by At a packed community center in southwest Iowa, Nikki Haley broke from her usual comments this month to offer a warning to her primary Republican presidential rivals, Donald J. Trump and Ron DeSantis, using a favorite phrase: “If they hit me, I hit”. I hit back and I hit back harder.”
But in that Dec. 18 appearance and in the days that followed, Haley, the former governor of South Carolina, didn’t exactly bash her opponents as she had promised. Her blows were rather surgical, dry and politically motivated.
“He went to DC saying he was going to stop the spending and instead, voted to increase the debt limit” Haley said of DeSantis, a former congressman, in Treynor, near the Nebraska border. At that same stop, she also defended herself against his attack ads and criticized DeSantis, the governor of Florida, for offshore drilling and fracking, and questioned his election of a political surrogate in Iowa.
She was even more careful about going after Trump, continuing to draw only indirect contrasts and clearly pointing out that her super PAC ally had begun running ads against Haley.
“Two days ago he said it wasn’t increasing,” he said, but now he had “attack ads against me.”
With less than three weeks until the Iowa caucuses, Haley is treading cautiously as she enters the crucial final stretch of her campaign to free the Republican Party from Trump’s clutches. Although the former president maintains a big lead in the pollsHaley has insistently played it safe, betting that an approach that has left her as the only non-Trump candidate with any kind of momentum may eventually prevail as the primary season progresses.
Along the way, he rarely answers questions from journalists. She barely deviates from her speech. And she continues to walk a fine line regarding her biggest obstacle to the Republican nomination: Trump.
“The anti-Trumps don’t think I hate him enough,” he told reporters this month in New Hampshire, where he won the endorsement of Chris Sununu, the state’s popular Republican governor. “Pro-Trumpers don’t think I love him enough.”
Haley’s consistent strategy has allowed her team to build a reputation as agile and stable where other campaigns have failed: As DeSantis’ support has waned and turmoil has gripped his allied super PAC, even some of his advisers are privately indicating that they believe in hope. He is lost.
“I keep coming back to the word ‘disciplined,’” said Jim Merrill, a Republican strategist in New Hampshire who was involved in Sen. Marco Rubio’s 2016 presidential campaign and Mitt Romney’s candidacies in 2008 and 2012. “He’s carried out an extraordinarily disciplined campaign.
That discipline slipped for a moment Wednesday in New Hampshire, where a member of the public pressed her on the cause of the Civil War and she avoided mentioning slavery. But while Democrats attacked her comments, it was unclear whether they would attack her again in her attempt to defeat Trump.
The former president remains the heavy favorite for the nomination despite facing dozens of criminal charges as well as legal challenges that aim to remove him from the elections in several states.
Haley’s apparent reluctance to attack her rival even in the face of what would appear to be political setbacks for him has raised questions from voters and other Republican competitors, in particular, former Governor Chris Christie of New Jersey – about whether he can win while also passing up crucial opportunities to derail his most important opponent.
“A lot of people in this field are running against Trump without doing much to defeat him,” said Adolphus Belk, a political analyst and political science professor at Winthrop University in Rock Hill, South Carolina, Haley’s home state. “If you’re running to be president of the United States, it seems like it would be imperative to run against the person who has the biggest advantage.”
A recent poll by The New York Times and Siena College found that Trump leads his Republican rivals by more than 50 percentage points nationally, a staggering margin.
The poll offered a glimmer of hope for Haley: Nearly a quarter of Trump supporters said he should not be the Republican nominee if he were convicted of a crime. But 62 percent of Republicans said that if the former president won the primary, he should remain the candidate, even if he were later found guilty.
The challenge for Haley is to take away more support from the Republican Party’s white, working-class base. The Times/Siena poll found that she garnered 28 percent support from white voters with a bachelor’s degree or higher, but only 3 percent from those without a degree.
As she crisscrosses Iowa and New Hampshire, Haley has remained committed to a calibrated approach that aims to speak to all factions of the Republican Party.
Her speech highlights her background as the daughter of immigrants and her upbringing in a small rural town in South Carolina, but in generic terms. She references his status as the only woman in the Republican primary and the potentially historic nature of her candidacy, but only subtly.
Even as she has risen in the polls and consolidated significant anti-Trump support among donors and prominent Republicans, she has continued to present herself as an underrated loser, with a message narrowly focused on debt and spending, national security and the crisis in border. .
And he has not wavered from his broad calls for a “consensus” on abortion, even though some conservatives say he is not going far enough in supporting new restrictions. At the same time, Democrats seek to attack it from the other direction: last week, the Democratic National Committee presented billboards in DavenportIowa, where she was campaigning, accusing her of wanting “extreme abortion bans.”
Still, Haley has evolved on some fronts. In recent weeks, she has argued more aggressively that she is the most electable Republican candidate, an argument that Polls show it has some merit. – and stepped up her criticism of what she describes as a dysfunctional Washington.
This month, after Republicans blocked an emergency spending bill to fund support for Ukraine, demanding strict new border restrictions in return, he accused both President Biden and some Republicans of creating a false choice between those priorities. as well as aid to Israel, which the legislation also includes.
“And now what are you hearing from DC? “Do we support Ukraine or do we support Israel?” she said at an event in Burlington, Iowa. “Do we support Israel or secure the border? Don’t let them lie to you like that.”
She has stepped up her criticism of Trump for his tone, leadership style and what she describes as his failure to follow through on his policies, accusing him of increasing the national debt, proposing to raise the federal gas tax and “praising dictators.”
But when we face tougher questions from voters about Trump’s decision potential danger to the nation’s democracy or why she indicated in the first debate that she would support him as a candidate even if he were found guilty of criminal charges, tends to fall back on a familiar response. She says that she thinks “he was the right president for the right time,” but that “rightly or wrongly, chaos follows him.”
“The thing is, normal people aren’t obsessed with Trump like you guys are,” he said. he told ABC News’ Jonathan Karl this month, attacking the media when asked for his opinion on how Trump is campaigning on the idea of “retaliation” against his political enemies.
These attempts to avoid alienating Trump supporters have helped generate interest, if not always engagement.
Before his event in Treynor, Iowa, Keith Denton, 77, a retired farmer and longtime Republican, said he supported Trump “100 percent” and had come to watch Haley only because his wife was debating whether to support it or not. . But after Ms. Haley concluded, he located a reporter to acknowledge that she was now seriously considering her.
“I have to eat my words,” he said, adding that Haley had said “some things that made me change my mind.” On the one hand, she said, “I thought she was more of a warmonger, but now I can see that she is against the war.”
But the next day, at an Osceola distilling company, Jim Kimball, 84, a retired doctor, veteran and anti-Trump Republican, drew nervous laughter from the audience when he asked Ms. Haley a couple of bold questions about the Capitol riot on January 1. December 6, 2021: “Did Mr. Trump trample or defend the Constitution? And he’s running for president or emperor?
As usual, Mrs. Haley weighed her words. She said the courts would “decide whether President Trump did something wrong” and that he had the right to defend himself against the legal charges he faces, but expressed disappointment that when he had the opportunity to stop the attack on the Capitol, he did not do so. .
“My goal is not to worry about him being president forever; that’s why I’m going to win,” he concluded to loud applause.
But afterward, Kimball said he wished she had said Trump is unfit to be president and that he was still deliberating whether to meet with her or Christie.
“I wish I had the courage of Liz Cheney,” he said, referring to the congresswoman ousted from the Republican leadership in Congress and then from her Wyoming seat by pro-Trump forces in the party. “But she doesn’t want to end up like Liz Cheney, so you get whatever response you get.”
Ruth Igielnik contributed reports.
