On the menu today: We’ll dive into Super Tuesday results, Nikki Haley’s suspension of her campaign, and the world of politics in a moment, but first . . . yes, it’s time for the spring webathon. And coincidentally, today’s the last day to book a cabin on the National Review Institute cruise to Alaska. Book your cabin now or miss out on the chance to see me tumbling down the side of Denali while my family laughs.
As Rich mentioned yesterday, there are two ways to support our mission. National Review exists as two entities: National Review Institute, and National Review Inc.
National Review Institute is the 501(c)(3) not-for-profit journalistic think tank created by WFB to support the NR mission, and it runs seminars, conferences, fellowships. Donations to National Review Institute are tax-deductible. Donations to National Review Inc., which publishes the magazine and website, are not.
In other words, National Review Inc. is the accidental nonprofit, as I call it, while National Review Institute is the deliberate nonprofit. Please feel free to choose whichever option is to your liking or — if you are feeling particularly generous and want to have maximum impact — both.
I’m proud of my colleagues and the work that they do — from Andy McCarthy’s keen insight into seemingly every legal issue that breaks into the news cycle, to Noah Rothman spelling out how Iran’s bellicosity and provocations represent an existential threat to Biden’s presidency, to Audrey Fahlberg’s tough-minded postmortem of the Ron DeSantis campaign, to Charlie Cooke’s sharp-eyed recognition of the omissions from the coverage of the shooting in Kansas City, to Ryan Mills’s reporting on the buyer’s remorse of Chicago voters after a year of mayor Brandon Johnson, to Dominic Pino’s ability to make the most complicated economic issues understandable and clear, to Luther Ray Abel’s insight into the difficulty of modern military recruiting, to Jimmy Quinn’s all-encompassing coverage of the Pacific Rim, to Maddy Kearns’s patiently explaining to ill-informed mainstream-media reporters that self-immolation is not the same as Christian martyrs being burned alive by other people for their faith.
We cover politics, we cover culture, we cover international affairs, we even cover quirky and easily overlooked corners of modern American life, like the country’s first diner in Rhode Island; a medieval castle in Loveland, Ohio; the New Jersey neighborhoods best known for the filming of The Sopranos; what it’s like to drive a milk truck in the wee morning hours in Oostburg, Wisc.; and Sarah Schutte’s adventures in flight school. (Sarah edits this newsletter, so you know she lived to tell the tale.)
Oh, and as you’ve noticed, I’ve spent the past few months reporting from some of the world’s most notorious trouble spots — Ukraine, Taiwan, Transnistria, Des Moines. . . .
But we can’t do it without you.
And of course, you can also subscribe, if you don’t already!
And now, on to a busier Wednesday morning. . . .
Vaya Con Dios, Nikki Haley
I went to bed sure that the electorate had given us a relatively quiet and boring Super Tuesday.
I awoke this morning to the news that Nikki Haley is suspending her campaign. In her meeting with reporters Friday, Haley was cagey about what threshold she felt she needed to hit to make continuing her campaign a worthwhile endeavor. She insisted that when she met with voters, “No one asks, ‘How long are you staying in?’ What they say is, ‘keep fighting.’”
Whatever her internal metric of success was, she didn’t reach it last night. Haley and her campaign can point to a few bright spots — winning Vermont outright, hitting 40 percent in Utah, getting 36 percent in Massachusetts, and winning about a third of the vote in Colorado. But in a bunch of other big red states, she got demolished — under 20 percent in Tennessee, under 18 percent in Texas, under 16 percent in Oklahoma, under 13 percent in Alabama, and under 12 percent in the Alaska caucus.
While Trump’s winning the nomination has been a certainty since Iowa or New Hampshire, I wish Haley had stayed in. There are still 26 states and four territories that haven’t held their Republican presidential primaries or caucuses yet; the only folks who will come out and participate are the true diehards.
There is something more than a little bit strange about a presidential-primary process where a swarm of candidates declare their interest two years before the election, but by the time about half the country gets an opportunity to vote in a primary, everyone has dropped out except the front-runner. Iowa Republicans sealed the fate of Ron DeSantis, and you can’t begrudge Republicans in places such as Arizona, Georgia, Florida, Pennsylvania, Indiana, and Wisconsin for resenting the fact that they never got to cast a meaningful ballot in the nominating contest.
Perhaps this is one of the reasons I’m so snarky about the 1 percent candidates who are running glorified book tours, who seem to come out of the woodwork every cycle. Running for president is hard, and the process chews up and spits out well-known, previously well-liked governors and senators with real records of accomplishment. The average little-known congressman or long-retired governor or radio talk-show host or mayor or whoever this guy was isn’t going to make a splash, and I don’t think we in the press are doing anyone any favors by playing along with the fantasy headline, “This person you’ve never heard of may just be the next president of the United States.”
Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised that Nikki Haley was the last woman standing among the Trump challengers. She made the most of her opportunities in the debates, she used her campaign cash wisely, and as a relatively young Indian-American woman, she made a stark contrast with Trump. She’s accumulated a conservative record as governor but is polished enough to swim in the waters of the American establishment.
