The speculation that former President Donald Trump will pick former United Nations Ambassador Nikki Haley as his running mate next year won’t die off despite efforts from several camps to kill it.
There are the Trump loyalists who don’t want Haley on populist and nationalist grounds; the Haley supporters who insist the only woman in the GOP presidential race isn’t running for second place; and the boosters of other candidates who insist neither Trump nor Haley will be at the top of the ticket when the dust settles.
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One big exception has been Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL). His allies on social media have pushed the Trump-Haley rumors. DeSantis’s campaign has launched a website claiming the two of them are working together against him to “make the establishment great again.”
DeSantis is trying to ward off Haley’s rise in the polls and upset Trump in Iowa before the calendar shifts to New Hampshire and South Carolina — and potentially a Trump-Haley race in which the Florida governor is an afterthought.
CBS News is the latest to report that Trump has been inquiring about what his supporters would think of Haley as a potential running mate.
It’s not uncommon for Trump to ask people in his orbit these kinds of questions or for them to signal relatively little about what he is eventually going to do. But Republicans who are supporting Trump because they hope it will mean a shift in the party’s direction on trade, immigration, and foreign policy still don’t like it.
Trump remains the heavy favorite for the Republican presidential nomination less than a month before the Iowa caucuses. He is above 60% in the national RealClearPolitics polling average, more than 50 points ahead of both DeSantis and Haley, but not a single primary vote has been cast yet.
Tucker Carlson has said he would not vote for a Trump-Haley ticket and would lobby against one “as strongly as I could.” Donald Trump Jr. said he would “go to great lengths to make sure” his father did not select Haley.
Roger Stone told Politico that Haley’s “views are so antithetically different than President Trump’s views.” Steve Bannon, who led a Turning Points USA rally in chants against Haley for veep, told the outlet her platform consisted of “Fox News-laundered neoliberal neocon policies that MAGA finds unacceptable.”
Of the candidates north of former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie in the polls, Haley is the most representative of the pre-Trump Republican Party. But if she leapfrogs DeSantis to become the runner-up, she will become the obvious party unity choice.
This is what happened in 1980 when Ronald Reagan tapped George H.W. Bush after considering former President Gerald Ford. Bush and Ford represented the pre-Reagan GOP. Bush, a former ambassador to the United Nations, among other positions, had unexpectedly finished second in the primary race.
The true believers didn’t like it, but few held out in November. But Bush Republicans in the White House were seen as an impediment to the Reagan agenda at times. And once Bush succeeded Reagan as president, there was immediate backsliding. For one thing, the kinder, gentler nation soon had higher, bipartisan tax rates.
Trump has complained about Bush Republicans, this time of the George W. variety, thwarting him in his first term. This time, he would be constitutionally ineligible to run for reelection, setting his vice president up to become the party’s nominee in 2028.
But even in 2016, there were rumors Trump might pick John Kasich, then the increasingly centrist governor of Ohio. (These were often stoked by other primary candidates.) He ultimately did choose Mike Pence, a conservative but clearly pre-Trump, non-populist Republican, to shore up the evangelical vote.
This time around, evangelicals don’t need as much reassurance. Yet suburban women do.
However much sense it might make on paper, the Trump-Haley talk is, at a minimum, premature, if not a long shot altogether. Trump will likely prioritize loyalty.
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Meanwhile, Haley has little incentive to join in any of these reindeer games for the same reason the talk that she or DeSantis will drop out to stop Trump is such a non-starter. Neither of them is running to stop someone else, whatever misgivings they might have about the front-runner or any other candidate, but to advance themselves.
If Trump runs the table in the early stages, a Republican with presidential ambitions might mend fences with them. But as long as an Iowa or New Hampshire upset is at least theoretically possible, a unity ticket will have to wait.
