Former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley wanted a two-person race. Now she is trying to run against two people at once.
It has proved difficult to go on offense against former President Donald Trump in the Republican primary. Haley has been trying to tie the GOP front-runner to a candidate the party’s rank-and-file likes considerably less: President Joe Biden.
Both candidates, she argues, represent “more of the same.”
“When we look at the choice that we have, more of the same like Joe Biden and Donald Trump, more of the same where 70% of Americans have said they don’t want a Trump-Biden rematch,” she said on the campaign trail in New Hampshire, where she hopes to score a major upset Tuesday. “More of the same in the fact that we do have two 80-year-olds running again and we need somebody ready to go for eight years.”
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“Both of those men put us trillions of dollars in debt,” Haley said at another campaign stop. “All they talk about are the investigations both their families are in.”
Haley told CNN on Sunday that Biden and Trump are “equally bad.”
“I mean, if they were — if either one of them was good, I wouldn’t be running. Yes, they are equally bad. That’s why I’m running is because I don’t think we need to have Biden or Trump. I don’t think we need to have two 80-year-olds sitting in the White House when we’ve basically got to make sure that we can handle the war situation that — that we’re in,” she said.
Haley added, “We need to know they’re at the top of their game. We need to know that they can take care of our national security and our economy. Right now, I don’t know that people feel like that with either one.”
Mark Harris, the top strategist for a pro-Haley group, recited a list of recent Trump senior moments on the trail in a memo circulated to reporters on Monday afternoon.
“These are the very same [gaffes] that Joe Biden has made for the last four years — so why is Donald Trump any different? He shouldn’t be,” Harris wrote. “If given the chance to repeat the 2020 election, Trump and Biden won’t just be competing for who gets to sit in the White House for four more years, but they’ll also compete for the most popular octogenarian award — a prize mostly seen in senior living centers across the country.”
From the beginning of her campaign, Haley has made attacks on Biden that not too subtly also apply to Trump. Her argument for a generational change in leadership, her call for competency tests in politicians over 75, this line in her announcement speech last year: “America is not past our prime; it’s just that our politicians are past theirs.”
But the Biden-Trump equivalency is a marked escalation as Haley becomes the last major Republican standing against the former president.
How many Republicans will buy the argument that Trump and Biden are “equally bad,” even in a relatively centrist state like New Hampshire, remains to be seen.
Yet plenty of independents see Biden and Trump as two peas in a pod. Voters outside the normal primary electorates don’t want a Biden-Trump rematch this year.
These voters can cast ballots in the New Hampshire primary, where the Democratic race is largely dormant as Biden’s allies run a write-in campaign. Haley will need them.
Trump is creeping toward 55% in the RealClearPolitics polling average for New Hampshire since the field has winnowed. He has recent leads ranging from 11 to 27 points. None of the last seven major public polls shows him below 50%, a metric that was once Haley’s main cause for Granite State optimism. The first polls without Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) show Trump taking between 57% and 62% of the vote, approaching his national polling lead.
Haley has to hope that the pollsters are undercounting independents who will vote for her in the Republican primary, as they did for John McCain in 2000 and 2008. Trump’s recent leads may have also reset expectations to let her gain a boost from New Hampshire with less than a win.
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That’s why Haley is trying to position herself as the only obstacle standing in the way of yet another Biden vs. Trump election, a rematch most voters say they don’t want.
New Hampshire is as good of a place as any to test whether this strategy can work.
