Sloshing Is Not Surging: Adventures In Nikki Haley Polling

Photo by Gage Skidmore from Surprise, AZ, United States of America, CC BY-SA 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

Bored with the current slack tide state of play in the 2024 GOP presidential primary, the Pavlovian salivation at any polling showing anything remotely interesting should be expected by the starved political commentariat.

New CBS polls in Iowa and New Hampshire:

NEW HAMPSHIRE
Trump 44
Haley 29
DeSantis 11
Christie 10
Ramaswamy 5

IOWA
Trump 58
DeSantis 22
Haley 13
Ramaswamy 4
Christie 3 pic.twitter.com/vixbMEaSH6

— Josh Kraushaar (@JoshKraushaar) December 18, 2023

CBS News Poll graphic

Cue the headlines in an orderly fashion, since they are pretty uniform:

CBS News: CBS News poll: Haley gains on Trump in New Hampshire while he continues to dominate in Iowa
Boston Herald: Poll: Nikki Haley consolidates non-Trump vote in New Hampshire
NY Post: Nikki Haley chips away at Trump’s monster lead in New Hampshire
The Hill: Haley gains on Trump in latest New Hampshire poll
Politico: CBS poll: Haley gaining on Trump in New Hampshire

Headlines are so fun: out with the last few weeks of “Haley is surging” and in with “Haley is gaining.” We should probably forgive folks who are trying to make a living off covering campaign 2024 here for squeezing all the content they can out of this current predicament. Anyone getting within 20 points of Trump seems like a breakthrough after a solid year of nothing really happening at the top of the race.

But “gaining” needs context. Sure, Haley has “gained” on Trump in New Hampshire, but not by taking any votes away from Trump, which is necessary to — you know — actually beat Trump. Trump’s New Hampshire number has been mid-40s throughout and holding steady, so the bump Haley is getting is coming at the expense of DeSantis, Christie, and rounding up the odd not-Trump voters that are still hoping for a miracle. As the field narrows and DeSantis has floundered, Haley has become the consolidation candidate of choice of media, donors, and various other folks lacking a better option.

Before throwing a parade for making second place, even more context needs to be applied. New Hampshire has a unique electorate and allows independents to vote in the primary, something Christie (who MAGA hates) and Haley (who MAGA strongly dislikes) are banking on for a boost. New Hampshire also comes after Iowa, where Haley is currently in a distant 3rd place, a result that doesn’t help her New Hampshire argument. Then the primary goes to Nevada, where polling is not super reliable or up to date but Trump has had massive leads in what we do have. Two weeks after that comes South Carolina, where former governor of the Palmetto State Haley is currently trailing Trump by 30 points. Consistently. For months now.

If Trump wins four out of the first four contests, and his polling shows none of the four to be particularly close, the March 5th “Super Tuesday” will be a formality on the path to Trump-Biden 2.

It sounds like nitpicking the nomenclature, but since folks haven’t quite let the lesson sink in, repetition is called for: there is no “gaining” on Donald Trump unless you pull voters away from Donald Trump. None of these candidates have shown any ability to do that. Most of them do not even show an honest effort in trying to do so. Furthermore, the GOP primary electorate has shown no indication they want any Trump alternative when Trump himself is readily available.

By the way, Trump skipped all the GOP debates, and having ceded all that media spotlight to the rest of the field, increased his lead over them by doing nothing but letting them talk amongst themselves.

Nikki Haley has the additional problem of having been a part of the Trump administration herself, making her threading of the “attack Trump without attacking Trump so Trump voters don’t savage me” needle even more impossible. Protestations about parts of the Trump administration while praising others comes off like Nikki Haley wanting to speak to the manager, only to arrive at her own desk in management and become confused if she should stand in front of it, take a seat behind it, or oscillate between the two for her very serious and well-crafted complaints.

With the Ron DeSantis flameout in full swing, Chris Christie running for his next network contributor contract in a party that hates him, and Vivek mainlining crazy as an all-but-in-name Trump surrogate, Haley is getting a bump and attention not on merit, or potential, or ability but as the only option left. Far from a surge, the Nikki Haley of late December is getting the sloshing backwash support that has nowhere else to drain as the electoral seas empty for the coming Trump tsunami.

The GOP primary electorate want Donald Trump, at least in numbers great enough to make this 2024 GOP primary a non-competitive affair. They don’t like Trump, they LOVE Donald Trump, and no policy proposal or appeal to reason is going to convince the 30-40 pct of Republican voters Trump will ride to primary victory come the new year that their moment of retribution is at hand. Those Trump diehards want to be right that the 2020 election was stolen, that January 6th was entrapment and overblown, that every bad thing every press person, Democrat, and talking head ever said or wrote about them was all wrong and should be punished for having done so. And the only way they get any of that validation is Donald J. Trump once again proving everyone wrong, proving them right, and becoming president again.

Thus is the plight of Nikki Haley, and Ron DeSantis too for that matter. No matter what they do, they are not Donald Trump, and there are not enough non-Trump folks left in the GOP to even come close to overcoming that. Plus, the Trump folks will hate you for even trying. The GOP wants Donald Trump, and they are going to get him good and hard.

Things that are different are not the same, and we should be able to tell the difference between a surge, a sloshing, and the social media salivations of a news media and the also-ran’s supporters desperate for there to be more of a race than there really is.