Nikki Haley’s comet soars or crashes Wednesday night.
All anti-Trump Republican eyes will be on the surging former ambassador to the United Nations when most of the 2024 GOP presidential candidates take the debate stage at the Reagan Library in Simi Valley, California.
Haley, who served six years as South Carolina’s governor, was the consensus winner of the first Republican debate in Milwaukee last month, and her performance fueled a rise in primary polls in her own home state, in Iowa, in New Hampshire and at the national level.
More noteworthy for many Republicans: An NBC News poll released Sunday showed Haley with a five-point lead — 46% to 41% — over President Joe Biden in a hypothetical matchup. That puts her well ahead of Republican front-runner Donald Trump, who is tied with Biden at 46% in a head-to-head matchup, and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who trails Biden by one point.
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Trump, who plans to skip the debate and speak with blue-collar workers at a nonunion factory outside Detroit Wednesday evening, will do everything in his power to draw attention away from the stage and toward the idea that he is already engaged in a rematch of his 2020 fight with Biden. The rest of the Republican field will also be competing for airtime with the autoworkers strike, Democratic Sen. Bob Menendez’s indictment on federal bribery charges and an impending government shutdown.
Those issues of national importance should provide fodder for the moderators from Fox and Univision, along with the broader economy — an issue on which the GOP holds its largest edge ever over Democrats in the NBC News poll — the future of U.S. support for Ukraine, abortion, crime and immigration.
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But one big question for the candidates in the pack behind Trump, and for GOP voters, is whether Haley sustains her fire or proves to be a flash in the pan. Many Republican strategists think her rivals — particularly DeSantis, former Vice President Mike Pence and businessman Vivek Ramaswamy — will affix a target to her back. That figures to put more pressure on Haley to defend herself capably and show she can go on offense at the same time.
“She has to look like she’s the most electable both in the primary and the general, and you can’t do that by talking about how you’re electable,” said Braid Todd, a Republican strategist who is not working for any of the campaigns. “You have to look the part. … If she’s able to take the fight to DeSantis, then a lot of people are going to say she can take the fight to Trump.”
That points to the broader challenge that has bedeviled the Republican pack throughout the early stages of the primary fight: No one has taken control of the anti-Trump wing of the party, much less begun to carve into the majority of the GOP that currently supports him.
After months of portraying the race as a two-man fight, DeSantis and his team are faced with the reality that his trajectory has looked a lot more like the Dow Jones on Black Monday in 1987 than a skybound SpaceX rocket.
“For Ron tonight, he’s got to hit it out of the park,” said Sean Van Anglen, a New Hampshire Republican activist who backs DeSantis. “This has to be his night, and I don’t think he can wait around anymore. I think the general consensus amongst confidants of his campaign [hangs] on tonight.”
Before the debate, one DeSantis bundler said donors had all but lost faith in the Florida governor.
“It’s make or break for the governor. He’s listing. He’s been floundering at best since the last debate,” the bundler said. “If he struggles, if he has another average or bad performance, I think the narrative becomes hardwired that he’s dead and it’s irrecoverable.”
Donors have been watching closely as Haley is close to overtaking DeSantis in the polls and as DeSantis has failed to break through.
“I’m not seeing anybody say ‘we must have Ron DeSantis,’” the bundler said. “He hasn’t had a legitimate good month since November.”
Trump led with 59% in the NBC News poll, with DeSantis at 16% — an eight point gain for Trump and six-point loss for DeSantis since a June survey. But DeSantis had begun to swoon well before that. Haley inched forward from 4% to 7%, while Pence fell from 7% to 4%. New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott and Ramaswamy all remained at 5% or below, and North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum remained at 0%.
Christie has put all of his emphasis on campaigning in New Hampshire, a state DeSantis hasn’t visited in a month, but is attempting the tricky feat of winning without leaving a footprint in Iowa. Ramaswamy has shown himself to be adept at collecting headlines, but is not polling in the top three in any of the four early states of Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina and Nevada.
Some Scott supporters were disappointed that his performance in the first debate tracked the general approach of his campaign: say nothing unkind about a fellow Republican. That has given Scott better favorability ratings than the rest of the field, but it has prevented him from gaining traction among an electorate that GOP strategists say is hungry for a fighter.
Scott has enough cash, between his campaign account and a supportive super PAC, to keep running indefinitely. But the other candidates may find that it’s hard to raise money if they don’t start breaking away from the pack and toward Trump. That gives several of them incentive to go hard at Haley on Wednesday night, and it means that Haley has an opportunity to start putting away rivals.
“Debates are really only about two things. They’re about showing off your brain and proving you have guts,” Todd said. “She’s going to pass the first one every time. So then, the burden on her is to pick a fight and win a fight.”
Source: | This article originally belongs to Nbcnews.com
