Vivek Ramaswamy stole the spotlight the night of the debate — but it’s Nikki Haley who seems to have made the most of her time on the stage.
A new memo from Trump pollster Tony Fabrizio, sent to fundraisers and allies of the former president and obtained by Axios, shows that Haley “has surged” in Iowa since the debate and that she and Ramaswamy have risen in New Hampshire to essentially tie with Florida governor Ron DeSantis.
“DeSantis has flatlined, Haley has surged, and Ramaswamy is seen as last week’s debate winner,” the memo reads. “With Haley’s surge, DeSantis finds himself with another challenger for a distant 2nd place besides Ramaswamy — Nikki Haley.”
The post-debate polling found Trump at 44 percent in Iowa, followed by DeSantis at 18 percent, Haley at 10 percent, and Ramaswamy and Senator Tim Scott (R., S.C.) tied at 7 percent, per Fabrizio’s memo. In New Hampshire, the polling found Trump at 48 percent, DeSantis at 11 percent, Haley and Ramaswamy at 9 percent, and Scott tied with former New Jersey governor Chris Christie at 5 percent.
Responses to questions about the debate revealed Ramaswamy as the “clear winner,” followed by Haley and DeSantis, who tied for second, the memo adds.
A new poll from Public Opinion Strategies, which is working for the DeSantis campaign, also confirmed that Haley is rising in Iowa after the debate.
A Washington Post/FiveThirtyEight/Ipsos effort to track support before and after the debate also yielded good news for Haley, finding that the number of Republican debate watchers who said they are considering supporting her candidacy increased from 29 to 46 percent.
And the campaign reaped the benefits; it says it received more online grassroots donations in the first 24 hours after the debate than in any other single day since Haley entered the race in February. Meanwhile, traffic to Haley’s website had risen tenfold, and she was the second-most Googled candidate following the debate — behind Ramaswamy, who topped Google’s list of trending searches the morning after the debate as the subject of more than a million searches in 24 hours.
Haley’s first post-debate event in South Carolina seemed to exemplify the surging interest as well. The town hall at the CrossRidge Center in Indian Land drew more than a thousand attendees, with Haley having to stop by three separate overflow rooms to greet voters. The State called the event “the largest crowd the venue has seen.”
One voter told the outlet she’d “been on the fence about Nikki for a long time, but the debate the other night brought me over to her side,” after Haley “showed some real backbone.”
Haley’s foreign-policy experience was a draw for voters who spoke to the paper, as well.
During the event, Haley brought up Ramaswamy — to whom at the debate she said, “You have no foreign-policy experience, and it shows” — and remarked, “Bless his heart. If you say something that’s totally off the wall, I’m going to call you on it every single time.”
Haley’s back-and-forth on the debate stage with Ramaswamy appears to have set off a battle between the two, with Ramaswamy now having adopted left-wing attacks on Haley’s name.
In a section of his campaign website that purportedly debunks accusations made against him, the campaign argues that the idea that Ramaswamy doesn’t support Israel is “WRONG.”
“Keep lying, Nimarata Randhawa,” he added. “The desperation is showing. By the end of Vivek’s first term, the US-Israel relationship will be deeper and stronger than ever because it won’t be a client relationship, it will be a true friendship.”
While Democrats have accused Haley of hiding from her Indian heritage with a whitewashed name for years, “Haley” is in fact her married name, while “Nikki” is her Punjabi middle name, which she has used since she was a child.
“First of all, I was born with Nikki on my birth certificate, I was raised as Nikki, I married a Haley, and so that is what my name is, so he can say or misspell or do whatever he wants,” Haley said. “But he can’t step away from the fact that, look, he’s the one that said he’s gonna abandon Israel. Those were his words. Now he’s wanting to walk it back, and the reality is you have to understand the importance of our allies and those relationships.”
NR’s Noah Rothman commended Haley for treating voters like adults — that is, by acknowledging life’s complexities without insisting that “all things are possible through sheer force of will,” as her competitors are wont to do. She shared “tough love” with Republicans on abortion and the limits of executive authority and Republicans’ legislative power, and reminded the base of the unpleasant realities of Trump as a candidate.
“We have to look at the fact that three-quarters of Americans don’t want a rematch between Trump and Biden,” Haley said. “And we have to face the fact that Trump is the most disliked politician in America. We can’t win a general election that way.”
It’s not clear if the post-debate bump will last, but Haley is headed back out onto the campaign trail to maximize her moment. She will return to New Hampshire next week to hold a series of grassroots events, including an education town hall in Manchester with Moms for Liberty’s Tiffany Justice.
