Can we stop pretending now? After weeks of speculating by the media that perhaps Nikki Haley might eke out a win in New Hampshire – or at least lose by a percentage small enough to make continuing in the race reasonable – she lost by a wide margin.
Before we had been offered various rationales for why, just maybe, this wouldn’t happen. Haley, after all, had recently come into a flush of donor money at the end of 2023, as the field dwindled and she was left alone as the last almost-plausible non-Trump candidate. She’d put much of that money into New Hampshire, a state whose Republicans tend to hew more moderate. (Haley, a rabid conservative but one who does not seem to oppose the rule of law outright, is what passes for “moderate” in today’s Republican party.)
There was also the force of history to consider, the fact that primary campaigns of either major party do not usually look like this. When there’s such a big field, as there was in this Republican cycle, normally New Hampshire’s first-in-the-nation primary can have quite a bit of sway, helping to advance the strongest contenders and cull the stragglers.
But this year there were only two people really running by the time New Hampshire rolled around, and one of them loomed much larger than the other – both in fundraising and in his power to animate the public. It was like watching a race between a whale and a minnow: he lapped her without seeming to try.
One word for the 2024 Republican primary contest is “anticlimactic”. But considering how completely Trump has captured the imagination of his party, it is possible that the real story is not about how easily he has trounced his challengers, but that there were so many challengers in the first place.
What possessed so many Republicans to run against Trump? Were they delusional? Hopeful? Cynical? Had they missed the memo on what their party had become – a personality cult devoted in total service to one man? Or did they think, somehow, that he was weaker than he was?
Perhaps this was the idea of the Trump imitators. Whiny, pleading Ron DeSantis hoped that if he demonstrated enough cruelty in Florida, his home state, Republican voters might admire him as strong, and forget how annoying he is. He was Trump without the charm.
Nasally, scheming Vivek Ramaswamy attempted to channel Trump’s snake-oil salesman pitch for nostalgia, punishment of enemies and exaggerated promises; he was Trump without the movement.
Chris Christie, the former governor of New Jersey best known for shutting down the George Washington Bridge to punish a mayor who had crossed him, was the only Republican willing to attack Trump, building his campaign around severe, self-serious intonations about the former president’s danger to the nation. But it was impossible to take Christie seriously: he could not convincingly feign honor.
Maybe it was fitting, then, that Haley was the last one standing: though she was equally misguided, she was doing something different from her fellow candidates. Haley’s campaign, focused on a revival of a hawkish neoconservative foreign policy and a comparative de-emphasis of social issues, seemed uncannily retro and anachronistic – a 90s-era Republican wearing a 21st-century blazer set.
Hers was a campaign that talked about a generational shift and played up Haley’s relative youth (she’s 52), but which also seemed to wish for a return to the political past, attempting to proceed as if Trump had never happened. Who could look at today’s Republican party – animated by racist and misogynist zeal, in thrall to short-sightedness and bigotry, harnessed around petty grievances and functionally largely, for its base, to entertain – and think that what such people wanted was a competent, cool-headed and strategic woman of color? Only the most naive people in the world could think that. Haley, at least, was willing to take their money.
In debates, Haley talked about the virtues of foreign military involvement and played up her own discipline and competence. There might be arguments for all this, but they are clearly not arguments that the Republican party base wanted to hear: foreign wars remain unpopular in post-Iraq America. (Trump’s pivot to an “America First” isolationism seems to have returned Republicans to a Lindbergh-esque hostility to the outside world for the foreseeable future.)
And things like competence, self-discipline and hard work are qualities that tend to render women into useful, serviceable minor characters – the sort of background figures who can be useful to a man of showmanship and bombast.
One of the most plausible explanations for Haley’s campaign has always been that she is actually running for vice-president. This might be the role she is best suited to play: that of a bridge between the old-guard establishment Republicans and the new, permanently Trumpist reality.
But it’s unclear how much of a reconciliation is really needed there. After his landslide victory in Iowa, the big donor money has once again flowed to Trump; reporters at Davos issued dispatches detailing how the global rich have made their peace with Trump’s possible return to the White House.
The old-school Republicans that Haley represents have never been as far from Trump as it would benefit their egos to pretend. The national war hawks, the corporate rich: these people do not need the democracy that Trump threatens. And in a few days or weeks, when she inevitably drops out of the race and endorses Trump, Nikki Haley will discover that she can live without it, too.
Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist
