283 days. Gaaaaaa.
On the evening of the New Hampshire primary, just as the votes were starting to come in, RNC Chairman Ronna McDaniel, bless her heart, said that the primaries were done, stick a fork in the process (we paraphrase), and Donald Trump is the winner. Forget all this voting crapola.
Now, Ronna got the [insert bad word] kicked out of her by the commentariat, but she’s closer to the truth than many want to admit. Political analyst, Jewish Insider editor in chief, and all around WTH fave Josh Kraushaar joined us for a post-mortem. And, yes, barring something really big happening, it looks like we are all going to relive the 2020 elections all over again. For the next 283 days, it’s the election campaign, day in, day out, over and over and over again.
As we did with our Iowa summary, the simplest thing is to give you the TL;DR (too long, didn’t read) upshot in bullet form. The highlights below dive in a little deeper, and hopefully, you’re all going to listen to the pod, twice.
Does Nikki Haley have a path forward? Not really.
Was NH all great news for DJT? Nope; a lot of Republicans said they would never vote for him.
Why can’t Haley make it if she wins South Carolina? She won’t, if the polls are right.
What are the signs for the general? Not great for Trump; he’s not beloved by independents, and he needs more than the base to win.
Is Nikki going to be VP? Did you listen to Trump’s speech? No way.
Will Nikki dump the GOP and go No Labels? Could happen. Seems unlikely, but maybe.
Why isn’t Haley quitting? She has the money and she wants to beat Trump.
What if Donald Trump goes to jail? Excellent question. No idea.
Preview: Next week, No Labels co-chair Governor Pat McCrory!
HIGHLIGHTS
So New Hampshire happened. Toplines?
JK: I thought this was going to be, and it was, a pretty resounding victory for Donald Trump. He won as it looks by 12 points. That's a significant number by anyone's standard. When you look at the exit polls, Trump is leading among New Hampshire Republicans by a significant margin, 40 plus points. So you would've thought that Donald Trump would've gone on stage, been as magnanimous as he was in Iowa, and not let any of the critics get under his skin. But we all know Donald Trump all too well, and that just didn't happen. That did not sound like a victory speech last night. If anything, it only will incentivize Nikki Haley to stick around and play this out until the South Carolina primary. And look, that's not good for the Republican Party. It's not good for Donald Trump. And it makes, what I would have said was a pretty clear win last night into a much more mixed political picture.
Are we just going to see a replay of 2020?
JK: Joe Biden can feel a little bit better, I think about his political prospects, looking at the results in New Hampshire and looking at Donald Trump's behavior last night. Number one, Joe Biden wasn't competing in New Hampshire per se, but he certainly had a lot on the line with this writing campaign in a state that was an unsanctioned primary. And he ended up getting almost 70% of the vote, which I think is a solid number. But the bigger number guys that I'm looking at is among Republicans, just among Republicans in New Hampshire. 25% of Republicans said that they would have trouble supporting Donald Trump if he's the nominee. 20% of Republicans in Iowa voted for Nikki Haley. That's going to be a critical, critical constituency when we look ahead if Trump is a nominee into a general election. Trump needed to get the party together. He needed to unify the party, whether Haley was sticking around or not.
That was the key message he needed to deliver last night. And instead, it makes you wonder what Haley's going to do, not even just in South Carolina, but going past that, whether there is maybe the possibility of a no-labels candidacy. If I was Nikki Haley a few days ago, I would've thought she might be a prospect to be Trump's running mate, a way to unify the Republican Party. Now, I think her cards may actually lie in being a very appealing candidate to independent voters, Republican-leaning independent voters who liked her message and who have been voting for her not enough to win primaries, but to get about 25% of the vote, both in Iowa and New Hampshire.
But Trump only has half of the GOP electorate. Isn’t that a weakness?
JK: For someone who is leading the party to see 40, 45% of the vote go against you, and even among Republican, I'm just looking at the Republican vote too. It's 25%, 25% of that partisan Republican vote is still much more the Nikki Haley camp, and that's a faction that is not going to be going away, and it's one that Republicans need to woo.
And by the way, listening to Vivek Ramaswamy last night saying that Haley represented America last, that is not a way to build a party. That is a way to push away those voters.
Talk a little bit about the Independent voters?
JK: Independents come in all shapes and sizes. There are the affluent suburban Independents that have been moving away from the party. And then there're also a lot of working class voters that are coming into the Republican Party because of Trump. So Independent's going to encompass a lot of different... I think in New Hampshire they tend to be a little more moderate, but they do come in all shapes and sizes. I think the weakness for Haley though is she wants to go forward to South Carolina. It sounds like she's going to be doing that, but you can't win with... 25% is a nice number, but it's not a majority.
Is Nikki Haley running a good campaign?
JK: She was trying to try to strike a middle ground, but ultimately avoided some of the big policy debates. Trump was hammering her on immigration, by the way. If you watch TV here in New Hampshire, almost every ad from the Trump super PAC, they were all hitting her on immigration and social security. She basically said, "Go to my website. Go to my website. They're lying about me." But she didn't really offer a really substantive, at least in my view, a really good response about what she's actually going to do on those fronts. So I think she could have been much more nimble.
Has Haley’s path narrowed or closed?
JK: I think most candidates might actually drop out, endorse the front runner and bring the party together. Trump certainly expected that and that's why he was so salty last night. But what's her path forward? The South Carolina primary is not for another month, right? Super Tuesday, that then takes place. She sounds like she's in this race for the long haul, and I don't think that's a way to win the Republican nomination this year. I don't know if that helps her win in the future. I think she's burning some bridges, frankly, with the Republican Party if she keeps this going. So I kind of wonder about this, No Labels.
