Today, Explained - Nikki Haley, maybe?

Episode Date: January 10, 2024

Nikki Haley is gunning for second place in the Iowa Republican caucuses. In New Hampshire polls, she’s gaining on Donald Trump. Vox’s Andrew Prokop and Republican strategist Scott Jennings explain Haley’s rise. This episode was produced by Miles Bryan, edited by Matt Collette, fact-checked by Laura Bullard, engineered by David Herman, and hosted by Noel King. Transcript at vox.com/todayexplained Support Today, Explained by making a financial contribution to Vox! bit.ly/givepodcasts Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Nikki Haley and Ron DeSantis will debate on CNN in Iowa tonight. The Iowa caucus is less than a week away. Donald Trump will not be there. He doesn't have to be. He's so far ahead. He is unbossed and unbothered by the others. Oh, wait. He's going after Haley?

Nikki Haley has been in the pocket of the open borders establishment owners her entire career. And she's a globalist. You know, she likes to globe. I like America first. Oh, and just last night, Trump promoted a new birtherism conspiracy. He says Nikki Haley can't be president because her parents weren't citizens when she was born in South Carolina. Oh, maybe Trump saw that CNN polling from yesterday.

Nikki Haley has trimmed Donald Trump's lead to single digits in New Hampshire. Because he seems shook. Coming up on Today Explained, Nikki Haley, maybe? From the director of The Greatest Showman comes the most original musical ever. I want to prove I can make it. Prove to who?

Everyone. So, the story starts. Better Man, now playing in select theaters. This is Today Explained. Andrew Prokop has just written for Vox.com a piece called Nikki Haley, the one candidate who could still make the GOP primary kind of interesting, explained. Therefore, and of course, we were going to call Andrew to explain how Nikki Haley has made the GOP primary kind of interesting. Andrew, shoot. Donald Trump has been the obvious overwhelming frontrunner for this presidential race for a long time.

All of his opponents have either gone down in flames or have failed to get off the ground. There's been one exception who's had just a glimmer of improvement, and that has been Nikki Haley. Nikki Haley is now beating Ron DeSantis in the national GOP average. We have signs that Trump views Haley now as his main possible threat. He's attacking her by name. Here we are with Nikki Haley appearing to be the main challenger to Donald Trump, right now in this moment today as you and I speak. Soon we will see whether or not that's really the case

because there's the Iowa caucus and the New Hampshire primary. How is she selling herself to voters in Iowa and New Hampshire? I think it's interesting to contrast her approach with Ron DeSantis' approach. DeSantis has really been trying to outflank Trump from the right, to argue to conservative activists, to real, you know, hardcore partisan warriors that, you know, he's tougher than Trump. He's he's with Trump on everything. And but he's going to do even better. And he's maybe with them even more on some issues. You know, when he was president, we were all supportive of securing the border. He tried to push through an amnesty in 2018.

I oppose that. It's not a Republican thing to do to push through an amnesty in 2018. I oppose that. It's not a Republican thing to do, to push through an amnesty. Haley hasn't really done that at all. She has been running in, I guess, what we could call the lane of the much more traditional Republican. You could even say that she is running as a pre-Trump Republican. As governor, I took a double-digit unemployment state and I turned it into an economic powerhouse. Businesses were my partners, because if you take care of your businesses, you take care of your economy, your economy takes care of the people, and everyone wins. If Disney would like to move their hundreds of thousands of jobs to South Carolina and

bring the billions of dollars with them, I'll be happy to meet them in South Carolina. Most of her campaign would fit in quite perfectly to the early 2010s when she first rose to prominence. She hasn't really updated her issue positioning or her political style in any kind of obvious attempt to appeal to Trump voters. She's very much a pre-Trump Republican. When my kids were little, even when I was governor, I would still be home five days a week to have dinner with them because I thought the family dinner mattered. Sundays were our days. We always were together on Sunday,

and Friday nights were Haley family fun night. Okay, this is interesting. So no threatening to imprison her enemies if she gets elected. No slap fights with the Disney Corporation. She is a throwback. She's somebody who it sounds like you're saying is potentially acting as if the Republican Party and Republican voters haven't changed. That's right. And I think she has the support of many Republican donors who would like the party to revert to its pre-Trump positioning.

