In Brief: Can Someone Tell Nikki Haley It’s Over?
Coming out of New Hampshire with hopes no doubt deflated, she has little hope down the road.
Yesterday in New Hampshire, voters gave Donald Trump another resounding win. Given that he’s acting like an incumbent, not showing up at debates and treating his opponents as nuisances instead of challengers, he ought to be winning the early states with 70%, 80%, or 90%. He’s not, which signals the deep dissatisfaction with him among Republican voters after the debacle in 2020.
That said, it’s clear he has the only path to the nomination. Political analyst Matt Margolis wrote as much before New Hampshire voters even weighed in.
From the beginning of the GOP primary season, I said I didn’t think Donald Trump deserved a coronation. Voters needed a choice. I strongly believe that had the race always been a two-person race between Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis it would have been a much more competitive race, but that’s not what we got. We had several candidates run audition campaigns, chipping away at the Trump-alternative vote. That, combined with the various efforts by the Biden administration to imprison Trump on bogus criminal charges, made it impossible for anyone to compete with the pseudo-incumbent.
DeSantis saw the writing on the wall and got out. Now it’s time for Nikki Haley to do the same.
“We’re not a country of coronations,” Haley said before Tuesday’s primary. “Voters deserve a say in whether we go down the road of Trump and Biden again, or we go down a new conservative road.”
Polls after DeSantis’s exit revealed that Trump, not Haley, benefited. That proved true yesterday, as New Hampshire’s voters clearly chose Trump.
That led Margolis to conclude:
Meanwhile, in South Carolina, Nikki Haley’s home state, Trump has an average lead of 30 points. This means that Trump is not only likely to win New Hampshire, but Nikki Haley is on the verge of losing big in her home state. As Ron DeSantis pointed out on Sunday when he announced he was suspending his campaign, Republican primary voters want to give Donald Trump another shot. He gets it, and Nikki Haley ought to as well. The longer she stays in the race, the harder it will be for the party to unite behind the candidate that will ultimately represent the party in November: Donald Trump.
- Tags:
- Nikki Haley
- Matt Margolis
