Ron DeSantis and Nikki Haley are competing for the Republican nomination for president. This means they are competing against Donald Trump. Yet lately, they have been training their fire as much on each other as they have been against the overwhelming front-runner. This is understandable given Haley’s apparent polling surge that has seen her muscle her way into the conversation of which candidate is the former president’s most formidable challenger.
Given the stakes, the DeSantis-Haley rivalry will only get fiercer and more acrimonious as the start of voting nears. Eventually, though, one of them will get the opportunity to take Trump on one-to-one. Yet they would not do so in the same way, as they have adopted drastically different approaches to him, the one looking through and beyond Trump, the other trying not to look at him at all. Whichever of the two emerges victorious from the contest within the contest, therefore, could be decisive not only for the 2024 race but for the future of the Republican Party.
THREE TAKEAWAYS FROM A ROUGH 2023 ELECTION FOR THE GOP
Until very recently, Florida’s governor was considered Trump’s main, even only, rival, and for good reason. Or, rather, reasons. The litany begins with his overwhelming reelection victory last fall on a night when Republicans in the rest of the country were experiencing a disappointing midterm election. But DeSantis was already a rock star on the Right before this, thanks to his aggressive stances against COVID-19 lockdowns and mandates, his antipathy for the media, and his battles against wokeness in the classroom and the boardroom. He has also championed the anti-abortion cause, signing a six-week “heartbeat” abortion ban, and fired two district attorneys backed by conservative bête noire George Soros. DeSantis also rails frequently against the deep state and institutions captured by leftist ideologues and has pledged to rein them in if elected to the White House. His decision to send illegal immigrants to Martha’s Vineyard and other liberal enclaves, dismissed initially as a stunt, turned the politics of immigration on its head.
Despite his reputation as a conservative culture warrior, DeSantis hasn’t neglected the more mundane side of government. He has received high marks for his handling of the hurricanes that assail Florida annually. He passed a significant pay raise for teachers and police in his first term, pushed to reduce or eliminate taxes on child care necessities such as diapers, and implemented several environmental measures, such as a statewide wildlife corridor and stronger cleanup provisions for the Everglades. Most recently, DeSantis successfully helped repatriate hundreds of Floridians after they were stranded in Israel because of the Oct. 7 Hamas terrorist attacks. The state also has a booming economy and a low unemployment rate.
Simply put, DeSantis’s record offers the best combination of practical accomplishment and conservative policy victories of any candidate in the field. He does more than pay mere lip service to traditional Republican stances such as cutting taxes and being tough on crime, but he does so while unapologetically embracing the rising populist and MAGA elements within the party. Much of the basis of his appeal and what made him on paper Trump’s strongest challenger was his successful fusion of these two strains of conservatism.
DeSantis is still criticized for never attacking Trump, but that hasn’t been true for months. DeSantis routinely chastises Trump for his blunders, such as praising Hezbollah as “smart,” turning the country over to Dr. Anthony Fauci during COVID-19, failing to build the wall or drain the swamp, waffling on abortion, and his profligate spending. He forthrightly says that if Trump is convicted in any of his criminal cases, he would be damaged for the general election, perhaps fatally. He has also accused Trump of costing the Republican Party numerous elections and turning Georgia and Arizona blue. Last but perhaps not least, DeSantis describes Trump as having lost a step (or two).
Implicit in that last criticism and DeSantis’s overall critique of Trump is the notion that in order for conservatives to consolidate and secure Trump’s positive achievements, the Republican Party needs to let him go. Unlike Never Trumpers, DeSantis accepts what Trump wrought. Which is why he believes the party must move on from Trump — not to turn the clock back, but so it doesn’t. DeSantis has been running against Trump by positioning himself as the Republican of the future is how. But as he envisions that future, while it includes Trump’s legacy, it does not include Trump himself.
The Republican of the future is something no one mistakes the former governor of South Carolina for. This is the basis of much of her appeal. If DeSantis is running on what he’s done, Haley is running on what she is: a woman, a minority, a child of immigrants, a mother. But she is also a pre-Trump Republican, and unabashedly so. If she is offering her supporters identity politics without the name, it is this aspect of her identity that has suddenly made her attractive, the promise that the entire Trump episode can be not so much relegated to the past as bypassed entirely like an unfortunate cul-de-sac.
Save some passing jibes at his “drama” and her observation at the first debate that Trump is the most disliked politician in America, Haley rarely criticizes Trump openly. Her critique of Trumpism is more implicit, embodied in what she represents personally and politically: a minority woman who hearkens back to the glory days when fiscal conservatism and hawkishness were ascendant in the GOP and the party elite could safely cater to the demands of their donors while foisting off social conservatives with lip service and symbolic gestures. Haley, in other words, is a throwback to the pre-2015 Republican Party. A party free of Trump’s crassness and vulgarity, one that took America’s role in the world seriously but also one in thrall to corporatism and disdainful of its burgeoning working-class and populist constituencies.
