Between Trump and DeSantis, Nikki Haley sees an opening

Nikki Haley is speaking to some three dozen voters, mostly women, over pizza and sodas at an Italian restaurant in Denison, Iowa. Toward the end of her 20-minute stump speech, the former ambassador to the United Nations offers a critique of former President Donald Trump, albeit in diplomatically careful language.

“We have to leave the drama and the baggage of the past,” says Ms. Haley. “Don’t elect someone who is going to win a primary and not win a general. You know what I’m talking about.”

Since launching her presidential bid in February, Ms. Haley has avoided attacking her former boss by name, instead making veiled comments about electability and the need for “a new generation” of leaders. Like every other Republican White House hopeful not named Trump, she’s attempting a difficult – some would say impossible – balancing act: Trying to persuade wavering Trump supporters that they ought to go with someone else, without provoking the ire of the former president’s die-hard fans, while simultaneously cultivating the Trump haters who are looking for a conservative alternative.

It’s a familiar dynamic to anyone who watched the 2016 primary campaign, and it may well result in a similar outcome this time. So far, Mr. Trump is dominating in the polls, while Ms. Haley has been stuck in the low single digits.

Still, it’s early, and much could happen in the nine months before the Iowa caucuses. Mr. Trump is under criminal indictment and contending with multiple investigations. Lately, the second most popular Republican, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, has seen his poll numbers plummet before even announcing his campaign, creating a potential opening for a Trump-adjacent-but-not-Trump candidate.

And if anyone can successfully walk that tightrope, it might be Ms. Haley.

As a member of the Trump administration, she studiously avoided criticizing the man she had once called an example of “everything I taught my children not to do in kindergarten,” leaving on her own terms after a relatively uncontroversial tenure. After the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol, Ms. Haley said Mr. Trump’s actions “will be judged harshly by history,” but just weeks later wrote in an op-ed that most of his policies as president were “outstanding, and made America stronger, safer and more prosperous.”

Then there’s the matter of her campaign itself – which she launched after saying she wouldn’t run if Mr. Trump were to seek the nomination.

To critics, these equivocations smack of inauthenticity – a politician trying to be all things to all people, at a time when the nation needs a leader willing to take a firm stance. Some openly wonder if she’s really running for vice president.

Yet others see her as one of the few figures on the right who stands a chance of uniting a deeply fractured party after a tumultuous few election cycles – who could build on the more popular elements of Trumpism while shedding the controversial ones, and maybe even take that combination all the way to the White House.

At the event in Denison, a rural community a few hours west of Des Moines, where the smell of nearby farms blows across the town, Iowa Sen. Joni Ernst praises Ms. Haley as “firm and fair.” She says the former South Carolina governor could be just what many GOP voters are looking for. 

“There are a lot of really wonderful Donald Trump supporters that were here in this audience, but they are excited about seeing new faces too,” Senator Ernst tells the Monitor. “The fact that they are here to listen to her is pretty telling.” 

Women for Nikki

Part of Ms. Haley’s pitch is that she could help woo voters like Jackie Sapp back into the Republican Party.

After voting for former Sens. John McCain and Mitt Romney in 2008 and 2012 respectively, the retired high school health teacher who lives 30 minutes north of Des Moines sat out the past two presidential elections because she just couldn’t bring herself to vote for Mr. Trump. Now, here she is: Leaving a “Women for Nikki” event in a Des Moines recital hall, wearing a “Nikki Haley for President” t-shirt and saying she’s “100% in” for Ms. Haley. 

“I think [Trump] did a great job with policy, don’t get me wrong. But it was his demeanor and his mouth. I thought he belittled women,” says Ms. Sapp. 

Of Ms. Haley’s four campaign stops on her Iowa tour last month, two were specifically directed at women. It’s something Ms. Haley deliberately leans into, while also not.

She’s sharply critical of the left’s reliance on identity politics, and laments that Florida’s Parental Rights in Education bill, which opponents dubbed “Don’t Say Gay,” doesn’t go far enough in restricting gender and sexual education in schools. Yet she also closes the “Women for Nikki” event by saying that what the GOP needs to win the White House is “a badass Republican woman.” The audience chuckles and cheers.

Certainly, Mr. Trump’s struggles among suburban women – whom he half-jokingly begged to “please like me” – have been well documented, and in 2020 even led to rumors that Ms. Haley might replace Vice President Mike Pence on the ticket. In the 2022 midterms, Democrats defied history and won critical congressional races thanks in part to the suburban gains their party made during the Trump years. 