For a while, I’ve contended that a lot of folks in political media label Democratic officeholders and candidates “centrist,” “moderate,” or “liberal” based entirely on aesthetics and personal style. A figure such as Democratic senator Sherrod Brown of Ohio votes like Bernie Sanders, but get covered, and is perceived, completely differently. Haley enjoyed the same effect on the Republican side; by campaigning with her Southern, seemingly polite “bless your heart” style instead of Trump’s raging about “retribution,” she was perceived as much more “moderate” or “centrist” than her record indicates.
She’s already taken a ride on the merry-go-round that was Trump’s presidential cabinet, and I can’t imagine a repeat of that holds much appeal for her or for Trump. I’ve heard a lot of people speculating that she was trying to position herself for 2028, but a scenario where the party turns to her four years from now is difficult to see. The Trump crowd will likely still hate her, and other, fresher faces will have emerged.
And if Trump doesn’t win this cycle, who can be certain Trump won’t run again in 2028? (If Trump wins, how soon until we hear Trump fans calling for the repeal of the 22nd Amendment?) After how the 2024 Republican primary has shaken out, if you were a rising-star Republican governor, would you want to run against Trump in 2028?
The Republican Party’s presidential nomination is Donald Trump’s until he dies.
The sympathy for Trump stemming from multiple indictments put the nomination out of reach for anybody else. But the fact that the reflex among Republican voters was to rally behind him suggests that they never truly left him in the first place. . . . Ron DeSantis tried to run against him from the right, Chris Christie from the left, and Nikki Haley from the middle. None of it mattered. All that mattered was that most Republican voters were always with Trump.
There wasn’t a ton of news on the Democratic side, other than some guy no one has ever heard of, Jason Palmer, beating Joe Biden in the American Samoa caucus. “Out of 91 ballots cast in the territory’s caucus, Palmer won 51 and Biden won 40, according to the local party. . . . Palmer, 52, said he never visited the territory before the caucus.” You know turnout is low when your vote total is lower than your age, and you still win.
Jason Palmer is so obscure, he makes Perry Johnson look like David Stuckenberg. Or maybe it’s the other way around.
Will this change the outcome of the Democratic primary? No, not in any significant way. But . . . could you see Barack Obama’s presidential campaigns in either 2008 or 2012 getting caught flatfooted like this and losing a caucus to some no-name? Nah, me neither. David Axelrod and his crew ran a tight ship. I’m not getting that vibe from this Biden team.
The takeaway from the big profile piece in The New Yorker this week is that the Biden campaign is convinced all the polls are wrong, and that it, and its man in the Oval Office, are doing great:
A series of senior aides told me that they doubt Biden is trailing Trump as much as some polls have suggested. “Polling is broken,” one of them said. “You can’t figure out how to get someone on the phone.” Pollsters partly concede the point; few people these days are willing to be candid with a stranger about politics, and fewer still have landlines. “I think the only person who calls me on my landline is Joe Biden,” the aide added. Campaigns that are trailing in the polls often impugn them, of course, but Biden aides cite reasons for their skepticism. When I raised the issue with Jennifer O’Malley Dillon, a top adviser who recently moved from the White House to the campaign, she made a distinction between “favorability” (a line of inquiry in opinion polls) and “vote choice” (the outcome of recent elections, notably the recent ones in which Democrats did well). “Historically, favorability and vote choice have been correlated,” she said. “I actually think that that’s no longer the case.”
Outside the White House, though, concerned Democrats note that Biden was not on the ballot in 2022 or 2023, so voters did not have a chance to signal their feelings about him. They worry that aides are relying too much on Biden’s self-image as the underdog who disproves the doubters. In any Administration, there is a tendency to amplify the good news and obscure the bad. “Every White House does it to some degree,” the former Democratic official told me. He said he believes that Biden’s polls show “flashing red warning signs,” but that the President “can just choose to hear the positive reinforcement.”
I don’t know — if everybody was as quietly happy with Biden as his team believes, would he have just lost a caucus to some guy who’s so obscure, he makes Irving Schmidlap look like Travis Kelce?
ADDENDUM: In all of yesterday’s excitement, it was easy to miss the news that Arizona’s Democrat-turned-independent senator, Kirsten Sinema, will not run for reelection. This means that retiring Joe Manchin and Sinema, the only two Democrats who didn’t want to get rid of the filibuster, won’t be in the Senate in the not-too-distant future.
The Editors note that the fact that a woman who voted with the Biden administration’s position was considered “too moderate” by Arizona Democrats is a bad sign:
If Biden gets reelected with a Democratic Senate, conservatives can no longer count on Manchin and Sinema to hold the line against efforts from the Left to do away with the filibuster. The prospect of the filibuster going away should be worrisome for all those who still care about limiting the expansion of the federal government.
But hey, relax, everyone, I’m sure Kari Lake has got this. Maybe this time around, she’ll ask fans of John McCain for their votes instead of telling his supporters to “get out.”