Last woman standing: Can Haley still beat Trump?
AFTER his impressive wins earlier this month (January) in the Iowa caucuses and the New Hampshire primary, it seems that former President Donald Trump is marching towards the Republican Party’s presidential nomination, and even seems strongly poised to beat President Joe Biden in November.
Reflecting these sentiments, Republican lawmakers and corporate leaders who had in the past expressed opposition to the idea of yet another Trump presidency, are now pledging to back him in the general election.
Political experts have speculated that the two electoral victories by candidate Trump may leave his main Republican rival, former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley, no other choice but to withdraw from the race.
But Haley, daughter of Indian immigrants and the former US ambassador to the United Nations, has decided that the race isn’t over and is going forward to challenge Trump in the next primaries.
“We’re just getting started,” Haley told her supporters last Tuesday (Jan 23) and left for her home state of South Carolina, where she will face Trump in the Feb 24 Republican primary there.
“There were a lot of ‘fellas’,” candidate Haley said. “All the fellas are out, except for this one,” she insisted, pledging that, “when we win the presidency in this country, I will do everything I can to prove to you that you made the right decision”.
Haley’s decision to stay in the race makes sense not only because, thanks to her donors, she has a lot of money to spend. In fact, the results of both the Iowa caucuses and the New Hampshire primary have exposed Trump’s electoral weaknesses that Haley hopes to exploit – and which President Biden most certainly will look to do so in the run-up to November.
More specifically, Trump is now facing a divided party. His support in both Iowa and New Hampshire depended on mobilising his electoral base – or what the media refers to as the Maga bubble. It comprises mostly rural voters and blue-collar workers with no college education who subscribe to Trump’s populist and nationalist agenda. They all went out to vote for him despite the harsh wintry weather, including a snowstorm in Iowa.
But beyond the Maga bubble there is a large Republican electorate, that includes urban and suburban voters with college education, who have little or no intention to cast their ballot for candidate Trump, whom they consider to be an agent of chaos who helped orchestrate the Jan 6, 2021 attack on the US Capitol. They just would not vote for Trump under any condition.
Indeed, exit polls have suggested that 35 per cent of Republicans in New Hampshire would not vote for Trump if he becomes the party’s presidential nominee, while one-third of the voters in the Iowa caucuses declared that Trump is unfit to be president.
And Haley – with around 43 per cent of the votes in the New Hampshire primary – has won the support of the GOP electorate in the state, as well as that of independent voters who were permitted to take part in the Republican primary there on Jan 23.
“Nikki Haley should go for broke,” advised conservative columnist Peggy Noonan, who served as a speechwriter for the late president Ronald Reagan.
Indeed, Noonan and other Never-Trump Republicans believe that candidate Haley has now nothing to lose and that she should go on the offensive, mobilising her electoral base of moderate Republicans and independent voters by asserting the obvious – that Trump is just utterly unfit to be president.
