Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis is telling Republicans that he’s in an existential fight against former United Nations Ambassador Nikki Haley — without telling them that.
The two candidates have emerged as the leading alternatives to former President Donald Trump for the 2024 Republican nomination — a position DeSantis once held alone. For several days, they have been engaged in a heated exchange over the unfolding war in the Middle East, with DeSantis on Thursday reiterating a debunked charge that Haley wants to admit Palestinian refugees to the U.S.
But the skirmish may be noteworthy less for the substance than for what it says about the state of a race in which Trump is still the dominant figure, according to Republican strategists who are not affiliated with either campaign.
For months, DeSantis and his allies have contended that the governor was in a two-man battle with Trump for the nomination. Their new focus on Haley betrays a different concern: that DeSantis is locked in a fight with her for second place.
“This is much more about momentum and whose arrow is pointing up and whose arrow is pointing down,” said Matthew Bartlett, a national Republican strategist and New Hampshire native. “I think they are trying to blunt any further growth, rise or momentum [for Haley] in order to try to maintain the No. 2 position.”
South Carolina state Sen. Josh Kimbrell, who has endorsed DeSantis, said the showdown between DeSantis and Haley always felt like it was coming.
“I always felt like this was going to happen [a Haley-DeSantis clash],” Kimbrell said. “This is all about who will be able to survive when the herd is thinned.”
He added that he did think the dust-up over whether Haley wants to allow Palestinian refugees into the U.S. would “hurt her with primary voters.” She has said she does not want to admit Palestinian refugees, a charge stemming a CNN interview in which she said “you can separate civilians from terrorists” while discussing a blanket statement DeSantis had made about Gaza.
Both candidates trail Trump by yawning margins in national and state-by-state polling, with DeSantis currently running second in Iowa and Haley holding that spot in New Hampshire and South Carolina. But their relative proximity to each other, at a time when several other candidates have faded, is a result of Haley gaining steam and DeSantis losing it over the course of the campaign.
“DeSantis has had more resources, but Nikki Haley has something that you can’t buy that he never really had: momentum,” said Vinny Minchillo, a longtime GOP operative based in Texas.
That momentum can be seen in her rise in the polls and in the two candidates’ fundraising.
After collecting $5.3 million in the second quarter of the year, Haley’s campaign posted an $8.2 million haul in a third-quarter report filed with the Federal Election Commission Sunday. DeSantis has outraised Haley, but his trajectory is in the opposite direction: $20.1 million in the second quarter and $11.1 million in the third quarter.
Perhaps most important on the financial front, Haley has been more efficient with her cash and has more to spend on the run-up to early-state voting, ending September with $9.1 million in available funds for the primary, compared to DeSantis’ $5 million.
Never Back Down, the pro-DeSantis super PAC which clocked $130 million raised and $96.8 million left in the bank when its last disclosure was due in July, gives DeSantis’ side a major cash edge over the rest of the field. Some of it is being spent now to try to reverse Haley’s surge and return DeSantis to sole possession of second place.
On Thursday, the super PAC began running an ad in Iowa and New Hampshire that strongly and falsely suggests that Haley is open to the U.S. admitting Palestinian refugees amid Israel’s war with Hamas.
The ad piggybacks on DeSantis’ argument in an exclusive interview with NBC News earlier this week that Haley has been “trying to please the media and people on the left” in her remarks on the war in the Middle East. Responding on CNN to a DeSantis claim that all Palestinians in Gaza are antisemitic, Haley said Sunday that Americans “should care about the Palestinian citizens” and have “always been sympathetic to the fact that you can separate civilians from terrorists.”
DeSantis said Thursday that it’s fair game to attack her for supporting refugees because her use of the word “separate” indicated that she wanted to vet Palestinians for entry into the U.S.
“Why would you be vetting people if you’re not going to be bringing them in?” he said.
More broadly, DeSantis allies are trying to draw a contrast in which Republican primary voters see DeSantis as more of a hard-liner than Haley on immigration and national security policy. It remains to be seen whether Never Back Down will air more Haley-focused ads, but a senior official for the super PAC said her rise has set her up for a fall.
“She’s about to go through her scrutiny and decline phase,” the official said.
Haley’s team foresees no change in the candidates’ respective trajectories, according to one aide, who said Haley has replaced DeSantis in a two-person race against Trump.
“She has just been slow, consistent, steady, and she is rising now,” the Haley aide said. “And DeSantis has gone nowhere but down.”
Source: | This article originally belongs to Nbcnews.com
