The Briefing, Vol. XII, Issue 4
This week:
- DeSantis drops out of a race he can’t win
- Haley makes her push in New Hampshire, but will it matter?
- Biden’s electoral college situation is even more dire than his polling
President 2024
Ron DeSantis: Although we did not necessarily expect Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis to drop out of the presidential race over the weekend, it is not surprising at all that he did.
After spending more than $35 million dollars in Iowa, he just barely eked out a distant second place at about 20 percent in the caucuses. He was facing a single digit finish in New Hampshire tomorrow, and after that a crushing defeat in South Carolina, where he had invested a huge amount of money.
As we’ve noted previously, DeSantis was the perfect candidate on paper. He had a record of conservative accomplishment, a strong position from which to run, a large donor base, and a willingness to tackle social issues that many Republicans have shied away from. Unfortunately for him, the timing just didn’t work out.
Just as he reached the apex of his career, Donald Trump was back, demanding the Republican Party’s nomination for a third consecutive presidential election. He remains such an overwhelming favorite with Republican voters, at least on a national basis, that he became the constant focus of the campaign, eclipsing nearly all other candidates. DeSantis and most others showed him so much deference that it was difficult to make any real progress in defeating Trump. They knew in advance that there was no path to success following the lead of former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, who made attacking Trump the sole focus of his campaign.
Even so, it was not a mistake for DeSantis to run in 2024. By 2028, he will almost certainly be irrelevant to the national political conversation, the way former Republican governors like Scott Walker and Mike Huckabee are today. He could improve his chances if a Senate seat opens up and he chooses to run.
DeSantis, despite his endorsement of Trump will probably be shut out of a second Trump administration, as retribution for running against the former president. The good news for conservatives is that, for his last two years in office as governor, he has every incentive to put the pedal to the metal on conservative reforms, as that gives him the best possible chance of remaining politically relevant. Or he may choose to leave politics altogether, taking a state or federal judicial appointment, a university presidency, or just practicing law.
Nikki Haley: Of course, the presidential nomination race is not over just yet. In fact, former President Trump faces his most credible challenge yet in tomorrow’s New Hampshire primary. Haley has taken off the gloves with respect to Trump, commenting over the weekend that he and Biden are “equally bad.”
Haley is expected to come close and, according to at least one poll, could tie Trump when the votes are all counted. The last American Research Group poll before the vote has her trailing by just two points. (As we noted last week, the previous ARG poll had them tied.) And DeSantis’s exit from the race will marginally help Haley, just as Christie’s exit seemed to markedly boost her numbers.
However, the question after that is just how much it matters. Haley could actually win New Hampshire, and it would probably get her no closer to the nomination than she is now.
In the last eight national polls, Trump’s lead over the second place finisher ranges from 37 to 61 points. In South Carolina, he leaves former Gov. Haley by nearly 30 points.
To be sure, this could change if Haley wins New Hampshire, but is it really going to change enough to overcome margins like that? The only thing that can undo Trump now would be some kind of legal calamity preventing him from campaigning for prompting him to drop out.
Meanwhile, to the extent that it matters, Democratic Rep. Ro Khanna made the interesting observation that Haley is not exploiting one of her strengths — her family’s positive story of immigration and integration into America — in order to appeal to “a base that’s never going to vote for her.” The latter is a reference to her soft-pedaling the role of slavery in the Civil War in some recent remarks, and her comment that the United States was never a racist country, which might come as a huge surprise to a lot of people who lived in the South about 60 years ago.
These latter do seem to be unforced errors, especially considering that Haley’s main push is in New Hampshire. But the former part of the observation is actually the more interesting one. In a parallel universe, Haley could have run a campaign similar to but perhaps more successful than that of Sen. Tim Scott (R-S.C.) by focusing on her family’s success story and preaching the values and virtues of legal immigration, in contrast to the Biden administration’s sanctioning of trafficking and lawlessness at the southern border.
Joe Biden: President Joe Biden is in no danger of losing the Democratic nomination, but he faces a technical problem in New Hampshire. When Granite State Democrats refused to postpone their primary and let South Carolina go first, as the Democratic National Committee had ordered, Biden made a point of not putting himself on the ballot. Now, he has to win a write-in election against Rep. Dean Phillips (D-Minn.) and a handful of other minor candidates.
The polling suggests that Biden will manage it easily — ARG has him on 51 percent and more than 30 points ahead — but write-in campaigns are not necessarily so easy to poll. There is already word of a left-wing protest vote in New Hampshire, to write in “ceasefire” instead, a reference to the ongoing war in Gaza. The real question: Just how many Democrats are going to come out enthusiastically for Biden in a low-stakes, meaningless primary at this point? A lackluster victory could prove humiliating for his campaign and emblematic of his problems.
Electoral math: The last Marist poll before the New Hampshire primary suggests that Biden leads Donald Trump in New Hampshire. With independent Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. Included, his lead comes down to 44 to 41 percent.
Still, Trump has never won New Hampshire’s electoral votes, and Biden’s problem is not in New Hampshire.
Biden is currently losing the presidency in states like Georgia, Nevada, Arizona, and Michigan — all states where he has trailed Trump in every single poll taken in the last several months.
Note that, all other things being equal to 2020, Trump wins 283 electoral votes on the newly reapportioned 2024 map, and the presidency, if he carries those states, before even considering any attempts to expand the map into Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, or New Hampshire.
Senate 2024
Michigan: Libertarian-leaning former Rep. Justin Amash will be joining the already-crowded Republican field for U.S. Senate. After his vote to impeach Trump, it is difficult to imagine how he wins the Republican nomination in a field that already includes another anti-Trump candidate, former Rep. Pete Meijer (R).
Again, it is doubtful that there is enough room in a Republican primary for two Republican candidates who each voted to impeach Trump. Pro-Trump sentiment seems to be running very high in Michigan lately, with Trump’s polling surprisingly strong, considering he only just barely won the state in 2016 and then lost it in 2020.
Amash’s entrance into the race will probably work to the detriment of Meijer, his successor in his old Western Michigan district, and to the benefit of the less anti-Trump candidates, such as former Detroit police chief James Craig or former House Intelligence chairman Mike Rogers.
Ohio: So perhaps the Trump endorsement still carries some weight in Ohio.
According to his own internal poll, unreleased but supposedly pitched to the NRSC, businessman Bernie Moreno (R) now leads his higher-profile opponents for the nod to take on Sen. Sherrod Brown (D). This comes after a couple of polls before Christmas, including one of his own, showing him just barely breaking open a narrower lead over Secretary of State Frank LaRose (R) and state Sen. Matt Dolan (R). Moreno got Trump’s endorsement on Dec. 20.
Texas: More ominous news for Sen. Ted Cruz (R), who really has his work cut out for him in seeking re-election he has an underwhelming lead against either of the two Democrats vying to challenge him — Rep. Colin Allred (D), who outraised him in the fourth quarter of 2023, and Roland Gutierrez. Cruz’s 42 or 41 percent in the latest Emerson college poll puts him two points ahead of Allred and one point ahead of Gutierrez, but the bigger problem is that that’s a very low number for an incumbent anywhere.
