Well, that was fun! (Was it?)
Former South Carolina Gov. and Trump-era U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley started her presidential campaign last February as a second- or third-tier candidate. She was most similar to fellow South Carolinian Tim Scott—both relatively polished, TV-ready Republicans with solid résumés who seemed as if they should run for president at some point, even if there wasn’t much of a case for why they should be doing it now. Donald Trump was leading the race by a wide margin, and Haley (like Scott, who dropped out in November) made the decision not to attack him directly, hoping that voters would get tired of the “chaos” around Trump on their own.
This didn’t happen—chaos is a good thing, apparently, to voters who are mad enough. But Haley did better than the other non-Trump candidates, finding a niche at primary debates as the one person who would at least attempt to sell Republican policies (on abortion in particular) to a general audience. She got a decent poll bump from this and attracted financial support from conservatives in the business and finance donor community, most notably the Kochs’ Americans for Prosperity organization. The state she was always set up to do the best in was New Hampshire, which has a local fetish for moderate politicians and rules that allow independent voters to swing on over to whichever primary they feel like voting in. (Centrist Democrats Pete Buttigieg and Amy Klobuchar did well there in 2020, although the contest was still won by a leftist from the adjacent state of Vermont.)
This time around, Chris Christie dropped out of the Republican race a few weeks before New Hampshire, removing Haley’s only competition for voters who actively dislike Trump. Two days before the primary, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis dropped out, clearing the field for Haley and Trump altogether and, in theory, simplifying the stakes for Republicans who aren’t anti-Trump per se but might have the nagging feeling, in the back of their heads, that someone else would have a better chance of beating Joe Biden this fall, perhaps because polls keep showing this over and over.
And … in this context, Haley lost—and by enough that the Associated Press called the race 10 minutes after the last polls in the state closed, at 8 p.m. Eastern time. She can now look forward to voting in South Carolina, where she trails Trump by 30, then to … a bunch of other states where Trump leads by more than that.
Where does that leave her campaign? Slate cannot see into the mind of the kind of person who would run for president against Donald Trump without being willing to criticize him, but Haley gave a defiant speech Tuesday night, while her campaign manager said in a memo she thinks Haley still can be competitive in “Virginia, Texas, Maine, Massachusetts, Minnesota, North Carolina, and Vermont” on March 5, aka Super Tuesday. Those states feature relatively educated electorates—Haley does better with voters who have college degrees—and/or allow Democrats and independents to cross over into the GOP primary, so it’s not the worst argument, but … no. Exit polling in New Hampshire found that Trump won registered Republicans on Tuesday by 50 points. Strange things have happened in American politics recently, but the Republican Party awarding its nomination to someone who is losing its voters by 50 is not going to be one of them. (Who’s in the best position to get nominated in the event of an incapacitating Trump health event or felony conviction? That would probably be Meatball Ronald, thanks to his decision to get out of the race before he was considered an active nuisance to the party.)
So, probably, give or take a Glenn Youngkin trial balloon that will get shot down with a cannon by actual voters, November’s matchup is all but officially set between Biden and Trump. And now, it appears, the news cycle is about to turn its merciless eye away from Biden’s poor favorability numbers toward the swaths of Republican and independent voters who say that they will not vote for Trump under any circumstances—not to mention the Democrats who haven’t been paying attention to the news and will likely come home to Biden after they realize that the Republicans are really, truly nominating Donald J. Trump again. (Can you blame them for not believing this? It’s a bad idea!) General election 2024 is underway—may God help us all.