Nikki Haley reportedly holding private conversations with JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon about the global economy. And Axios is reporting that Dimon admires Haley's grasp of the economy, specifically that she believes government and business can drive growth by working together. It's pretty evident in a couple of issue areas where she has stuck with those old line Republican positions and not embraced the new Trump repositioning of the party. I think there are two issues where that's clearest. One is on entitlements. Back in the early 2010s, entitlement cutting, Social Security and Medicare reform were all the rage among Republicans, pushed by Paul Ryan. Donors love this. But when Trump ran, he said, I'm not going to do any of this. Haley has been going out on

the trail saying, we've got an issue. We need to fix it. And the way we fix it is no one has to worry that you're going to lose what you paid in or what you gave. But what we will do is make changes to those like my kids in their 20s, those coming into the system. We will change their retirement age to reflect life expectancy. We will change rather than doing cost of living increases, we'll do increases based on inflation. The other area is foreign policy in which, you know, the issue of the Ukraine war has kind of loomed the largest. It's been the clearest issue of contrast among the contenders on the debate stage this year. And it's one where Haley contrasts with Trump a lot as well. Before I even arrive at the Oval Office, I will have the disastrous war between Russia and Ukraine settled. It will be settled quickly.

Haley wants to keep arming Ukraine to give more aid. She says this is an extremely important conflict for the United States to be involved in. But more broadly than that, she is a more traditional Republican hawk supporting a broad American leadership role in the world. So Nikki Haley is running like the kind of Republican that Republican voters would have really liked 10, 15 years ago. How is it going over with Republican voters? For now, Haley has not been any sort of a roaring success in the national contest. She's still, you know, around 10 or 11 percent in the polls nationally, whereas Trump is somewhere around 50 or 60 generally. That is obviously quite a big gap.

But what does give her campaign perhaps the faintest glimmer of hope are the polls that have been coming out of the early Republican primary state of New Hampshire. New polling from CNN and the University of New Hampshire shows Trump with support from 39% of likely Republican primary voters in the state. Haley has 32%. Another poll was less encouraging. It showed Trump with a 20-point lead,

46 to 26 over Haley. Christie again with 12. She's got some other things going for her in New Hampshire, too. She has the endorsement of the state's governor, Chris Sununu. In New Hampshire, we're the live for your die state, right? So we want limited government. We want local control. We want low taxes, individual responsibility. And to kind of have someone really understand that they can carry that to the White House. In New Hampshire, that's really what's moving her numbers more than anything. Notably, in New Hampshire, independents are allowed to vote in the Republican primary,

and there's not a serious Democratic primary going on at the same time. So many of them might. And there have been arguments that they should vote for Haley instead of Trump. She has a lot of outside spending on her side. Groups supporting Haley have been outspending groups supporting either Trump or DeSantis on the airwaves in Iowa and in New Hampshire. Haley had won the endorsement of the political network founded by billionaire Charles Koch, and that has been helpful to her in giving her this outside money. So she has a lot of things going for her.

And you can kind of see, while she's still the underdog in New Hampshire, there are the conditions there. If things go right for her over the next couple weeks for something interesting to happen, maybe. For that reason, for that precise reason, let's stay in New Hampshire for a second. So a couple weeks back, Nikki Haley is in New Hampshire. She's doing a town hall. She's taking questions.

Someone asks her, What was the cause of the United States Civil War? Well, don't come with an easy question or anything. I mean, I think the cause of the Civil War was basically how government was going to run, the freedoms and what people could and couldn't do. And that answer creates a firestorm. Can you just walk us through that scandal and what you think it really says. Well, Haley is a very good politician most of the time, which means she is kind of calculating for the answer that she thinks voters will want to hear from her. And so my assumption is that she heard that question and, you know, she's from South Carolina, state with a very troubled racial

history, to put it mildly, state from the former Confederacy. She's obviously had these questions, questions about race come up in the past. She's faced concerns about her own ability to appeal to perhaps voters with racist views, given that she is non-white. And I think that she got the question and it was a bit of a kind of deer in the headlights moment. And she tried to avoid saying what she thought would be the wrong thing. But she didn't expect that it would go viral and that she would she would look like such a shifty, dodgy politician. So she tried to roll it back very quickly. You know, I had Black friends growing up.

It is a very talked about thing. I was thinking past slavery and talking about the lesson that we would learn going forward. It's really just a classic gaffe that hands ammunition to her opponents. And now you've seen everyone from Ron DeSantis to Donald Trump to Joe Biden piling on and saying, oh, this proves that she's not a straight-talking politician, that she's dodging the real answers. She didn't use the word slavery, which was interesting. I don't know that it's going to have an impact. But, you know, I'd say slavery is sort of the obvious answer. It's supposed to about three paragraphs of bull. Lastly, Andrew, let me ask you about Donald Trump. So we're all paying attention to Nikki Haley. You and I are doing a whole episode about her. How is Trump responding to all of this? Well, you know, Haley was a Trump

