viewers had to sift through a lot of candidate crankiness to find them. No single candidate performed flawlessly. No one hit it out of the park. The debate was overwhelmed with cross talk, shouts, and incoherent interruptions. The moderators were simply bad in almost all respects. They repeatedly lost control of the debate. Inexplicably, they resorted to speechifying instead of, you know, asking questions. After two hours of Sturm und Drang, there were only two noteworthy developments in a night that will be largely forgotten by the end of the week.
First, in a GOP primary debate, Chris Christie, Nikki Haley, and, perhaps most notably, Ron DeSantis all attacked Donald Trump directly. Chris Christie’s attack was unsurprising, and his Donald Duck jibe landed flat. But Christie did have a memorable and genuinely amusing response to Dana Perino’s Survivor-style “vote him off the island” question. Nikki Haley had tiptoed up to taking on Trump earlier this month, and with her ongoing mini-surge in the polls, everyone expected Haley to continue her aggressive strategy. She didn’t disappoint (more on this below). DeSantis, however, showed by his attacks that his six-month-long master plan of avoiding confronting Trump directly has put him in a deep and unenviable electoral hole. Yes, there’s still a chance that his “I’ll outwork everyone else in Iowa” campaign plan pulls a rabbit out of the hat, but his newfound belligerence strikes me as a day late and a dollar short.
Mike Pence, Vivek Ramaswamy, and Doug Burgum were all notably less active and less interesting than they were in the first debate. I don’t see a path for Pence or Burgum going forward — nor for Vivek, though for different reasons. Ramaswamy was obviously trying to respond to the overwhelmingly negative reactions to the high-school-debate-club-know-it-all demeanor he had exhibited during his late-August introduction to America. Tim Scott responded to the criticism of his lackluster performance in the first debate by actually showing up tonight. He was much, much better, but he failed to break through. And Scott’s attack on DeSantis and Florida’s African-American-history standards was flatly wrong on the merits. Vivek is going to do what he’s going to do (i.e., whatever he thinks is in his interest), but Pence, Scott, and Burgum should think hard about what they’re doing in this race. Can they articulate a vision for victory? They need to, or they’re wasting everyone’s time.
The second — and more important — development was Haley’s pugnacious game plan to take the action to her opponents. She was feisty and aggressive. She attacked Trump and tangled with DeSantis, Ramaswamy, and Scott. She won some exchanges, and she lost a few.
But she came to play. Haley acted like a professional pol who wants to be a front-runner, who wants to win, and is executing a plan to get there.
The Haley surge is real in the sense that — of the non-Trumps — she’s the only one going in the right (statistically significant) direction. She has risen to second place in New Hampshire according to some polls. She’s rising a bit in Iowa. She clearly had a plan at this debate to try to unseat Ron DeSantis as the undisputed non-Trump alternative. (Of course, Haley, along with everyone else, is still down dozens of points to Donald Trump in both national and state polling.)
Whether this debate will have any campaign-changing effect or not can be distilled down to a single Rorschach-test question:
Does America like aggressive, feisty, playing-to-win Nikki Haley?
That’s an open question, and we’ll find out over the next week or so if tonight’s debate will propel Haley forward or if we have we seen the last of the Haley boomlet.
If I had to bet the mortgage, I’d wager that Haley will continue to float upwards in the polls towards the high teens and maybe even the low twenties as a few other candidates fade. But unless something big and unforeseen happens, Trump is still an electoral giant among pygmies in the 2024 presidential race.