Nikki Haley could be the new John McCain

Like McCain in 2000, she could win New Hampshire and boost her profile. But it's going to be very hard for her to win the GOP nomination.

I’ve always thought that American presidential primaries are more interesting than general elections. Rather than being one-and-done affairs, they’re held sequentially, so results from one state can shift the momentum in subsequent ones. And because primaries are, by definition, held among just one party’s voters, they tend to be highly dynamic affairs. Instead of the 10 to 15 percent of the country that constitute swing voters in general elections, the majority of primary voters usually have multiple choices they like and would at least consider voting for — so voter preferences can shift quickly.

So primaries are almost always exciting. Except, I’m afraid to say, this year’s primaries.

Sorry, but there’s little that’s changed since September, when I wrote that Joe Biden and Donald Trump were the highly likely nominees. That’s not exactly an unconventional take, I know, although I would note that Trump has “only” an 83 percent chance of being the Republican nominee at prediction markets, and Biden has only about a 72 percent chance. Both those figures seem low. Maybe Joe Biden should step aside — I’ve written about that a lot. But that’s not a prediction of what he will do — he’s running again, and nobody more prominent than Minnesota Rep. Dean Phillips is challenging him.

Meanwhile, the national Republican race isn’t remotely competitive, and it hasn’t really been since this spring since Ron DeSantis began to flop. Trump leads his nearest rivals nationally, DeSantis and Nikki Haley, by around 50 points (!), and has more than 60 percent of Republican voters listing him as their first choice:

Seriously, what more is there for us to analyze here? Yes, primaries are unpredictable and the polls can change in a hurry. But 50-point (!) leads are hard to lose. Usually if there’s movement against a heavy frontrunner, we’ll have seen more signs of it by now. By December 2015, for instance, Bernie Sanders had closed to within 20 points of Hillary Clinton nationally and within 10 to 15 points in Iowa.¹

You can find better parallels in the 2000 nomination campaigns. In December 1999, Al Gore led Bill Bradley by around 20 points nationally, but the center held for Gore in Iowa and New Hampshire and he wound up winning all 50 states.

Meanwhile, these numbers from the 2000 GOP nomination race look familiar:

George W. Bush’s lead over his Republican rivals in 2000 was pretty Trump-like, and anti-Trump Republicans can take at least a little bit of comfort from the fact that the race at least wound up being interesting, if not exactly competitive.

Bush won Iowa by 10 points that year, with Steve Forbes finishing in second. But then he lost to John McCain in New Hampshire — and McCain wound up winning seven states in total. This did have important downstream impacts, boosting McCain’s national profile, which culminated in him being the GOP nominee in 2008.

McCain’s New Hampshire win in 2000 bought him great headlines — but not the GOP nomination. https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/2000/02/02/issue.html

Still, Bush was probably never in that much danger. McCain’s appeal was regional; five of his seven wins came in New England, another in his home state of Arizona, and the final one in Michigan, a state that has a long history of doing maverick-y things in presidential primaries.

You could argue that Nikki Haley is on a McCain-in-2000-like trajectory. Whereas Trump has actually been expanding his lead lately in Iowa, New Hampshire is closer, with a YouGov poll this weekend showing Haley at 29 percent to 44 percent for Trump. Other polls don’t show as tight of a race, but there haven’t actually been any other high-quality non-partisan polls in New Hampshire in the past several weeks.

It’s not impossible to imagine Haley winning New Hampshire. Chris Christie has 10 percent of the vote in the YouGov poll, and if he were to pledge his support to Haley, that might make things a little closer. And the polls are notoriously swingy in New Hampshire. The problem is, it’s not clear where Haley would go from there. As Bill Scher points out, around half the Republican primary voters in the YouGov poll support abortion rights, a consequence of the fact that i) New Hampshire Republicans an unusual bunch, more secular and libertarian than Republicans in the rest of the country and ii) independent voters in New Hampshire can vote in the presidential primary of their choosing and many of them will vote in the GOP race without Joe Biden on the Democratic ballot there.

Now, it isn’t quite fair to say New Hampshire’s track record at picking winners is poor. In fact, the winner of the Republican primary in New Hampshire has won the GOP nomination in all years but 1996 and 2000:

However, if you look more closely, you’ll see that New Hampshire marches somewhat to a different drummer. It was Pat Buchanan’s best state in 1992 and one of his best in 1996. Wonky candidates like John Huntsman and Lamar Alexander also did relatively well there without becoming major factors elsewhere.

And after his win in New Hampshire, McCain got a boost in the polls — but still only enough to bring him within about 20 or 25 points of Bush nationally. Indeed, I’m sure if you plugged this year’s numbers into the primary model I designed four years ago, which attempts to account for potential momentum from primary wins, Trump would be a prohibitive favorite to win the nomination — perhaps well into the 90 percent range — even if the model did assign Haley some shot of winning New Hampshire. As with McCain in 2000, a win there might make the race interesting, but probably not truly competitive.

And Trump is a far more entrenched figure than Bush ever was. Would a Haley win in the Granite State really cause Republican voters to rethink the race when they’ve had every opportunity to rethink Trump since 2015 and have never done so? Haley has a strong electability argument — with high-quality polls often showing her trouncing Biden — but it’s a hard case to make when Trump also leads Biden in most polls².

That doesn’t mean there’s nothing at stake. A low chance doesn’t mean no chance. And even if she doesn’t win, a strong Haley showing could set her up as the frontrunner in 2028, or perhaps to be Trump’s VP nominee. Greater signs of resistance to Trump could also encourage third-party bids if such candidates figured they could form a coalition from both disaffected Republicans and disaffected Democrats. And u nlike DeSantis, Haley actually has been critical of Trump at times, so if you’re an anti-Trump Republican — or a Democrat or independent who thinks Trump is uniquely bad — some signs of resistance to Trump with the GOP electorate are probably better than none.

There are also some contingencies that are hard to model — like Trump’s legal risks, though it’s not clear how much those would hurt him in a primary. Plus, there are actuarial risks because of Trump’s advanced age. If you gave me a few bucks to wager on a long-shot, I’d bet them on Haley before DeSantis. But I’ve exhausted the amount of ass-covering that I’m willing to do. We’ve reached the point where the nominee being someone other than Trump would be perhaps the most surprising development in the history of the presidential primaries.

1. And of course, although Sanders gave Clinton a run for her money, he didn’t come that close to winning the nomination in the end.

2. And when many Republicans believe his false claims about the 2020 election being stolen.