appointee as U.N. ambassador. They were always said to get along pretty well during that time. She's been very careful about how she has criticized Trump. She's kind of mostly used kids gloves about it and stuck to the issues. And Trump has been more focused on DeSantis for most of the past year, just hammering away at DeSantis, ripping him to shreds. But, you know, now Haley appears to be the threat. He has been saying that Haley was in the pocket of establishment donors, that it's really Democrats who are trying to make her the nominee. The subtext for a lot of what's going on here is that many are wondering whether Haley might in fact have a different office on her mind, the vice presidency under Trump,

because Trump is obviously in the market for a new vice president due to his falling out with Mike Pence, who refused to steal the 2020 election for him. So according to many reports, Trump advisors would prefer to pick a woman as the VP nominee because of the abortion issue and a desire to appeal to suburban voters who might not be on board with Trump anyway. So there are a few possibilities, but Haley has always loomed pretty large on that list. So there is a question if she refuses to go after Trump too hard, if things end relatively well between them.

She may have positioned herself pretty well to be his pick for VP. The question is whether Haley is truly in it for the vice presidency and whether Trump would actually pick her for that. Vox's Andrew Prokop. Ahead, we're going to Iowa after a weather delay in O'Hare Airport. Support for Today Explained comes from Aura. Aura believes that sharing pictures is a great way to keep up with family, and Aura says it's never been easier thanks to their digital picture frames.

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immigrants' rights, defend reproductive freedom, fight discrimination, and fight for all of our fundamental rights and freedoms. This Giving Tuesday, you can support the ACLU. With your help, they can stop the extreme Project 2025 agenda. Join the ACLU at aclu.org today. Explained. 2024 Explained. I'm Scott Jennings, and I'm a partner at Run Switch Public Relations. I'm a senior political contributor for CNN and was special assistant to President George W. Bush and worked on both of his campaigns. All right. For color, tell me where are you right now and why are you there? Well, I am currently in the Chicago O'Hare Airport, and I've been here for several hours because it's snowing. And I'm trying to get to Des Moines because CNN, my employer,

is having a big debate, and they want me there to talk about it. And God willing, we'll make it sometime in the next 24 hours. So let's talk right now about a new CNN poll that has everyone in my Slack excited. Nikki Haley is running at 32 percent of likely Republican voters in New Hampshire to Donald Trump's 39 percent. Of course, everyone's excited because what? Haley's within 7 percent of Trump. Should we care about these polls? Should we care about these numbers? I think you should care about it. Of course, I also think you should average them. And there was another survey showing Trump much further ahead. So the truth is probably somewhere in the middle. I mean, the glaring issue with the CNN poll, of course, is that Nikki Haley is close

to Trump. But if you were to toss on Chris Christie's percentage in that survey, combined, they'd be ahead of Trump. And you don't always get a one-for-one conversion on things like that, but you can see that if that's to be believed, there is the possibility that someone could get on top of the Republican front runner, at least in New Hampshire. The Iowa caucuses are next week. How important are the next seven to 10 days for Nikki Haley?

Well, pretty important. They're really important for everybody, of course. And it's because of whether or not expectations are going to be met. I think for Donald Trump, the expectation is that he wins. And so how to spend the margin of victory and what is the margin of victory is going to be a big deal. For Ron DeSantis, a competitive second place seems very necessary for him to keep the ball bouncing. For Haley, who seems to be peaking at the right time, if she were able to move in front of DeSantis in Iowa, even if she fell farther back from Trump but was still in second place, she could spin that as some momentum heading into friendlier terrain in New Hampshire.

So the expectations game here, mostly based on the margins, is vital, I think, for all three of these campaigns moving forward. Hey, why has New Hampshire been friendlier terrain for Nikki Haley? Why do the people there seem to like her a bit more than in Iowa? I think it's a more moderate electorate, less friendly to Trump. There's also independents in New Hampshire that aren't necessarily affiliated with either party or maybe more moderate in nature that can come in to that primary. And I think some of these folks are Northeastern Republicans. I think they're probably the most likely people on the map to want to go back to a Nikki Haley type nominee, a pre-Trump type nominee, if you will, than when you're going to get into some other states like Iowa or even South Carolina, which is obviously coming up pretty soon, where Nikki Haley used to be the governor.

And that's really been one of the core questions of this primary. Are there enough Republicans who'd like to go back to a pre-Trump style nominee? Or is this now Donald Trump's party and only Trump or Trump era Republicans viable for the nomination? What do you think Nikki Haley has been doing well so far? And what has she been doing not well? Well, she's been the most polished person on most of the stages. I mean, for most of these debates and town halls, she gives a very compelling and polished presentation.