No wonder Republican donors are enthralled and showing a renewed interest in her. Apparatchiks and functionaries from the pre-Trump days have climbed aboard the bandwagon, too. Among old-guard figures who in the last few weeks have added their voices to the Haley-lujah chorus imploring her rivals to drop out and endorse her are ex-Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele, longtime GOP operative Mike Murphy, conservative eminence grise George Will, and the Daily Beast’s Matt Lewis. Michael Strain of the American Enterprise Institute spoke for them all when he declared Haley’s rivals must get out so they “stop obscuring the view of the candidate most likely to win.”
A Haley-Trump matchup would draw in the sharpest relief possible, with the primary field constituted as it is, the contrast between the pre- and post-Trump GOPs. There’s just one problem with this scenario: Haley isn’t likely to win at all. A candidate who inflames the Michael Steeles and Mike Murphys of the world is not one whose prospects of winning the Republican presidential nomination can be rated as particularly robust. Haley, it turns out, is what Trump influencers on social media have long accused DeSantis of being, the choice of the worst relics of the pre-Trump GOP establishment.
Republican voters understand this even if pundits don’t, and the polling shows it. The very Iowa poll that set hearts aflutter because it had Haley “soaring” to a tie with DeSantis for second in the Hawkeye State also confirmed that she has a low, hard ceiling. Both were chosen by 16% of Iowa voters as their first choice (behind Trump’s 43%), but DeSantis was the second choice of 27% compared to 17% for Haley. Over 41% of his voters picked Trump as their second choice, compared to 34% of hers who picked DeSantis. So if he dropped out, it would help Trump, but if she did, it would help DeSantis. DeSantis also had a higher favorability rating, with 69%-26% to Haley’s 59%-29%. Trump’s was 66%-32%. Haley fares even worse in her home state, where per the latest poll she trails Trump by more than she does in Iowa.
National polling, in which Haley struggles to break double digits, shows the same thing. And in polls that ask respondents to pick a second choice, she doesn’t reach 20%. In the two most recent polls that offered a second choice option, her total preference, first and second choice combined, scores were 16% and 17%. DeSantis’s marks were 43% and 41%, respectively. In addition, one of the polls asked who Republicans would choose in Trump’s absence. DeSantis led Haley 36% to 12%. Republicans just like DeSantis more. His net favorability rating with Republicans is 20 points higher than Haley’s, according to FiveThirtyEight.
In the latest Quinnipiac University poll, which pegged Haley’s standing at 8% nationally, she received just 6% support from Republicans but 12% from Republican-leaning independents. Only 1% of self-described “very conservative” voters backed her, but 10% of “somewhat conservative” and 14% of centrist and liberal Republican voters did. Sen. Tim Scott (R-SC) may have proved a bust as a candidate, but he’s right that Haley is a centrist and therefore can’t beat Trump.
Haley’s own tortured history with Trump, moreover, makes her an imperfect vessel for anti- and non-Trump voters. She served in his administration as U.N. ambassador, for one thing. In the wake of the Jan. 6 riots, she disowned him in her notorious interview with Politico’s Tim Alberta, but she swiftly ate her words when it became clear no one else was assembling behind the anti-Trump banner. Later, she swore she wouldn’t run for president if Trump did, subsequently changed her mind, and finally sought his blessing before jumping in. And as noted earlier, unlike DeSantis, Haley rarely calls out Trump by name. Whatever Haley is, a committed Never Trumper she is not. But then, trying to be all things to all people and have it both ways is the Haley way.
The vast majority of Republicans voted for Trump and are poised to do so again. Haley can’t win by appealing strictly to those who didn’t and won’t vote for him for the simple reason that there just aren’t enough of them. Pre-2015 Republicans may give her a solid crust of support, but a crust is all it is. The old-guard, Reaganite establishment that has so ardently rallied around her in recent weeks is at best a faction, at worst a rump, of the GOP. And factions and rumps the base of a winning coalition do not make. In the blunt formulation of Townhall’s Kurt Schlichter, “She’s dominating a lane that no one wants to drive in anymore.”
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Haley stands for an irredentist, revanchist wing of the party trying to reclaim not just the power but the prestige and influence it lost in the revolution. DeSantis, on the other hand, represents the assimilation of the Trump experience into conservatism, the post-revolutionary settlement that recognizes as the first of its terms that there will be no restoration of the pre-revolutionary order, not only because that order no longer exists but even more so because such restorations are impossible. Haley is the candidate of those who believe, forlornly and futilely, that the revolution can be undone, as DeSantis is the standard-bearer of those who understand it cannot. For even were it erased from the world, it can never be erased from men’s minds.
Wherever the Republican Party goes from here, it will never be able to return to a place where Trump wasn’t president of the United States and wasn’t so as a Republican. As long as that remains true, DeSantis will have a path, however narrow, to the Republican nomination. Whereas Haley will have none at all.
Varad Mehta is a writer and historian. He lives in the Philadelphia area. Find him on Twitter @varadmehta.