In December The New York Time’s The Daily released a podcast about Nikki Haley and her recent success in early primary state polls. They noted her rise of over DeSantis, and her seeming position as the most viable Trump alternative. I appreciated their analysis on her status as a factional candidate that really only currently appeals to Republicans who are unhappy with Trump: a minority of the party. In most polling Trump is well above 50% meaning he is unchallengeable without a major shift.
However, I felt like The Daily, like many other analysts missed the mark on why even today, hours before the caucus, I would still rather be in DeSantis’ shoes than Haley’s. The Daily failed to speak on the overall strategy of the the GOP primary. To explain why DeSantis is still for all intents and purposes in second place let’s consider the goals of our candidates. Some candidates are not trying to “win“ per se. Chris Christie was mostly there to antagonize Trump which is going about as well as you might have hoped, and Vivek to me seems mostly interested in a VP pick. There isn’t a path for either of them to getting the most delegates in the GOP convention.
Haley and DeSantis on the other hand are actually attempting to win. They are spending time, money and political influence to try to win the primary. A naive approach to their strategy would be making every choice which maximizes average vote-share. Obviously every choice has risks, so someone using this strategy would weigh the ups and downs and pick the options which on net have the highest vote-share most of the time. This is a poor strategy because the second place is the first loser. There is no benefit to in going from 25% to 35% against Trump’s majority share of the party.
Accordingly, even if Haley picked up all the other lesser candidate’s votes she still would lose. It’s unlikely for a good debate performance or witty ads to turn over enough voters from Trump to Haley to make a difference. Therefore she is in the same boat as everyone else: hoping Trump has a major health problem or an immediately scandalizing legal development. Neither of these are particularly likely but they certainly could happen (even if it is more and more likely everyday that the primary voting will mostly happen before any major convictions).
Once you assume that without Trump collapsing its impossible to win you start to see the race how it truly is. DeSantis and Haley are essentially running solely against each other in the hopes that Trump has a heart attack. They have no incentive to attack Trump because if they were to do so they would alienate Trump’s voters who they would need to defeat the other remaining candidate.
The next logical question about the race if you analyze it like this is who do Trump’s voter’s favor as a second choice pick? The answer is overwhelmingly DeSantis. Do I think DeSantis is likely to outperform Haley overall this cycle? No. Chances are high that Trump won’t drop out and Haley will pick up the majority of the anti-Trump vote. However, if Trump were to drop out for whatever reason, DeSantis is the clear winner in that scenario. To me that would put him in second place no matter if he’s currently polling below Haley.
Lastly, I have some reporting that the founder of substack has been defending commercial relationships with Nazis. I’m looking for a potential replacement to house my blog. If anyone has any recommendations I’d love to hear them. I’ll make a post here with a forwarding link if I end up moving.
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