She's got a good answer for things. She's had, in many cases, the ability to fend off attacks and to deliver some attacks. I frankly think she was at her best when she was spanking Vivek Ramaswamy in some of their exchanges over foreign policy and other issues. Under your watch, you would make America less safe. You have no foreign policy experience, and it shows. And you know what? There's a foreign policy experience. Where she's had some stumbles lately, a few gaffes where she was tricked up by a person asking her about the cause of the Civil War in New Hampshire. She made a gaffe when she told people in New Hampshire that they needed to, quote, correct the votes of the people in Iowa. Of course, the folks in Iowa don't really want to

hear that. And then she gave an interview where she talked about needing to change personalities when you go from state to state. Iowa starts it. You change personalities, you go into New Hampshire, and they continue it on. And by the time you could encapsulate the knock on Nikki Haley, it's that right there. The idea that she's malleable, the idea that she's whatever she needs to be in the moment. And that's obviously not something that voters want to hear. But on the whole, she's been a very polished person. And if you're looking for someone who sounds the part the way we've usually understood it, she's it. Now, whether that is in opposition to the idea of authenticity that some voters crave today that sort of embodies Trump's appeal to the Republicans, we'll wait and see. But there's been a real polish with her public appearances.

She was probably telling the truth when she said you have to change who you are depending on what state you're in. And somehow telling the truth and authenticity are in this case a bit at odds with each other. Well, I think the knock on her as a candidate has always been that she just morphs into whatever the prevailing Republican shape is of the day. So when she started, then when she goes to work for Trump, now when she's running for this office, and it causes people to wonder, who is Nikki Haley? And so then when she says to an interviewer, oh yeah, you just changed personalities when you go over to another state, it does cause people to say, well, wait a minute, I don't want somebody to change personalities. I want to know who they are, what they stand for, and that they're going to be strong enough to be that no matter what state they're in, no matter what situation they're in. And so I do think that was a real stumble,

honestly, because it's just not what Republicans are looking for these days. Somebody who's malleable, that's what they would say about the pre-Trump Republican era. People were too weak. They were too soft. They were too willing to give up on their values and principles. They wouldn't fight enough. And I think that little statement, you know, sort of was an embodiment of what people would say about that era versus the Trump era when everybody seems to know what they believe and have a willingness to fight for it. You know, we heard that same sentiment from Andrew Prokop in the first half of our show,

that Nikki Haley is a pre-Trump Republican, that she's an old-timey Republican. Republicans like Donald Trump. It's early to call this. You can tell me how foolish it is to ask you this question right now, but do you think Nikki Haley could beat Donald Trump? I think it's possible she could get close to him

in New Hampshire. If Chris Christie were to drop out, which it doesn't sound like he's going to, that would help her mathematical possibility. So I think it's possible in a state where the terrain is the friendliest and you have the possibility of some independents coming in, sure, the conditions could strike on a given day. I think the trouble is when you look at the landscape at large, nationally, about two-thirds of Republicans want Donald Trump to be the nominee. He's had a grip on this party for years. The idea that it would turn on a dime when it hasn't really moved an inch since he came onto the scene strikes me as highly improbable.

So you would think, look, Trump's going to win Iowa. He bounces out of that. Maybe he has a brush with a close race in New Hampshire. But then you start to get into a bunch of other states where he's going to run really strong, including South Carolina, where she was governor. And I suspect Donald Trump would have no trouble dispatching her if they had the primary there today. Why is that? She was governor. People in South Carolina elected her. Why would she have so much trouble? Well, this is the difference between the modern party that exists in the image of Donald Trump and the party that existed prior to Trump in the era when she was governor. I mean, this has been the great question. Are there enough Republicans left who want to do something like nominate a Nikki Haley pre-Trump Republican? Or do they just want to keep going down this path? And I think South Carolina, like a lot of other Southern and rural states, have fully embraced the Trump era of the Republican Party. And based

on the polling I've seen down there right now, he's in really strong shape. Now, if she were to win New Hampshire and get a little momentum in a narrative shift, maybe that state gets a little more interesting. But I would think Trump is destined to run strong in South Carolina and states that are similarly positioned. All right, Scott Jennings from O'Hare Airport, good luck making your way to Iowa. We really appreciate this. Take good care. We got our snow boots in the luggage. We just need the plane to take off. Today's episode was produced by Miles Bryan and edited by Matthew Collette. It was engineered by David Herman and fact-checked by Laura Bullard.

Scott Jennings made it to Iowa at 1.30 this morning. It's Today Explained. point.