But while playing up the “woman angle” might boost Ms. Haley’s candidacy, it’s also something she has generally declined to comment on to the media, including to the Monitor.

“She is struggling with both maintaining the conservative stance of being opposed to identity politics … but at the same time wanting to use her identity as a woman as an asset,” says Debbie Walsh, director of the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers. “This is going to be a hard thing for her to navigate. She ends up with a pretty muddy message.”

That muddiness extends to a number of other topics.

A daughter of Indian immigrants, Ms. Haley in 2010 became not only the first woman but the first person of color to win South Carolina’s governorship. She rose to national prominence when, after a mass shooting by a white supremacist at Charleston’s historic Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church, she called for the Confederate flag to be removed from the state Capitol. As part of that effort, she noted that some residents associated the flag with “noble” traditions – a point she would repeat in later interviews, adding that the shooter had “hijacked” the meaning of the flag.

“She has always tried to have it both ways on issues,” says South Carolina strategist Terry Sullivan, who worked for one of Ms. Haley’s Republican rivals in the gubernatorial race.

Similarly, last week Ms. Haley gave what her campaign billed as a “major” speech on abortion, an issue that has become something of a minefield for Republican politicians after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade last June and many states subsequently banned the procedure. The political backlash has energized Democrats and seemed to hurt Republicans among moderates and independents in elections from Wisconsin to Kansas.

While many Republican candidates have been tiptoeing around the topic, Ms. Haley, who calls herself “pro-life,” promised to address it “directly.” But in her speech, she mostly avoided specifics, such as how far into a pregnancy she would support a ban on the procedure. She did not take questions.

“Hope is not a strategy”   

In 2016, Mr. Trump’s rise was aided in part by a crowded GOP field that splintered the anti-Trump vote. This time around, the desire to avoid “another multicar pile-up,” as former Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan put it, may already be keeping some would-be candidates out of the race. Along with Governor Hogan, Mike Pompeo, Mr. Trump’s former CIA director and secretary of state, recently announced he wouldn’t run for president after numerous visits to early primary states.

Still, some strategists contend it wasn’t so much the number of primary candidates that allowed Mr. Trump to win the nomination, but the fact that none of his opponents were willing to attack the guy who was leading in all the polls. 

“The thing is, you got to take on Trump,” says Mr. Sullivan, who was Sen. Marco Rubio’s presidential campaign manager in 2016. “The strategy that every campaign employed [in 2016] was ‘I hope Donald Trump will evaporate’ – but no one did anything to make him evaporate until it was way too late. ... Hope is not a strategy.”

Ms. Haley’s team says she’s pursuing a “common sense” position, letting voters know where she agrees with Mr. Trump (including recounting positive anecdotes from her time working with him), while also noting where they disagree. In this, they argue, Ms. Haley is not all that different from many Republican voters, many of whom appreciate the former president but also feel ready to move on.

“The idea that you have to be 100% in agreement or 100% in disagreement with someone is silly,” says an official with the Haley campaign. “That’s not how normal people operate.” 

Interviews with more than two dozen conservative voters across Iowa, the first nominating state for the Republican presidential primary, suggest there may be something to that.

At events for GOP candidates other than the former president, it’s clear at the very least there’s curiosity about possible alternatives. Many who previously voted for Mr. Trump say that they’ll back him again if he’s the nominee – but add that they’re hoping for a different standard-bearer.

But if she hopes to convince voters that the standard-bearer should be herself, Ms. Haley has her work cut out for her.

At the Cedar Rapids Country Club last month, around 75 guests sat beneath chandeliers drinking iced tea and listening to South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott explain why America needs “a change in leadership.” After the event, which Mr. Scott left without taking any questions, half a dozen voters said they liked what he had to say but weren’t ready to commit to supporting the senator in a presidential run. 

Rather, all of them said they hoped Mr. DeSantis would be the nominee this time around. None brought up Ms. Haley until asked.

“I’d like to see DeSantis as the Republican nominee, and maybe Tim Scott could be his running mate,” says Marilyn, a Cedar Rapids resident who declined to give her last name. When asked about Ms. Haley, she offers: “Sure, she could be good too. I like our candidates, just not Trump. I voted for him twice but enough is enough. Common sense has to prevail.”