What about No Labels — is 2024 their year?
JK: I've always been skeptical about third party candidacies, but I will say that if there's any election where you could have a market for a younger kind of up the middle candidate, and by the way, Haley is the right kind of candidate. If you want to have a successful third party candidacy, it has to be someone who's not sort of pro-life, who can appeal to those 25% percent of Republicans and also maybe be able to get some of the moderate Democrats. I also think the fact that there are other third party candidates running, so the bar to winning estate in this election, given the presence of Robert Kennedy, given the presence of Cornel West, Jill Stein. You might only need 35% of the vote.
So the bar is going to be a little bit lower than usual to actually win a state. So look, I'm not saying that this is likely or she has a really good chance of winning or anything like that, but if there was any environment where you have health questions, age questions, a deep dissatisfaction with the two leading candidates, this is the environment and Haley is the type of... I've been very skeptical of these with Joe Manchin and some of these Democrats that don't have a lot of visibility and frankly are too liberal to win over Republican voters. Haley, she's a two-term Republican governor who actually has appeal, even among some of the Trump voters out there. So I think it's an interesting choice that she's going to have to think about.
What about a Trump-Haley ticket?
JK: So I would have thought there was an outside chance a few days ago. That would've been, at least for Haley, I thought that was the exit. That would've been a good compromise, and that's where the party is right now. It's a party that is Trump's party, but there's still a lot of different views and factions, and Haley represents a pretty sizable faction of traditional Republicans. So I thought that was quite possible, but after the last 24 hours, Marc, I just don't think that's really... Trump is someone who values loyalty and if there was any chance to get on the train and have that still remain a possibility, it would have been last night.
If a horserace was held today…
JK: Now, you never know if Trump shoots himself in the foot and who knows, there are always wildcards. But you can't win a one-on-one race with 25% at best of the Republican vote. New Hampshire was as good of a home field advantage as Haley could possibly get, and she did maybe a little better than expected, but still lost by 11, 12 points and lost among Republicans by a healthy margin.
Why is Haley continuing in this race, anyway?
JK: I'll tell you what the Haley campaign will say. Look, they think South Carolina is home cooking. She did win two terms as governor. She had one of the biggest comeback stories in politics in 2010 when she ran against a lot more established male politicians and won in a decisive victory in 2010, so she's got a lot of experience in South Carolina. She's not been on a ballot in a little while, since 2014. So look, I think they think there's home cooking in South Carolina. They have four weeks to get their message out there and spend money, and then they point to these open primaries on Super Tuesday, states like Michigan, Virginia, where you also have Independent voters being able to cast ballots and where there may be more moderate voters in those types of states.
But look, again, New Hampshire is about as good as it gets when you look at the number of independents, you look at the number of moderates. This is about as good as it gets for someone like Haley, so she would need to have a really quick turnaround in South Carolina. And I just think the odds of that, when you look at the polls and when you look at some of the fundamentals and endorsements, it's just not going to be easy.
What happens if DJT is convicted?
JK: You look at polls now and that reflects a snapshot in time. But I think we'll be spending more time in the courtroom over the next year than the campaign trail and that is going to be an input. The polls show that there is a critical mass of voters that are going to be watching closely, and that may make a difference in a competitive general election. So that is one of the big X factors going forward.
How will 2024 be any different than 2020 at this point?
JK: Big picture is Biden's the incumbent. So in theory, he bears the responsibility. If the economy's not good, people are going to blame Biden. They blamed Trump for COVID in 2020. They're going to blame Biden for the economy if it continues to be in a little bit of an inflationary funk. So that's the difference, that Biden bears the burdens of incumbency. Whereas in 2020, it was Trump who was the sitting president, but it goes both ways. The economy could get a little better and that could benefit the President. And you also have, Biden wants to run against Trump because he thinks that you can make this a race about two presidents, two incumbents, not a challenger. And that's the big worry I think in Republican circles, that Trump has just a lot of baggage. And we saw that last night, and that's where we're going to look ahead to in the general election.
What would be Haley’s best shot at winning?
JK: I think you look at the polls now and you see the pathway, that the same battleground states, the Midwest, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan, those are going to be close races. And whether it's the economy, worries about Biden's handling of immigration, worries about just sort of the overall foreign global picture. There's just a lot of malaise out there. And going back to the incumbent, if you don't feel like you're better off than you were four years ago, to borrow the phrase from Ronald Reagan, you're going to tend to vote for a challenger. The hope for the Biden folks is that the challenger is deemed unacceptable and they'll vote, hold their nose and do what they did in the midterms two years ago. That they want to vote Republican, but some of these candidates just don't fit the bill.
Full transcript here.
SHOWNOTES
Donald Trump and Nikki Haley offer clashing visions of America’s place in the world (Financial Times, 23 January)
Suffolk University / NBC10 / Boston Globe Tracking Poll (1.21 - 1.22) - Survey of 500 likely Republican Primary Voters; margin of error is 4.4 percentage points
InsiderAdvantage New Hampshire GOP Primary Post-DeSantis Poll: Trump Leads Haley 62% - 35%; Undeclared Voters Apparently Not A Major Factor (Insider Advantage, 22 January)
Trump pollster predicts "smackdown" of Haley in South Carolina (Axios)
Trump Defeats Haley in New Hampshire Primary: Live Results (WSJ)