please clap.
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.
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.
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
Their is no need for a pro-war, Free Trade/Anti-worker, open borders political party. That appeals to about 5% of the electorate.
The donors think that with the right candidate they can fool the voters once more. They are mistaken.
The US has drastically changed in the past 10-15 years. The average person’s standard of living and safety has gone down and nothing can make them not notice that.
Couldn’t have said it better.
Baris noted yesterday that the primary is over, has been over. “When you have one candidate with a 50 point lead, it is simply not a ‘race.’”