How Nikki Haley Could Become our First Female President

There’s a lot of noise in the daily news. To see ahead, you’ve got to filter it out.

This month, two important signals rose above the noise. One came from the GOP primary debates. The other came from polls made in connection with them. If both are right, and if their truths hold, they point to two important consequences. First, the Demagogue’s political career is finished; he will not be elected president again. Second, Nikki Haley has seized the reins of the Republican Party with courage and intelligence. Let’s analyze.

The first consequence emerges from the polls. According to an August 2023 Reuters/Ipsos poll, some 35% of Republicans would vote for the Demagogue even if and after he is duly convicted of a felony. That’s an appalling statistic. It’s also a clear reflection of the extreme craziness of the MAGA base. But the same poll said that 45% of Republicans won’t vote for the Demagogue if he is convicted. (The remaining 20% were unsure.)

With Democrats adamantly opposed, and with independents turning in droves against the mere idea of a convicted candidate in the White House, no Republican can win with support from only 55% of his party. Lawbreaking, it turns out, has consequences, even in an age of “alternative reality.”

What if none of the four trials is complete by the time of the general election? That may well be the case: the Demagogue’s lifetime approach to the law and litigation has been to delay, delay, delay.

But the same result most likely applies in that case. Thinking Republicans will reject the Demagogue because they will not wish to squander their party’s electoral bets on the long chance that even a single MAGA fanatic will sneak by voir dire in every one of the four trials. Even if that happens, there will most likely be a hung jury and mistrial, not an acquittal. So one or more trials likely will continue into the new president’s term, even if he wins, causing a constitutional crisis. What thinking Republican or independent wants that?

You can see dim understanding dawning on the Demagogue’s own face. It appears in his “avenging angel” mug shot from his Georgia arraignment, which he reportedly is already using to raise money. For the first time, we can see fear in his eyes, behind his fake truculence. He seems at last to understand, deep down, that he is not going to be president again. Without that hoped-for immunity, the long arm of the law will reach him at last.

No doubt his new lawyer—for the first time, a recognized expert in defending racketeers and white-collar criminals—has informed him that his chances of emerging legally unscathed are dim. A lifetime of disregard for the law is catching up with him as, one by one, his oppressed subordinates and loyalty-starved underlings begin to flip. And he now has the nation’s best prosecutors, with all the resources of the United States, the State of New York, and the State of Georgia, vying to hold him to account.

What does this mean for the primary and general elections? Let’s take the general election first. What it most likely means is the Joe Biden will get a second term as President. But that depends on three things. First, Biden must be alive. Second, he must be in good health. Third, he must not have made a fatal campaign or political mistake, and a new political, geopolitical or economic problem must not have arisen out of the blue to blindside him and his campaign. At Biden’s age and in these parlous times, meeting all these three conditions is hardly guaranteed. So there is an opening, however small and uncertain, for a Republican other than the Demagogue to claim the presidency.

Any rational Republican candidate must focus on the chance that one of these three conditions fails. That’s the only rational path available. No “Trump-light” clone of the Demagogue can win where the Demagogue himself couldn’t. To the extent the Demagogue actually has “policies” beyond tribalism, culture wars and working-class resentment, they are mostly big mistakes with no general appeal, like his tax cuts for the rich or his 10% across-the-board tariffs, which would be the economic equivalent of applying leeches to a sick patient.

If something happens to slow the Biden juggernaut, Nikki Haley has the most to gain. Why? She is not trying to mimic the Demagogue.

While that ploy may seem attractive to the collection of the feckless and feebleminded that the GOP has become, it’s a fools choice. No one can mimic the Demagogue or capture all of his base, because his spell is personal and unique. So trying to clone him won’t work. That simple logic has already doomed DeSantis: you can’t out-culture-warrior the culture warrior in chief. The trendy sycophant Vivek Ramaswamy appears to have figured this out: he seems to be gunning for the VP spot.

The only hope for a Republican to win in 2024 is to capture a few flexible MAGAts, most of the rest of the Republican Party, some restless independents, and a few right-leaning Democrats willing to vote Republican as long as the Demagogue is gone. Nikki Haley appears to have escaped the cult leader’s spell long enough to understand this simple logic.

But Haley has three other things—even more important—going for her. The first is a passing acquaintance with reality. This appeared in her much-replayed exchange with Mike Pence. There she accused him (rightly) of misleading Republicans by proposing a federal statute outlawing abortion. She pointed out that there is virtually no chance that, in 2024, our nation will elect a Senate in which Republicans have the 60-vote supermajority needed to pass such a law over a Democratic filibuster. (What Haley failed to mention, but no doubt understands, is that a proponent of a federal statute banning all abortion has little chance to win a general election, in which female voters are likely to be a majority.)

In pointing this out forcefully during the debate, Haley showed Pence up for what he is: a doddering, mostly spineless old man, whose refusal to subvert our Republic has been his only notable act of courage, and indeed his only notable act as Vice-President. I would say the viability of Pence’s presidential campaign ended with that exchange.

Haley’s second strong point is her gender. There is a palpable yearning for female leadership among the majority of our electorate: women, plus more than a few men tired of candidates who have more testosterone than brains. The Dobbs decision revoking women’s right to abortion only heightened that yearning. If Haley can “thread the needle” on the abortion issue and come out where the majority of Americans stands—legal before fifteen weeks—she might actually win a general election on the abortion issue, by attracting some voters from both sides.

Haley’s third strong point is her intelligence and her experience. She schooled our clueless former Vice-President on politics as the art of the possible. She put down Vivek Ramaswamy as an utterly unqualified candidate for the Demagogue’s former show “The Apprentice,” which he seems to be emulating as he “runs” for VP. As the popular former governor of a Southern State, Haley has her finger on the pulse of America. As a former United Nations Ambassador she has the chops to defend the world order, or at least not to become a lapdog of Putin or Xi. And, at 51, Haley represents a new, dynamic generation in a contest with a President who will be over 80 and a Demagogue in his late seventies.

So Haley is the right person, of the right gender and age, at the right time, to salvage what is left of the ashes of a party now burned to ground like Lahaina, Maui.

Because of what that party has done to my country and the viability of American democracy and the Western Enlightenment, I will never vote for any of its candidates as long as I live. But if I were inclined to vote for a Republican, Haley would be my first choice, by far. She’s the only one who shows a spark of independence and appears not to be, one way or the other, under the Demagogue’s spell. Only she can “thread the needle” of the massive assault on women’s human rights that the activist right-wing Supreme Court has undertaken. Even apart from that key issue, only she has even a remote chance to win. Republican realists who want to resurrect their party have no choice but to place their bets on her. The reality show that has maimed, and still threatens to destroy, our democracy cannot go on forever.


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