Trump Has a Nikki Haley Problem

Her surge in the race presents him with two related questions.

Trump and Haley in the Oval Office on Oct. 9, 2018. Photo: Mark Wilson/Getty Images

On Sunday, I wrote about how recent polls out of New Hampshire have been showing surprising surges for former Gov. Nikki Haley of South Carolina, who is among a handful of remaining challengers to Trump in the primary. Trump is an obsessive poll watcher, and so Haley’s strength going into the final months of the first primary has him pondering two things:

1. How can I beat her in New Hampshire?

2. If I don’t beat her there, can she join me?

The two thoughts are somewhat related. On one hand, the Trump campaign has taken out advertisements against Haley in New Hampshire, which indicates they now see her as a real threat. On the other, Trump has begun asking others what they think of Haley, a sign that he is wondering if she might make a good VP candidate.

These two questions signify the GOP’s current identity crisis. To understand how, let’s take a look first at why Trump now has to take Haley seriously and ensure he actually beats her in New Hampshire. Then we’ll look at why a Trump-Haley ticket, which could help him win the general election, faces significant resistance within Trump’s base of support.

Is Haley the best alternative to Trump?

For many Trump-hesitant voters, 2023 has been a long process of weeding out which primary challenger would present the strongest alternative to Trump.

At first, it was widely believed their savior would be Ron DeSantis. After all, he’d won a resounding reelection in Florida, and the hardcore right saw him as the heir apparent to Trump: as mean, nasty and anti-woke as they come, but a lot more intelligent and capable. But that all turned out not to matter, as DeSantis’s distinct lack of charisma and his focus on cultural issues at the expense of good governance caused his campaign to fizzle. 

Big money donors started testing the waters with Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina, but unresolved questions about Scott’s personal life and his lackluster debate performances resulted in a failure to launch. Vivek Ramaswamy captured attention in the first debate, but then everyone quickly realized he was simply insufferable and annoying. And Chris Christie, while making a strong case against Trump, has failed to make much of a case for himself. 

This all left an opening for Haley, who polls higher than Trump in a head-to-head against Joe Biden. Many in the “traditional” GOP believe Haley could capture the Trump-hesitant vote and be a darling of the corporate right. She received a big boost when the Koch Network endorsed her over DeSantis as the way to move past Trump, and that group is now opening its considerable financial spigots. The Koch Network has pledged to assemble enough workers to knock on 100,000 doors for Haley in Iowa, and that money will also likely help her enormously in New Hampshire and then her home state of South Carolina.

When New Hampshire’s popular GOP governor, Chris Sununu, endorsed Haley over Christie, she received another big bump, and polls now put her within striking distance of Trump, with one poll even putting her within four points. Notably, in New Hampshire, independents may vote in the primaries, choosing either a Democratic or a Republican ballot at the time of voting. If undeclared voters there want to send a strong signal that they really do not want Trump as one of the state’s nominees, they have a big chance to make that clear.

All this has led Trump’s allies to take the Haley threat more seriously. As the New York Times reported, an ad attacking Haley began running this week, paid for by Trump’s super PAC. To be sure, it is fairly innocuous: It accuses Haley of flipping her position on a gas tax hike while governor of South Carolina. 

Not exactly earth-shattering.

After hearing that the ad was going to drop, Haley sought to spin its very existence as a positive, writing on X, “Two days ago, Donald Trump denied our surge in New Hampshire existed. Now, he’s running a negative ad against me. Someone’s getting nervous. #BringIt.”

Trump’s allies coming after another candidate for lack of executive consistency is ironic at best. But it also signals that they are pulling no punches when it comes to Haley, perhaps because Trump hasn’t made up his mind about the other option: getting her to join his ticket.

Trump gets Haley-curious

As the field continued to clear and Haley’s numbers kept rising, Trump began seeking input from people outside of his campaign. 

“What do you think of Nikki?” Trump has asked.

That question alone has been enough to set his extremist advisors on edge. Lately, they’ve tried to send strong signals that a Trump-Haley ticket is simply out of the question, probably hoping that Trump will absorb their public statements and agree.

