Goodbye Ron, Good Luck Nikki

It’s now fair to ask: Is the GOP Presidential Primary already essentially over?

Photos by Getty Images/Background by Samuel Branch

There was a major shuffling of the deck in the GOP presidential primary race over the weekend.

After canceling appearances on national news networks, a clear sign something was afoot, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis finally bowed out of the contest. This had seemed inevitable after DeSantis lost to Trump in Iowa by 30 points, but he made it official on Sunday.

It turns out, you can’t buy charisma, and you can’t out-nasty Trump.

That leaves Nikki Haley as the sole remaining Trump opponent. But even with the backing of the Koch Network and an endorsement from the popular GOP governor of the state, Chris Sununu, Haley is struggling mightily to catch Trump in New Hampshire, which votes in the GOP’s first primary on Tuesday. 

The numbers for Haley don’t look promising. Election analysts note that Haley trails Trump badly in the polls and, more importantly, in voter enthusiasm—the same factor that sunk her to third place in Iowa. And as I’ll discuss below, now that their candidate is out, DeSantis voters are likely mostly to break for Trump, not Haley. She will need to rely on moderates and independents to turn out, but these aren’t typical primary voters. 

A bad loss in New Hampshire would make Trump’s nomination nearly a sure thing. But somewhat counterintuitively, Trump’s inevitability is likely a good thing for the Biden camp. Like a sickness that is finally diagnosed, Trump’s candidacy needs to have a certainty and finality to it before Biden can address it fully by clarifying the stakes and sharpening his attacks.

Let’s first have a slice of schadenfreude pie as we assess how gloriously awful DeSantis’s campaign for president was before it abruptly ended. Then we’ll review how there’s only a snowball’s chance in Haley that Trump isn’t the winner on Tuesday and in all the upcoming primaries, but why this is on balance a good thing for Joe Biden.

Ron DeSayonara

Ron DeSantis was riding high after the midterms in 2022, where he bucked the national trend and thumped his opponent badly in the governor’s race in Florida. The national punditry class, having never apparently watched him debate or seen him interact with actual people live and in person, quickly crowned DeSantis the heir apparent to the future of the GOP.

But then three things happened. 

First, Trump got indicted in March 2023 in the first of what would become four different criminal cases against him. His cries of “political witch-hunt” rallied his base to him, and DeSantis began to lose ground. Rather than support the criminal justice system and the rule of law, DeSantis stayed mostly quiet, then half-heartedly condemned the indictment as political. The strange thing was, DeSantis likely knew for months that indictments were coming, but the announcement still seemed to catch him completely off guard, and his weak and undisciplined response was telling.

Second, DeSantis decided that he would win the nomination by tacking to the right of Trump. He launched a “war on woke” that involved suing the largest employer in his state, Disney. He also went after migrants and drove them from his state with threats of raids and deportations, attacked the LGBTQ+ community in schools, clubs and libraries, and signed a draconian six week abortion ban—all in an effort to come off as crueler and harsher than Trump. But none of this worked. After all, why get the diet version of Trump when you can get the real thing?

Third, people actually met him on the campaign trail in Iowa and saw him on the debate stage, shoe risers and all. To say that DeSantis is awkward and stiff around people is charitable. The man has all the charm and charisma of a golem. And while he managed to nab some important endorsements, including from Iowa governor Kim Reynolds and evangelical kingmaker Bob Vander Plaats, none of this could overcome his weird, abrasive and unfriendly demeanor. Watching the man try to smile was like watching a serial ax murderer attempt the same. It was never going to work in retail politics-heavy Iowa.

Here’s an astonishing figure: DeSantis spent some $150 million to try to win one primary. If you do the math, that’s around $6,400 for each vote he actually received on caucus day. That’s more than 10 times the previous record set by Michael Bloomberg, who spent $450 per voter only to come up similarly empty.

To no one’s surprise, DeSantis turned around and endorsed Trump, just days after complaining how the worst Republicans in America ultimately kiss Trump’s ring. If there is a silver lining to this, DeSantis abandoning his home state for the campaign trail has left him increasingly unpopular there. The Democrats have scored two political upsets in Florida lately—the mayor’s race in Jacksonville and a state house race in Orlando—and they are organizing to put abortion rights up for a constitutional amendment in November. His aides are under investigation for using migrants as political pawns, and his “war on woke” is fizzling.

As an ironic cap to his failed campaign, DeSantis purported to quote Winston Churchill, posting his concession video on the X platform with grand language allegedly from the famous British wartime Prime Minister: “Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts.” 

But Florida Man got this one wrong, too. As the International Churchill Society quickly corrected, their guy never said those words. The quote is actually—and you can’t make this up—from an ad by Anheuser Busch, the company that makes Bud Light. DeSantis had ordered a full state investigation into the company after it sent one of its cans to a trans activist, Dylan Mulvaney, as part of a social media influencer campaign.

DeSantis can now sink back into political obscurity knowing that he has reached the peak of his political fortunes in Florida, and no one outside of it wants him going any further.

