Posted on 10/12/2023 11:10:34 AM PDT by conservative98
This might be Nikki Haley’s moment.
Not her moment to become the Republican presidential front-runner. (Don’t be silly.) Not even her moment to nip at Donald Trump’s heels. But it could be her chance to consolidate the anti-Trump support in the GOP, and to make a solid play for the silver medal and maybe a good speaking slot at the RNC in Milwaukee next summer.
The former South Carolina governor and United Nations ambassador has risen, slightly, in recent polls, and is now third in RealClearPolitics’ average of national polls, after Trump and Ron DeSantis. She is consistently coming in second in polling in the first-in-the-nation primary state of New Hampshire, having pulled ahead of DeSantis there. This week, she picked up the endorsement of former Representative Will Hurd when he dropped out of the Republican race. She’s appearing at two major donor conferences this month. Her boomlet is a long way from the big candidate bubbles of the 2012 and 2016 GOP primaries, but it’s the most notable surge in the race right now.
[cut]
Nearly a year of campaigning has revealed a huge gap between “Ron DeSantis,” the candidate conservative elites thought they were getting when they coalesced behind him last fall, and Ron DeSantis, the actual man Americans have seen on the trail.
[cut]
This combination enthralled "old-school" Republicans who had not either surrendered to Trumpism or abandoned the party. National Review practically became a DeSantis fanzine. Rupert Murdoch’s influential empire excitedly covered him, with the New York Post labeling him “DeFUTURE.”
Instead, they’ve gotten DeFlation. Just as my colleague Mark Leibovich predicted last November, the more people get to know DeSantis, the less they like him.
(Excerpt) Read more at theatlantic.com ...
Thus the Haley buzz right now. Hurd’s support won’t do much for Haley on its own—if he had many followers, he wouldn’t be dropping out—but it bespeaks the concern of anti-Trump Republicans that they must consolidate to defeat Trump, and that DeSantis is simply not capable of doing that.
But although it’s true that DeSantis looks like a terrible candidate, his ultimate problem was not that he’s a terrible candidate but rather that GOP primary voters don’t want someone other than Trump. The premise of the Haley boomlet, insofar as it exists, is that Republicans would choose another candidate if only the right one presented him- or herself. But Trump is consistently polling above 50 percent among GOP voters nationally. This isn’t a replay of 2016, where he managed to squeak past a splintered field but never achieved more than plurality support until he’d clinched the nomination.
Trump-chilly Republican elites still haven’t accepted the reality that rank-and-file Republican voters have a different ideology than they do. What’s surprising is that even after failing to stop Trump in 2016 and seven years of eulogies for the Republican establishment, party elites still don’t get that. Speaking to a conference of his former donors yesterday, Mitt Romney said, “I want to put responsibility on your shoulders as the people who are financing campaigns to have some say as to when it’s time for the person you support to say, ‘Okay, I’m getting behind someone else.’”
The donors, who presumably didn’t come into their piles of money by being bad at math, can run the numbers easily enough and see the flaws in this argument: Even if every Republican candidate except Trump dropped out and backed Haley, she’d still be trailing Trump. (That’s obviously not going to happen, especially given how bad the vibes are between Haley and Ramaswamy.) This makes Haley’s rise intellectually interesting, but it also means it will likely just be a footnote to Trump’s renomination.
Nikki Haley is the new NeverTrump great hope.
Oh, they get it just fine. They just hate Trump, and us, so much that they will help Dems rip the country to shreds before they concede to our wishes.
This is from the China owned Atlantic. Utter nonsense. Nobody is propping anyone. Trump is doing a splendid job of destroying his own candidacy by methodically alienating every segment of the conservative movement one poorly worded comment at a time.
And we think Liberals are the vile ones.
Who is we Canadian?
Prease crap......................
Desanctimonius had some appeal to thr MAGA base, Birdbrain does not so she is probably less od a threat. That being said, she’s more likable overall than Desanctus...
And here we go. The Anti DeSantis Trumpers here about to shift their spamming to Anti Haley.
I’m kinda glad actually. At least it’s someone different.
Ron DeSantis, but without the charisma
And here we go with more of your spam comments just talking about spam. Is that all you got? Come up with a new line.
Ron has been a dreadful candidate in the worst campaign l can recall. It was as if he had a list of items that would turn off the base and worked his way down it. A train wreck. It started with the waffle on Ukraine and kept getting worse
Trump is doing a splendid job of destroying his own candidacy by methodically alienating every segment of the conservative movement one poorly worded comment at a time.
Good point and many of his followers have thrown more republicans off the ship than are available to get him beyond the margin election tampering and to a victory.
He may have to reach out to liberals on some topics. Hopefully he wont evolve his stance on abortion.
Trump is doing a splendid job of destroying his own candidacy by methodically alienating every segment of the conservative movement one poorly worded comment at a time.
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Lol
We’ll see.
Would anyone have expected anything but this diatribe from the Atlantic?
Nikki Cheney??
Recent Fox Poll
“Biden edges out Trump in Fox News poll, loses to DeSantis or Haley”
Israel could very well be the beginning of the end for the isolationist candidates
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