Nikki Haley is on a roll — but the question is how far it will take her.
Haley has emerged as the clear winner of the first Republican debate, held in Milwaukee on Aug. 23.
Her polls have ticked up in the aftermath — both nationally and in the key early states. She has got an infusion of fundraising. Her campaign aides eagerly note that she has been seeing bigger crowds on the stump too.
The former South Carolina governor’s run of good news continued Thursday when a CNN/SSRS poll indicated she would be the strongest general election candidate of all against President Biden.
In hypothetical match-ups, every other Republican candidate was, in effect, in a dead heat with Biden. Former President Trump, who leads GOP primary polls by a huge margin, held just a 1 point edge over Biden. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who still holds onto second place in national GOP polls, was exactly tied with Biden, at 47 percent each.
By contrast, Haley led Biden by six points, 49 percent to 43 percent.
The result was a stark one, and it could have real appeal for a Republican electorate desperate, above all, for victory in 2024.
It also underlines the arguments made by Haley boosters that she has a greater appeal to independent voters and female voters, and is a less divisive figure, than her rivals including Trump and DeSantis.
“This is the sort of positive that she was likely looking for, which gives her something to talk about to the Republican electorate,” said GOP pollster David Winston, who is not affiliated with any candidate in this year’s race. “It gives her the opening to say, ‘This poll says I am the strongest candidate.’”
Haley makes that case plenty as it is.
She reminds voters often on the stump that she has never lost a race. She talks about how polls going into the first contests next year will inevitably look very different from how they look now. And she underlines that she has often been an underdog, dating back to her runs for the South Carolina state House and, later, when she became the Palmetto State’s first female and first governor who does not identify as white.
Shortly before the first debate, she appeared at the Iowa State Fair in a T-shirt bearing the slogan: “Underestimate me. That’ll be fun.”
Olivia Perez-Cubas, a Haley campaign spokesperson, told this column that the audience from the first debate had gotten “to see the candidates up close. A lot of those people liked what they saw in Nikki Haley — her toughness, her honesty, and her refusal to back down on the important fights.”
Haley’s campaign claims to have raised more than $1 million in the first 72 hours after that debate.
There have also been some eye-catching polls from the early states. A recent NMB Research poll of New Hampshire had Haley tied with DeSantis for second place, with each winning 10 percent support. At least two recent polls of Iowa have put her in third place and advancing.
But all the positive vibes don’t make the gradient Haley has to climb much less steep.
Right now, Trump is so far ahead of the rest of the pack that the other contenders are fighting for scraps.
The New Hampshire poll that had her and DeSantis tied for second place, for example, had Trump 37 points ahead of them both.
In the weighted average of national polls maintained by data site FiveThirtyEight, Haley is in fourth place, behind biotech entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy as well as Trump and DeSantis.
In that average, Haley registers roughly 7 percent support. Trump is on 53 percent, DeSantis on 16 percent and Ramaswamy on 9 percent.
The dynamic between Ramaswamy and Haley seems especially sharp. She excoriated him for his position on Ukraine — and what she contends is his lack of foreign policy experience — during the debate, while he refers to her by her more stereotypically Indian names, “Nimarata Randhawa,” while criticizing her on his website.
In any event, the real question is whether Haley, whose appeal appears to be strongest to more upscale Republican voters, can come to pose a genuine threat to Trump, whose populist instincts inspire avid support among a sizable share of the GOP grassroots.
Haley’s campaign manager, Betsy Ankney, sought to address that point head-on in a memo first published by Axios on Wednesday.
In the memo, Ankney contended that a plurality of the GOP primary electorate, especially in the early states, is still shopping around for an alternative to Trump.
Ankney further asserted that Trump was running as, in effect, an incumbent.
“The number of voters who are ONLY considering voting for Trump is around 25%,” Ankney wrote. “He has a strong grip on that 25%, but if any other incumbent were staring down those numbers, they would be rightly nervous.”
Haley’s campaign manager also took a swipe at DeSantis and Ramaswamy for, in her view, being willing to “fall all over themselves to copy Trump on everything from policy to his leadership style.”
Still, though Haley is tonally very different from Trump and has criticized him on occasion — including saying during the debate that he was “the most disliked politician in America” — she did herself serve as his United Nations ambassador, and she abjures the more aggressive criticisms of him articulated most conspicuously by former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie (R).
It is possible that her nuanced approach to Trump pays off. But it’s also possible Haley’s approach comes to be seen as a too-clever-by-half effort to thread an electoral needle.
Republican skeptics contend that Haley’s approach, which also includes a belief that a national abortion ban in the early stages of pregnancy is unrealistic, garners favorable media coverage but is less likely to win over the GOP primary electorate.
“Most of the vote that isn’t for Trump is socially-minded, has some kind of social conscience,” said Barry Bennett, who was a Trump senior advisor during his 2016 run and worked for the short-lived campaign of Miami Mayor Francis Suarez this year. “The vast majority of those pro-life people are never going to vote for somebody who is going to let New York and California decide what to do” on abortion.
Other unaffiliated Republicans are at least intrigued by Haley’s apparent momentum, however.
“She is in a very good position and the theory of her race is stronger now than anybody else’s,” said Rick Tyler, a GOP consultant and Trump critic who was Sen. Ted Cruz’s (R-Texas) communications director during the 2016 campaign.
“Now the question is, does she have the organization and ground game to compete?” Tyler added. “We don’t elect people on national polls. But can she get people to the caucuses in Iowa, can she get people to vote in New Hampshire? She has got to be able to turn her people out.”
The Memo is a reported column by Niall Stanage.