How Nikki Haley Just Might Beat Donald Trump
- Thread starter binsfeldcyhawk2
- Start date
If the Tea Party never existed, leading to this Trump/MAGA nonsense, Nikki Haley wouldn't have gone loony to appease the crazies, which would have made her someone for me to think about. Now, it's too late for her. She ruined it with cowardice.
He dealt with it the wrong way,... Should have simply taken the position that this is now a states issue. Florida state legislators wrote the bill, voted on it, and passed it. Him signing a bill that the Florida legislature wanted doesn't mean that he was endorsing this 6 week approach for any other state.
We already had a 15 week ban which is an acceptable limit for most folks.
He could have just vetoed the 6 week ban. If he signed it...he agrees with it.
It's a cult and the cult leader will win the primary.
He could be in prison and he will run from prison and likely not lose many votes.
He could be in prison and he will run from prison and likely not lose many votes.
Agree with this assessment. Haley is doomed as long as DeSantis is banking votes/delegates.
She needs an upset to generate new interest and momentum. 2nd place in Iowa plus a win in NH or she needs a miracle … Trump choking on a BigMac e.g.
What does that have to do with the Republican primary between Haley and Trump?
If he wins we are. Him and his people fought and risked everything to keep him in power the last time and it almost worked. They have learned their mistakes and will attempt to keep him in power in 2029.
Said by a white male who thinks women agree with him. LOL. Nice try bins.
Not if people would actually let the Democrats run shit...the only pissed off people would be the wealthy. Instead everybody listens to Republican lies about socialism and the like. We aren't screwed, yet, but we are really really dumb.
Sigh...
WSJ News Exclusive | Support for 15-Week Abortion Ban Outweighs Opposition, WSJ Poll Finds
A majority of voters think abortion should be legal in most cases, but many back a 15-week ban being considered by the Supreme Court.
www.wsj.com
You're dumber than I thought if you think a majority of women agree with this. Who owns the WSJ? Sigh, indeed. Seriously, women want men to tell them what they can do with their bodies...and you believe that?Sigh...
WSJ News Exclusive | Support for 15-Week Abortion Ban Outweighs Opposition, WSJ Poll Finds
A majority of voters think abortion should be legal in most cases, but many back a 15-week ban being considered by the Supreme Court.
I think she will hang in there as long as she can to see if prison might hurt Trump's numbers or force him to bow out.
15 weeks is in line with most of Europe.
Main point being a 15 week ban is far more defensible than the 6 week ban he signed which was what the discussion was about.
National average has him at 60% and her at 11%. Conviction won't happen by Super Tuesday. Plus when Vivek drops out his supporters will probably go for a trump. Metrics are all wrong for her.
I replied to what you said about 15 weeks, which is BS. Women don't agree with you. Millions of men who are pro-choice don't agree with you. What you said was false so I called it out.
Yeah I don't think it's a likely strategy to work but that's about all she's got.
If Trump succeeds in significantly delaying the DC trial date the Republican primaries will be completed, or nearly completed, before a jury could render a verdict which might damage his appeal to Republican voters.
Also- c’mon now, Trump will never bow out.
My thoughts are similar and everyone paying attention knows that it settled nationally and is now an individual state issue.
I understand this must be an issue for you but this is like your house being on fire (state of the nation) and complaining about the color of the drapes. I agree that a majority of people agree with you on this but it must be down on the line for some considering the amount of influx the state of Florida has had since he has been there.
Haley has tried to use middle ground words about abortion, but she'll never be the candidate unless she bends the knee to the pro life absolutists. She's a skilled enough politician to think she can placate them by saying the words, and then governing differently. If a Republican does not go 6 week or full ban, then a good chunk of the GOP base stays at home.
Spot on. He's gotten rid of the "weak links" in his group. If he's elected again, there won't be a Mike Pence there to save the day. There will be a Kari Lake type there to do whatever Trump tells her to. There will be Michael Flynn types all over the administration.
I think the worst case is actually him losing, then all hell breaking loose with GOP-run states throwing out their results, fake electors from every state that Trump lost, violent protests, etc. And whatever nonsense occurs I have no faith that the current SCOTUS would uphold the constitution.
Honestly, unless and until Biden is sworn in next January, we are screwed as long as Trump is alive.
Might be some truth to that but I think you underestimate the dislike of the D’s and Joe in that base.
