Former United Nations Ambassador Nikki Haley is going to spend the coming weeks trying to keep the race for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination alive.
One gambit she might try to keep the contest competitive is baiting former President Donald Trump to debate her.
This was clearly on Haley’s mind when she refused to debate Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) ahead of the New Hampshire primary.
“We’ve had five great debates in this campaign. Unfortunately, Donald Trump has ducked all of them,” she said after the Iowa caucuses. “He has nowhere left to hide. The next debate I do will either be with Donald Trump or with Joe Biden. I look forward to it.”
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The end result was that the scheduled debates before New Hampshire voted were canceled. Trump wouldn’t participate and therefore neither would Haley.
Haley could hope for a different outcome this time. Assuming she stays true to her pledge to remain in the race until at least her home state of South Carolina, she will have a little over a month to try to shake up the primary.
A debate would be one way to do that. Trump and Haley have taken different approaches to debates during this nomination contest. The former president has skipped them, citing his massive polling lead. Haley has been the one candidate who has benefited from them, using her performances to go from polling in the single digits to the second place and the last challenger standing against Trump.
It stands to reason that Trump will want to continue avoiding the debate stage while Haley will see debates as a positive. Her position would be stronger if she had won New Hampshire.
A win in New Hampshire would have meant that she and Trump had split the opening contests. She would then go on to win the Nevada primary, where she is the only active candidate on the ballot, followed by a Trump win in Nevada’s caucuses. Only the latter actually awards delegates.
Instead Haley lost New Hampshire by double digits. She will argue it was the second straight contest where Trump, a quasi-incumbent, lost more than 40% of the vote, showing discontent with the front-runner. In New Hampshire, she won nearly all of those votes, outperforming her poll numbers.
But it is hard to see where Trump stops winning for the foreseeable future. He is heavily favored in South Carolina, where Haley was governor. The RealClearPolitics polling average for the state shows Trump with 52% to Haley’s 21.8%. DeSantis, who has left the race, remains at 11%. Much of that vote could go to Trump. The electorate will be more conservative than in New Hampshire.
Trump has little incentive to change what has worked for him so far. His critics have gotten the two-person race they wanted. He remains the front-runner.
The former president’s angry remarks after winning New Hampshire suggest debating Haley would be risky. “Who the hell was the imposter that went onstage before and, like, claimed a victory?” he said after winning Tuesday night. “She did very poorly. She failed badly.”
Trump clearly disliked Haley’s attempts to define herself as the Bill Clinton-like “Comeback Kid.”
Even if the debates failed to halt Trump’s march to the nomination, a series of testy performances against Haley would likely do him no favors with the suburban women he needs in the general election.
For Haley’s part, she has done well enough to keep running. But she needs a game-changer to make this a truly competitive race. In the coming days, analysts and prospective donors will conclude her path is daunting.
A debate is the type of thing that might give Haley this kind of chance. For the same reason, Trump is unlikely to give her one.
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Former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie staked his whole campaign on confronting Trump on the debate stage. When the former president was a no-show, Christie called him “Donald Duck.”
Still, the Christie-Trump debate moment never happened. Christie didn’t make it to New Hampshire. Haley could find it difficult to avoid a similar fate before South Carolina.
