Nikki Haley did nicely sufficient within the Iowa caucuses Monday evening to maintain her supporters’ hopes alive. However her third-place displaying, on the heels of Ron DeSantis and a mile behind Donald Trump, was additionally simply disappointing sufficient to boost doubts about her candidacy.
Her plan popping out of Iowa is a basic underdog technique: Use sturdy early outcomes to upend expectations within the contests to come back, reshaping the dynamic of the race one upset victory at a time. So, the considering goes, her solid-enough efficiency in Iowa will propel her larger in New Hampshire, the place she holds a powerful second place within the polls.
It’s attainable. However even when Ms. Haley does nicely in New Hampshire, it gained’t matter. That’s as a result of Ms. Haley is starkly out of step with the evolution of her social gathering over the previous decade.
The form of at present’s Republican voters may be seen most clearly in nationwide polling of Republican voters, the place Mr. Trump has led by a considerable margin for months. Even within the unlikely occasion that each one the voters who’ve advised pollsters in current weeks that they assist Mr. DeSantis, Chris Christie and the previous Arkansas governor Asa Hutchinson converted to Ms. Haley, she would attain solely the excessive 20s, putting her greater than 30 factors behind Mr. Trump, who sits at round 60 p.c. (The voters who’ve stated they assist Vivek Ramaswamy, who dropped out of the race on Monday evening, would doubtless change to Mr. Trump.)
Certain, Ms. Haley would possibly peel off a few of these Trump voters if she manages to puncture his air of inevitability by knocking him sideways in New Hampshire. However imagining that she might wrest the nomination from him ignores the truth that, if he had been to undergo a humiliating setback in New Hampshire, Mr. Trump could be assured to assault her with a viciousness he has thus far reserved primarily for Mr. DeSantis. In December, as she climbed within the polls, MAGA loyalists like Tucker Carlson and Steve Bannon provided a preview of those kind of slashing assaults (referring to her as a “hologram” despatched by donors or as probably worse than “Judas Pence”).
Extra vital, although, the success of the Haley marketing campaign’s hopes would require a wholesale shift in preferences amongst tens of millions of Republican voters.
It is a actuality obscured by who can be voting in New Hampshire. For one factor, not like many of the states to come back, New Hampshire permits “unaffiliated” (unbiased) voters to take part within the Republican main, in addition to any Democratic-registered voters who modified their social gathering affiliation earlier than Oct. 6, 2023. That’s a pool of voters who disproportionately favor Ms. Haley.
Then there’s the character of the Republican voters within the state. As Jonathan Martin lately identified in Politico, Ms. Haley attracts voters who’re “much less spiritual, extra educated and wealthier” than the common Republican in 2024 — which simply so occurs to explain New Hampshire Republicans. Few states are a greater match for Ms. Haley’s marketing campaign.
She is going to discover the states that observe New Hampshire, together with her dwelling state of South Carolina, a lot much less hospitable. There are a number of causes that regardless of being a former fashionable governor there, Ms. Haley is trailing Mr. Trump in South Carolina by 30 factors.
For one factor, his takeover of the social gathering in 2016 was made attainable by his enormously highly effective attraction to voters who haven’t graduated from school. This dynamic was partly about coverage. By 2016, these voters had grown weary of candidates emphasizing cuts to entitlements and taxes on the rich whereas additionally favoring liberal charges of immigration, free-trade agreements that resulted in manufacturing jobs being shipped overseas, and pious defenses of waging wars within the identify of abstractions like “freedom” and the “liberal worldwide order.”
Ms. Haley tries to sound powerful on immigration, however she helps elevating the retirement age with the intention to lower Social Safety spending, has tried to dance round the query of the place she stands on free commerce and is a vocal supporter of hawkish internationalism. That locations her totally on the flawed aspect of the insurance policies which have outlined her social gathering’s Trumpian shift over the previous decade.
However extra basic to Mr. Trump’s energy is populist anger at “them” — the progressive-leaning elites who graduate from the nation’s most selective universities, management the commanding heights of tradition, run America’s main public establishments and media shops and sneer at him and his supporters, calling them racists, xenophobes, misogynists and fascists.
When these supporters have been requested why they assist Mr. Trump so fervently, they’ve typically responded by saying, “He fights.” Ms. Haley would possibly domesticate a picture of toughness, however she is going to by no means have the ability to surpass Mr. Trump’s fame as a fighter when seemingly every single day brings recent headlines about prosecutors and judges transferring towards him (and, by means of him, towards his supporters).
That factors to a last benefit Mr. Trump enjoys with Republican voters over Ms. Haley. In her debate final week with Mr. DeSantis, each tried to sound like fighters, demonstrating it by repeatedly sniping at one another. But the overly intelligent assaults sounded scripted, and each candidates got here off as inauthentic tryhards.
Mr. Trump against this typically speaks from a spot of unfiltered rage. No marketing consultant within the nation would have suggested him to assault John McCain, George W. Bush, Mitt Romney, a Gold Star household, Ted Cruz’s father and spouse, his personal vp, judges and prosecutors in his personal trials or any of the opposite targets of his unhinged wrath through the years. But he has accomplished all of these items and gained the love and assist of a majority of social gathering voters, not a lot regardless of as due to it.
Such Republicans are exceedingly unlikely to be swayed to modify their allegiance to a traditional politician, even one who can brag about polls displaying she’d beat Joe Biden by a wider margin than the previous president would. They’ve cause to imagine that Mr. Trump would beat him, too, they usually’d moderately go into the final election with somebody they really feel they will belief.
Certain, a win or shut second in New Hampshire could produce a bounce for Ms. Haley. However New Hampshire is overwhelmingly more likely to find yourself because the high-water mark for her marketing campaign.
She and her supporters must be happy with her accomplishment in getting inside attain of changing into probably the most viable candidate after Mr. Trump. Sadly, that can nearly definitely depart her in a distant second place.
Damon Linker, who writes the publication “Notes From the Middleground,” is a senior lecturer within the division of political science on the College of Pennsylvania and a senior fellow within the Open Society Challenge on the Niskanen Heart.
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