It's the Retrumplican party cult of personality. The only way he loses the nomination is if he's caught having gay sex with a transgender male and even then they might overlook the transgression. "It was just gay boys locker room stuff. Everybody’s does it. What's the big deal?"Sure, at the moment, it looks like Donald Trump will win the 2024 Republican nomination. But it smells a bit like 2016, when there was near unanimity in the press and the political class that he didn’t have a shot in hell against Hillary Clinton.
In an unstable, unconventional time, it’s not inconceivable to imagine a scenario in which the bottom suddenly falls out for the former president and a rival ambushes him on his way to the GOP convention in Milwaukee. Like Nikki Haley.
Let’s review the last quarter-century of presidential elections.
The GOP’s Electoral College lock has been picked. The Democratic Blue Wall has been breached. Ohio, a longtime bellwether, has gone red. Georgia and Arizona, longtime GOP stalwarts, have gone blue. Jeb Bush, a GOP juggernaut, lost to a reality TV star. Joe Biden, a dead letter after the first 2020 primaries, is now president.
If we’ve learned anything, it’s that the laws of political gravity or axioms about elected politics don’t always apply anymore. Traditional voting habits have been thrown out the window. Polling has proved unreliable. And yet here we are, again, operating with utter certainty that the GOP primary is already cooked.
This isn’t a prediction or a guarantee that Haley will beat Trump. But if it happens, here’s how it would work.
Her uphill climb begins next Monday in the Iowa caucuses, where Haley needs a solid second- or third-place finish. In her best-case scenario, the former U.N. ambassador finishes a strong second — which sounds the death knell for Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis — and holds Trump to under 50 percent.
While she hasn’t concentrated on Iowa like DeSantis, who shows signs of having a formidable ground game there, there is an outline for Haley to follow in the state. In 2016, Marco Rubio won just 5 of Iowa’s 99 counties but he won nearly a quarter of the vote. He delivered a strong third-place showing — less than 2,500 votes behind Trump — by running best in the more populous parts of the state, particularly in the Des Moines suburbs and in counties with high levels of educational attainment.
For better and for worse, Haley and Rubio share a political profile: roughly the same age, the children of immigrants and forged in the GOP’s tea party era. As South Carolina governor in 2016, Haley endorsed Rubio before the South Carolina primary, a coup for the Florida senator at the time since she was wildly popular at home. Haley “exemplifies what I want the Republican Party to be known for in the 21st century — vibrant, reform-oriented, optimistic, upwardly mobile,” Rubio told reporters at the time.
As long as Haley places or shows in Iowa — virtually no one in the state, and not even the campaigns themselves, think Trump will lose — she is in the hunt. In fact, she could join Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, John McCain, Mitt Romney and Trump in the pantheon of GOP nominees who lost in Iowa.
After Iowa, it’s on to New Hampshire, where expectations will be higher. She’s already nipping at Trump’s heels in the latest polls, so anything less than a second-place finish could prove fatal to Haley’s campaign.
But New Hampshire is also uniquely suited for her. Polls suggest it is the early state where Trump is weakest. She has spent time and directed resources there and it shows — she has doubled her support over the past two months. Her efforts have been bolstered by popular GOP Gov. Chris Sununu, who is pulling out all the stops on her behalf. (At 13 years old, Sununu saw the power of a New Hampshire governor to sway the state results when his father, then-Gov. John Sununu, helped lift George H.W. Bush to victory in 1988.)
This is where she needs to bleed Trump and show Republicans in the states to come — most notably in her home state, which votes a month later — that there is a viable alternative.
New Hampshire election rules work to Haley’s advantage since independent voters can take part in the GOP primary. According to the most recent UNH/CNN Granite State Poll, she leads Trump by a wide margin among these undeclared voters. In New Hampshire, this isn’t a small slice of the electorate. There are more undeclared voters than Republicans or Democrats; 39 percent of the state’s registered voters are undeclared. And without a competitive Democratic primary, the action is on the GOP side, incentivizing undeclared voters to pull a Republican ballot. The last time there wasn’t a competitive Democratic contest, in 2012, independents cast nearly half the GOP primary vote.
Chris Christie’s departure from the race Wednesday was the necessary first step. With the most vocal anti-Trump Republican gone, now there is a possibility she can consolidate the vote against the frontrunner; together, their support surpassed Trump’s in the latest Granite State Poll. And two-thirds of Christie’s supporters indicated Haley is their second choice. A Haley victory in New Hampshire isn’t out of the question; the Granite State Poll shows her within 7 points of Trump.