Nikki Haley attacks too late

Haley had already finished a disappointing third in Iowa, despite having the enormous resources of the Koch Network as wind in her sails. Lately, she has been struggling over questions of race, first by failing to acknowledge slavery as the cause of the Civil War, and second by insisting that America is not a racist country.

That last part was particularly ironic given Trump’s latest attacks upon her, in which he chose a new nickname for her to replace the “birdbrain” insult he has hurled previously. In a post on Truth Social, the former president referred to Haley as “Nimbra”—a distortion of her birth name, Nimrata. (Haley goes by her middle name Nikki, and took her last name upon marriage.) This followed his earlier, false “birther” suggestion that Haley was not a real American who is eligible for the presidency because her Indian immigrant parents were not yet citizens at the time she was born in South Carolina.

But Trump apparently has had Haley on his own birdbrain of late. Over the weekend, Trump mistook Haley in a speech several times for Nancy Pelosi, saying that on January 6th it was Haley, not Pelosi, who wouldn’t accept federal troops.

Haley finally seized upon Trump’s mental well-being as an issue. As CNN reported, Haley spoke to a crowd in Keene, New Hampshire about it on Sunday night.

“Last night, Trump is at a rally and he’s going on and on mentioning me several times as to why I didn’t take security during the Capitol riots. Why I didn’t handle January 6 better. I wasn’t even in DC on January 6. I wasn’t in office then,” Haley said.

“They’re saying he got confused. That he was talking about something else. That he was talking about Nancy Pelosi. He mentioned me multiples times in that scenario,” the former South Carolina governor added.

“The concern I have is – I’m not saying anything derogatory, but when you’re dealing with the pressures of a presidency, we can’t have someone else that we question whether they’re mentally fit to do it.”

The Biden Campaign has already used both Trump’s mental lapse and Haley’s response in an anti-Trump ad. 

Haley is likely far too late to the game to be questioning Trump’s mental fitness. And in any event, his devoted GOP primary voters probably simply hear what they want to hear, no matter what comes out of his mouth.

If the latest poll numbers are any indication, including some deeper dives into who is likely to turn up to vote, the race is Trump’s to lose.

Haley needs a miracle to catch Trump

Polls taken before DeSantis dropped out of the race don’t show a very close race. One of the more recent, a Washington Post-Monmouth University survey, finds 52 percent of potential primary voters supporting Trump, while 34 percent are backing Haley. That’s still the best poll for Haley of any state, including her home state of South Carolina.

Another eight percent in the poll back DeSantis, but his dropping out isn’t going to result in a shift of those voters to Haley. Most of those voters would rather choose Trump, and that makes some perverse sense if you think about it: Most of them want someone tough and mean and awful, so Trump is their next choice down after DeSantis.

Another problem for Haley is one of enthusiasm. Somewhat dispiritingly, the enthused primary voters in New Hampshire are hard core MAGA folks, not traditional conservatives. While Trump leads Haley by 18 points among all potential voters, among those who said they are “extremely motivated” to vote, his lead grows to 28 percent.

The way things stand, and given the likely makeup of Tuesday’s primary voters, I concur with Dave Wasserman of Cook Political, who predicts Haley will probably carry Bedford, Amherst and a “smattering of the super-blue NH cities/towns” but that Trump “romps everywhere else.”

In short, Haley would need a surge of independent and moderate voters to turn out in order to close the gap. Otherwise, Trump wins, likely with more than 50 percent of the vote again.

Trump as the Republican nominee

This isn’t all bad news. Indeed, we have known for some time from the national polling, and at least since the confirmation in Iowa last week, that Trump is pretty much unbeatable for the GOP nomination. But that reality—that it really will be Trump on the ballot again, facing Joe Biden for a rematch—still hasn’t dawned on many Americans.

Per a report by CNN, and according to internal Biden campaign polling, among undecided voters a full three-quarters of them simply do not believe that Trump is really going to be the GOP nominee. That has presented both a challenge and an opening for Biden. These undecideds are the very folks who will determine this otherwise close election in November.

Many voters remain tuned out precisely because we are still holding primaries and debates, where we have at least gone through the motions of an ordinary GOP primary. But this of course has not been an ordinary year. Trump has stayed out of the debates and has mostly campaigned from the courthouse steps, where the media remains eager to hear him malign the judicial system. 

As soon as the math becomes inevitable—sometimes shortly after the polls close on Super Tuesday in early March—Trump will be the chosen candidate, and there will be no contest left. When general election voters are faced with the stark choice, once more, between Biden, with whom they have a lot of concerns over things like his age, and with Trump, who is a threat to the very existence of our democracy, the hope and expectation is that the undecideds will break heavily for Biden.

But whither Nikki Haley? If she wants to spare herself the embarrassment of losing to Trump in her own home state of South Carolina, she could drop out too. She may decide, however, that it’s worth earning as many delegates as she can and staying in as the only viable alternative to Trump in the likely event he is convicted, possibly in the early summer before the GOP convention, of multiple felonies by a jury in D.C.