Leading the charge is Trump’s former senior advisor Steve Bannon, who is currently under New York state indictment for fraud and could be in jail next year. (I know that’s an aside, but it’s fun to point out.) Bannon warned that the GOP “establishment” wants to foist Haley upon GOP voters as part of a Trump ticket. And he claims Haley employs “outdated Republican talking points” and supports “Fox News-laundered neoliberal neocon policies that MAGA finds unacceptable.”

It’s unclear what “neoliberal neocon policies” are, other than a hopeless word salad that somehow implies “establishment” politics. And it’s certainly alarming that Fox News is now considered too moderate by top MAGA spokespersons. But Bannon’s revulsion to Haley underscores where the real war lies: within the GOP, between burn-it-down MAGA leaders (think Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene, Lauren Boebert and Matt Gaetz) on one hand and “establishment” figures on the other (think Kevin McCarthy, who is singing Haley’s praises and pushing for a unity ticket.) 

So far, in this war, the MAGA extremists are winning.

But Trump has keen political instincts, and he knows that while he can easily win the GOP primary from his base of supporters alone, he likely can’t win the general election without bringing the Trump-hesitant voters back into the fold. One way to do that is to signal that there is still a place for them in the party. After all, if Haley can join him, everyone can!

This may not be an easy sell. And it may so alienate many of his own allies that they will do everything to take her down before it happens. 

Trump’s own relationship with Haley has been rocky. She picked Sen. Marco Rubio over Trump in 2016. Trump forgave most people who opposed him in 2016, and he appointed Haley as ambassador to the U.N.—a body which he openly disdained. But after January 6, she condemned Trump and warned he would be “judged harshly by history.” 

More recently, and as a kind of amends, she had promised in 2022 not to run against him if he announced his candidacy. But then she backtracked on that, too, and personally called him to tell him she was going to run after all. For someone who values loyalty, in Trump’s mind this was likely a big strike against her. He even picked a nickname for her: “Birdbrain.” It doesn’t seem to want to stick, however.

Haley’s critics will likely remind Trump of these betrayals to put the kibosh on any further musings about Haley as a VP-pick. Per Politico, Tucker Carlson has pledged to advocate “as strongly as I could” against such a ticket. Trump’s son, Don Trump, Jr., has also pledged to “go to great lengths to make sure” his father doesn’t pick Haley. 

For her part, Haley says she isn’t interested in such talk anyway. 

“I don’t play for second,” Haley told Christian Broadcast Network. “It’s offensive when anybody says that, ‘Oh, she wants to be vice president.’ You don’t do something like this to be vice president. You don’t sacrifice emotionally, mentally, physically with your family, everything to come in second.”

But wait, does any of this matter?

Trump still dominates the polls, and there’s no indication that his base will abandon him for someone like Haley. She might pull an upset in New Hampshire, and that could give her momentum into her home state race in South Carolina on February 24, 2024. But couldn’t he just turn around and trounce her on Super Tuesday the next week?

That’s still the most likely outcome. But politics are unpredictable, and especially in a year like 2024, Trump could still stumble. His nomination could stop becoming inevitable if she beats him in one or more states, or even draws close. Trump’s mental and physical decline could become hard even for MAGA to ignore. And it could finally dawn on enough GOP voters that his 91 criminal counts and likely impending convictions aren’t a winning narrative for the general election.

At that point, a very important question will arise: Who is waiting in second place?

Imagine a brokered convention, because midway through the primary season Trump is actually convicted on federal charges. The GOP could face electoral annihilation if they nominate him anyway. Who would be the choice of the assembled delegates at that point? Would they double down on Trump, or go with someone else? Either way, the party could split.

Haley appears to be positioning herself to take up the Republican mantle should Trump’s shaky hands drop it. She has been careful to at least sound as awful and right-wing as she can on issues from abortion to LGBTQ rights. But would the MAGA extremists ever accept someone who supports Ukraine and the existing international order, is the daughter of Asian immigrants, and doesn’t act like she wants to be an authoritarian like Trump or DeSantis?

No one yet knows. But given the uncertainty of what lies ahead in 2024, it’s important to begin gaming this out. While Trump looks like he has a lock on Iowa, New Hampshire might still be in play. And where the “traditional” GOP establishment throws its weight in the coming weeks will be a critical indication of where the internal battle lines will be drawn.

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