Then comes her home state, South Carolina, which is scheduled to vote almost exactly a month later. Technically, Nevada looms in-between but the confusing details — a non-binding state-run Feb. 6 primary that the Trump-dominated local GOP refuses to acknowledge, followed by a state-party-run caucus two days later — makes it likely that, for momentum purposes, the results of both will be a wash.
In South Carolina, Haley trails Trump by a wide margin in the polls. And the state’s rapid growth — and Trump’s grip on the party — means it’s a different state than when Haley first won the governorship in 2010. But no candidate who’s won statewide twice can be easily dismissed, especially if she’s riding the tiger out of Manchester.
Contrary to conventional wisdom, Haley doesn’t have to win New Hampshire, or even South Carolina — she just has to keep it close enough to keep donors and voters convinced there might be a real nomination fight and move forward. Keep in mind that through the end of February, only 142 of the 2,429 delegates will have been allocated, just under 6 percent.
Which means Super Tuesday on March 5 looms as Haley’s moment of truth, the proving ground when the GOP learns once and for all if she’s the viable Trump alternative DeSantis was supposed to be. Roughly two-thirds of all GOP delegates will be allocated in March, the bulk of them on March 5. Among the 15 states up for grabs that day: California, North Carolina, Texas and Virginia.
A number of Southern Trump strongholds will vote that day — including Alabama, Arkansas and Tennessee — and the demographics of the new Republican Party with its working-class base will work against her. Even as a daughter of the South, she will struggle to expand her footprint beyond the upscale suburbs where GOP support has eroded during the Trump era. But if she’s held her own — and can hold him to under 50 percent in certain states, a critical threshold for delegate allocation purposes — she could scoop up a large swath of delegates.
There’s still a good chance this is where the ride ends. After Super Tuesday, primary season transitions from a momentum play to a delegate slog, and Trump is well-prepared for that, having learned from his 2016 experience.
To go farther, Haley will need a few surprise finishes accompanied by strong performances in some traditionally blue states where beaten-down Republicans might welcome the prospect of a Haley-led ticket and the prospect of diminished down-ticket losses. She’d also probably need a big-state win in a place like California. If she were to accomplish such a feat — and continued to hold her margins over Joe Biden in head-to-head polling matchups — she could justify remaining in the race, especially with Trump’s legal troubles looming in the background.
The convention is another problem entirely, if she makes it that far. As hard as it is to envision a scenario in which she wrests the nomination from Trump, there isn’t much precedent for a nominee with four criminal indictments either. A felony conviction would breathe oxygen into the case for Haley, particularly if it led to a scenario where Haley continued to lead Biden in the polls and Trump was trailing, or where independents, women and suburbanites turned even more sharply against him.
It’s a bank shot, of course. Trump occupies the commanding heights. But there’s no shortage of recent examples where conventional political wisdom was upended or a seemingly unassailable politician’s fortunes took a dramatic turn for the worse.
Consider the fate of Christie himself. In 2011, he was soaring in the polls, and a group of Iowa activists and donors even flew out to New Jersey to urge him to run for president. Five years later, when he did decide to run in Iowa, he came in tenth place. By this year, he didn’t even bother campaigning there because he didn’t have a prayer of winning the state. And he didn’t make it to New Hampshire either.
Don’t Be So Certain Trump Has the Nomination Locked Up
Here’s the path for a Nikki Haley upset.www.politico.com
Trump would just claim he was raped. He's a victim, always.
It could be an issue if the GOP has full control of both the house and the senate. They will probably throw out all of Biden's electors.
Furthermore down the party the people who cared more about democracy than Trump have been pushed out.
Even if he loses, 2024 could be a giant constitutional crisis as Republicans will essentially refuse to accept that Trump has lost.
Registered doesn't mean shit. When was the last time a Dem was governor? When was the last time Dems controlled the state? When was the last time a Dem Presidential candidate won in Florida? There's too many olds here for the Dems to overcome.
Not true
Desantis come on in 2019
So having more registered voters in your state doesn't matter. OK.
Again, RD took a purple state and made it red through policy and common sense. Maybe Dems aren't winning there because their policies are garbage.
And we wouldn't have had the Tea Party without Obama. So really, it's the Secret Mooslim’s fault.
I think it will be Trump, DeSantis, Haley in Iowa.
Haley has to win in New Hampshire to even stay in the race imo. She finishes second in NH and she's done. Btw, she's done. Trump is the nominee and likely President in 2025.
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