Ladies and gentlemen, Ron DeSantis has left the building. The real question is … does anyone care?
In terms of the polls, it certainly wouldn’t seem to make much difference. In New Hampshire, 538’s polling average had DeSantis at just 5.8% on Sunday. Next up on the Republican calendar is Nevada, where DeSantis failed to clear double digits in Emerson College’s most recent poll of the state’s caucus. Looking down the calendar to South Carolina, we see that the story is the same: DeSantis drew only 8.9% in Nikki Haley’s home state, according to 538’s average, as of Sunday.
In realistic terms, there was no upcoming state where DeSantis might have proved his campaign had even a glimmer of hope. That includes Florida, where Donald Trump more than tripled DeSantis’ numbers in the latest polls. The truth is, DeSantis hasn’t been a viable candidate for months.
The only real thing that changed with DeSantis quitting is that Haley now has what she said she wanted: a two-person race. Poor Haley.
With DeSantis’ departure, the race is now between one Trump and just one not-Trump. It’s hard to call Haley an anti-Trump candidate—because she’s not.
In June 2021, five months after the Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol, Haley praised Trump at an Iowa speech clearly intended as a feeler for her presidential campaign. She also joined Trump in mocking Vice President Kamala Harris, lauded Trump’s pro-dictator foreign policies, and tried to hop the anti-woke train by claiming that schools were teaching critical race theory while Democrats supported “riots and lawlessness.”
In recent weeks, Haley has been in the news for saying that America “has never been a racist country,” This isn’t a new claim for her. It appeared in that 2021 Iowa speech:
Take it from me, the first female and minority governor of South Carolina. …I said it last year at the Republican national convention, and I will keep on saying it: America is not a racist country. It’s just the opposite. America has done more to ensure equal justice and opportunity than any other country in history.
But how will her message fare now that she’s head-to-head with a guy determined to show that American racism is alive and well?
The truth is, Haley stands no chance against Trump, and there’s no better illustration of that than what happened this past weekend.
On Friday, Trump confused Haley with former Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi and then accused Haley of not being prepared to defend the Capitol against the horde of rioters he directed at Congress. It was a speech in which Trump not only repeatedly subbed in Haley’s name for Pelosi’s but also lied about the speaker being in charge of Capitol security, and lied about offering to send troops to help in the defense.
“The concern I have is—I’m not saying anything derogatory,” said Haley the next day, “but when you’re dealing with the pressures of a presidency, we can’t have someone else that we question whether they’re mentally fit to do it.”
That’s a very nice display of deference toward someone who regularly mocks her birth name.
Though Haley is now in the two-person race she wanted, it’s unlikely to help her, as Politico notes. While DeSantis has been declining, his voters haven’t been moving to Haley, because DeSantis was never an anti-Trump candidate. DeSantis positioned himself as the candidate who was more Trump than Trump. More racist. More misogynist. More openly antagonistic to education and voting rights. Voters who favored DeSantis were as far from Haley’s supposedly moderate position as it was possible to get, and it is little wonder that as DeSantis lost favor with his party, Trump gained in the polls.
So even though DeSantis never had enough voters to threaten Trump in any state, his departure is unlikely to mean those candidates consolidate behind Haley as the not-Trump candidate. Instead, they’re much more likely to push Trump’s numbers higher, making it clear that even if all the not-Trump voters were shoveled up and put into a bucket, they would still be a minority in the Republican Party.
While conservatives were busy backing Trump to get their tax bills lowered and labor laws loosed, the deplorables won. Their party became a cult of personality focused on a single would-be dictator with ambitions to break the republic, and now conservatives have discovered it’s too late to do anything about it. Whoops.
Like many of her vanished peers, Haley is talking about traditional Republican policies and angling to be just enough different from Trump that she maintains a pretense of being a not Trump, but she’s also trying to make it clear she’s not anti-Trump. Because she can’t afford to offend his supporters. Anyone else, sure. But not Trump supporters.
This is a strategy with a highly technical name. It’s called losing.
The time for Haley to do something about it is … well, that time was back in 2021, when Haley said Trump would be “judged harshly by history” and that he had “lost any sort of political viability” because he had “fallen so far.” Had she and others held fast to their criticisms of Trump following Jan. 6, their party might have been vastly different.
But she and all the rest of the Republicans threw that chance away. Now there’s no time at all.
The Iowa primary took place Monday, and while traditional media outlets would like you to believe Trump won big the reality was anything but. Kerry and Markos talk about what the numbers really show and the possible ramifications for the rest of the primary season as well as the national election.
