The Focal of a 2020 Democratic Primary: An Interview with the former Secretary of State Mike Pence, Tim Scott, and Ron DeSantis
One of the defining early questions of the 2024 presidential election seems about to be answered with some of the ex-president’s potential rivals for the Republican nomination making clear moves toward the race.
A source told CNN that Haley will launch her campaign in Charleston on February 15. In a political world where would-be candidates often make throat clearing noises, former Secretary of State Mike Pence was making the same sort of noises while promoting his new book. And South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott is setting off on a listening tour focusing on faith. The first two stops just happen to include Iowa and his own state – early voting pillars that will frame the GOP primary contest early next year.
After the first two state campaign swing of Trump, this sudden flurry of activity followed by another potential rival, Ron DeSantis, who he claims is showing disloyalty by considering his own run. The rising star of Republican politics pointed out that he was the only one who had won reelection.
The clearest signs of forming campaigns is that Trump, who has had the most influence on the GOP since the 2016 election, is not so formidable that he can be challenged by serious rivals.
It would be too much to say that his rivals sense weakness given the former president’s deeply loyal bond with activist Republicans who decide primaries. Trump has so-so campaign appearances, low-energy launches, and a poor record of raising money that make him a liability in the election.
Still, having multiple rivals would help Trump, as it did in 2016, since the winner-take-all nature of most Republican primaries allows a candidate with a mere plurality of votes to build up big delegate leads in a crowded field.
In other words, if Trump can split the opposition, he can win the primary, but that’s no guarantee for the general election given that the twice-impeached former president left Washington in disgrace after trying to steal an election and fomenting a mob attack on the US Capitol.
She engineered a smooth exit from the Trump administration on her own terms. She was in the midst of a photo-op departure meeting with Trump in the Oval Office, which looked like it would be footage for a future Republican primary campaign. Haley is not being subtle about her pitch – one that could allow her to gently argue that it’s time to move on from the ex-president and President Joe Biden without directly repudiating the Trump presidency and his fans.
It’s time for a new generation. It is time for more leadership. In a Fox News interview last month, Haley said that they have lost the last seven popular votes for president. It is time to get a Republican in there that will lead and win a general election.
Yet the most fundamental question that Haley will face is whether the Republican base, which has rewarded culture warriors, extreme “Make America Great Again” rhetoric and election denialists, has any interest at all in what she plans to sell.
Her credentials look formidable in isolation but less so when considering the values of the party whose nomination she is seeking. For example, is there really a market in the GOP for a more unifying, multicultural, less strident delivery vehicle for Trump’s “America First” creed? Even though the ex-president frequently uses profanity, such as calling liberals “bastards” and laceration of the media, it creates more of an emotional connection with his fans than a direct ideological connection.
She chastised her party for following Trump down a path he shouldn’t have taken after leaving the administration, which led to the January 6, 2021, insurrection. But with Trump still a powerful figure in the GOP, she repositioned herself in October 2021.
Some pundits are wondering how she will build up a wide support base to take her to the nomination after she casts her ballot for the GOP sweet spot.
I think there’s room for three people in this race. The more anti-Trumper – not a never Trumper, the Trump lite, which is where Ron DeSantis is, (and) Nikki Haley, and then Trump himself,” said former Illinois Republican Rep. Adam Kinzinger, who is now a senior CNN political commentator. It is going to be a battle for Haley because she has been pro- Trump, anti-Trump and now he is going to run. She doesn’t actually have a natural constituency yet. She’s a smart lady, so we will see how she goes.”
I have been to Iowa and New Hampshire. This is not random,” he said at a forum in Washington, DC, on Wednesday. “We’re just trying to figure our way through this. It is an unbelievably momentous decision to say you believe you should be the leader of the United States of America,” he added.
Nikki Haley: From the earliest days to the present day, what she told her dad, and what she had to do about it
It seems like it would be better for Haley to keep this positioning issue to herself since he is the ex-president’s enforcer at the State Department and director of the CIA. Even if they were able to get from Trump almost everything that a GOP primary voter could, they might be able to get from Pompeo, since the West Point graduate and former Kansas congressman seems to have a calmer temperament.
I remember the first time I saw Nikki Haley. It was in a high school gym before the 2012 South Carolina Republican presidential primary. Tim Scott, who was then a congressman, was holding a raucous town hall, and Ms. Haley was there to cheer him on. The youngest governor in the country was the first woman governor of South Carolina. Ms. Haley had that thing that talented politicians have. She seemed to like people and people liked her. She made the conversations feel special and important by not talking to you. She seemed to have a lot of potential.
The politician who saw herself as a role model for women and immigrants transformed herself into everything she claimed to oppose: By 2021, Ms. Haley was openly embracing her inner MAGA with comments like, “Thank goodness for Donald Trump or we never would have gotten Kamala Harris to the border.” In one sentence, she attacked both women and immigrants while praising the man she had vowed never to stop fighting. She had gone from saying “I have to tell you, Donald Trump is everything I taught my children not to do in kindergarten” to “I don’t want us to go back to the days before Trump.”