What Nikki Haley Gets Right about the Trump Campaign

By Noah Rothman

Wednesday, August 14, 2024

 

Former U.N. ambassador Nikki Haley’s diagnosis of what ails the Trump campaign is simple: “Quit whining” about Kamala Harris. In a Tuesday night sit-down interview with Fox News Channel’s Bret Baier, the onetime governor of South Carolina catalogued the Trump campaign’s failures since Joe Biden left the race. Her verdict establishes what may soon become the conventional wisdom that explains how Donald Trump lost a presidential race that was his to lose.

 

“I want this campaign to win, but the campaign is not going to win talking about crowd sizes,” Haley added. It won’t win by talking about “what race Kamala Harris is,” or “whether she’s dumb.” And it won’t be won if Trump, J. D. Vance, and his allies continue to double down on appeal to voters who make up the MAGA movement. “Republicans need to be fighting for suburban women, for college-educated [voters], for independents, for moderate Republicans, and for conservative Democrats,” Haley concluded. “The American people are smart. Treat them like they’re smart.”

 

Haley advised the GOP nominee to focus not on the candidate’s grievances but on public policy. And if the Trump campaign took her advice, it would find that voters are more receptive to this approach than the luminous glow around the vice president presently suggests.

 

Just-released polling for the Cook Political Report Swing State Project Survey conducted by two reputable firms between July 26 and August 2 — just days after Biden left the race on July 21 — show Trump losing the election in November. But his loss cannot be attributed to voters’ enthusiasm for what Harris plans to do with the power she’s asking Americans to grant her. Indeed, Harris’s support seems decoupled from voters’ skepticism toward her policy instincts.

 

Trump “continues to hold an advantage over Harris on issues like the border and immigration (+14 points), getting inflation and the cost of living under control (+6) and dealing with crime and violence (+4),” the Cook Political Report’s veteran analyst Amy Walter observed. Among the uncommitted and third-party voters who are likely to decide the outcome in some of America’s most evenly divided states, voters give Trump the edge on the single most important issue of the race: the economy. When asked what concerns them more, potential swing voters said Harris “setting economic policy” is more unsettling than Trump “setting policy for immigration and border security” (by a 16-point margin) and “setting policy for abortion rights” (a 6-point margin. A shockingly high number of uncommitted voters see Harris’s “readiness and ability to perform the job of president” as a concern (62 percent) compared with Trump’s “age and ability” to serve (38 percent).

 

What explains this poll’s finding that, despite his advantages, Trump trails Harris in Arizona, Michigan, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin? Mostly, a general distaste for the one thing Donald Trump’s campaign cannot control: its candidate.

 

“She may serve as Biden’s vice president, but she’s winning Biden-Trump ‘double haters’ by 30 points,” Walter wrote. “Harris’ ability to quickly and decisively win over those double haters is a reminder that the 2020 Biden coalition was more anti-Trump than pro-Biden.” And even if the bloom falls from Harris’s rose in the coming weeks, it’s reasonable to expect that her coalition will persevere as an anti-Trump movement.

 

Trump’s struggles extend beyond the small number of voters who are dissatisfied with both campaigns. Trump trails Harris among independent voters by eight points at 48 to 40 percent — a huge swing to the Democratic ticket from May when Trump led Joe Biden among undeclared voters by 41 to 38 percent. Harris narrowly outflanks Trump when voters were asked who “makes you feel safer,” who is most committed to “enforcing the rule of law,” and who is most likely to be a “smart president” in office. And among those undecided and third-party voters who favor Trump on the issues, Trump is seen as “too erratic and out of control to govern the country effectively” and “too focused on personal retribution” to the tune of 44 percent. Overall, swing-state voters agree with that assessment by 14 and 18 points, respectively.

 

If there is good news in this poll for Trump, it can be found in the fact that the former president is leading by a single point both among “mid-to-low engagement” voters and new registrants. These may be unreliable voters, but they’re more receptive to persuasion from the Trump campaign. But Trump has not done much persuading in recent weeks, as our own Mark Antonio Wright detailed with savage disregard for the MAGA movement’s emotional distress. Since Biden left the race, Trump has only demonstrated the wisdom of voters who fear his more inclined toward conspiratorial thinking and ego-fueled flights of fancy than sobriety and good governance. “Inflation, mass illegal immigration, and chaos and weakness abroad have been complete afterthoughts,” Wright observed.

 

Republicans can soothe themselves with the notion that the deck in this race has been stacked against them by the press. By simply not being either Trump or Biden, Harris has seen her favorability ratings improve by 13 points since May. But Trump isn’t overwhelmingly disliked by the swing-state electorate. Whereas Harris’s favorability rating stands at 49 percent, Trump’s is “essentially static” from the spring at — there’s that vexing number again — 47 percent.

 

Republicans knew going into Trump’s third consecutive run at the presidency that 47 percent has the feel of a hard ceiling for the man who would be the 47th president. They knew voters had a fixed impression of the former president, and they knew that he is not for changing. They knew that the movement he inspired lacked much appeal to the majority-making voters outside the MAGA coalition. They knew all this, and they rolled the dice on Trump again anyway.

 

Despite Trump’s disadvantages, voters still believe their interests and America’s would be better served by a Trump presidency than a Harris administration. They just have little faith that Trump can competently pursue or secure those interests without succumbing to his own neurosis. Nikki Haley has laid down a marker, which, while superficially supportive of Trump, sets her up nicely for a forthcoming “I told you so” tour. When asked if Donald Trump has the discipline to be a policy-oriented candidate, Haley replied, “He can be, and I want him to be.” But, for now, he’s not.