She’ll then hold a town hall in Claremont, followed by a veterans’ town hall in Merrimack, which will bring her grand total of grassroots events in the Granite State to 48.
While the debate has been a boon to Haley’s campaign, a failure to qualify for the debate marked the end of Miami mayor Francis Suarez’s presidential bid.
“While I have decided to suspend my campaign for President, my commitment to making this a better nation for every American remains,” Suarez wrote in a statement released on the social-media platform X on Tuesday.
Meanwhile, the rest of the field is gearing up for the second debate, which will take place on September 27 at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley, Calif. Politico reported on Wednesday that the second debate will be moderated by Fox News Media’s Stuart Varney and Dana Perino, as well as Univision’s Ilia Calderón.
And Trump, who chose not to appear at the debate, is set to become increasingly preoccupied with his legal troubles as the primaries get under way. His trial on federal charges related to his alleged attempts to overturn the 2020 election is set to begin on March 4 — one day before Super Tuesday.
Next week, he and his 18 co-defendants are set to be arraigned in the Fulton County, Ga., election-interference case. Trump is scheduled to appear before Fulton County Superior Court Judge Scott McAfee at 9:30 a.m. Wednesday.
Around NR
• Noah Rothman dismisses the suggestion that Trump’s various legal issues will bestow him with a level of “street cred” in the 2024 race and make him relatable to the 5 million people in America under some form of supervision by the U.S. criminal legal system:
There’s an unbridgeable gulf between Trump’s alleged misdeeds — mishandling of classified documents, misleading investigators, and conspiring to defraud government agencies, among dozens of other criminal charges — and being convicted of conspiracy to distribute more than 100 grams of heroin. Moreover, the idea that there is no “better way to make a billionaire relatable” than arresting and releasing him on a six-figure bond is doubtful. Six in ten arrestees are detained pre-trial because they cannot afford bail.
• A trio of events in Florida — a hurricane, a racially motivated shooting, and the reemergence of the fight over Covid-19 mitigation strategies — will offer DeSantis a chance to sink or swim in the Republican primary, Charles C. W. Cooke writes:
In the press, these developments have been cast as potential “distractions” from DeSantis’s participation in the primary. In reality, they are the opposite: This, not the horse race, is what an interested electorate ought to be watching. . . . Whoever wins the presidency next year will be obliged to face a set of obstacles that, at present, we are unable to predict. Whether that person is up to the challenge and whether he is capable of responding in a manner that the electorate finds acceptable are, in my estimation, the only crucial questions at hand.
• The NR editors are calling on Asa Hutchinson to drop out of the race.
None of this is to denigrate his accomplishments as a U.S. attorney, head of the Drug Enforcement Administration, or governor of Arkansas. But his current campaign is a pointless exercise. Understandably, he wants a return to a more honorable Republican Party, but the role of vocal Trump critic is being more effectively taken up by Chris Christie, who has gotten some traction in New Hampshire. And his traditional Republican policy priorities are being championed by sundry other candidates.
• Philip Klein argues that DeSantis’s presidential campaign is failing because he’s campaigning with — in a phrase often heard during the pandemic — an abundance of caution:
DeSantis has bought into the idea that he has to be the unity candidate: somebody who can win over a portion of voters who like Trump while still remaining palatable to those Republicans who hate Trump. While this seems logical, the problem with running a campaign based on the idea of trying to satisfy both sides is that it can backfire by alienating everybody. This is especially true when running against candidates who have no qualms about alienating particular segments of the party.
• Mark Antonio Wright is not buying claims that Trump would have dominated the GOP primary debate stage, had he shown up:
During the 2015–2016 primary debates, Trump was a whirling dervish of energy, charisma, and spontaneity. People watched because the show — and it was indeed a reality-TV show come to life — was genuinely entertaining. . . . But that was eight long years ago. Trump was still in his late sixties. He’s now 77 years old. And it shows.
• A new analysis from WPA Intelligence reveals Trump’s lead over President Biden among white voters has been cut almost in half since 2020, with the former president’s loss of support among white voters outpacing any gains he has made with black voters. “Barring some miracle or a third-party candidate that splinters the Democrats, if Trump is the nominee and is only nine points up against Biden with whites, he has little chance of winning the election,” Bryon Allen, a partner with WPA Intelligence, told me.
To sign up for The Horse Race Newsletter, please follow this link.