Reading the signs in New Hampshire

If you want to understand the New Hampshire primary, stand at the corner of West Broadway and Valley Street in Derry, NH

There are two huge yard signs — one for Nikki Haley and one for Donald Trump — on neighboring homes. Maybe a dispute with neighbors?

Not exactly: When my colleague Michael Bender went there recently, neighbors told him that the pro-Haley house had been vacant for years and that political campaigns often placed their signs there. And the pro-Trump house was actually owned by an absentee landlord who lives in Florida.

It felt like one big metaphor for this campaign. The race looks like a real competition, with yard signs and all the usual campaign events. But if you dig a little deeper, there's a lot less going on than it seems.

Trump is the political version of a Florida-based absentee landlord. Until the last week, he hardly held any campaign events in the state. Now the former president has come to collect what he thinks is his due.

He has flown in for late-night meetings with a slew of surrogates, including Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina, Haley's home state. That was enough to increase enthusiasm and extend his lead. Trump's double-digit advantage has never wavered, only grown.

Meanwhile, Haley's strongest appeal comes from voters who have largely abandoned the Republican Party as their political home. She relies on independent voters, or “black” as they are called here in New Hampshire. Those voters constitute a significant voting bloc, about 40 percent of the state's electorate. But they're not Republicans.

All this makes it feel less like a serious competition. The biggest news of the weekend — when Florida Governor Ron DeSantis withdrew from the race and endorsed Trump — did not appear to significantly change those margins.

Even if Haley somehow wins in New Hampshire, her path will be difficult. The idea was that finishing first in the primaries could give her a boost that would send her into the next important race in South Carolina. But she's doing poorly in her home state — and it's obviously difficult to win a Republican nomination without the support of the party's core voters.

And if Trump wins tomorrow night? Well, then the general election basically starts on Wednesday.

The best advice for that outcome may come from a neighbor on Valley Street. “Welcome to the madhouse,” he said to Bender.

This analysis comes true The Tilt, a newsletter from Nate Cohnthe chief political analyst of The New York Times.

DeSantis' lost moment

Ron DeSantis entered the 2024 campaign as a formidable candidate, with early polls rivaling or even surpassing those of Ronald Reagan and Barack Obama.

In the end, that just meant he had more room to fall.

There are countless reasons why DeSantis fell apart and ultimately ended his campaign on Sunday — including the fact that Donald Trump once again proved to be a juggernaut.

But it's worth returning to his apparent strength from the start: that brief moment when DeSantis, or at least the idea of ​​him, routinely led Trump in high-quality head-to-head polls.

It's the only glimpse we've had of a post-Trump Republican Party.

The intervals

Trump has said and done countless things that could have damned any other politician. None of this really made any difference in his support – until November 2022. The Republicans' disappointing results in the midterm elections damaged Trump in the polls, and DeSantis took a clear lead that lasted for months.

It's worth noting a few things that may have helped make the post-mid-term period different:

• The attacks came not from liberals, but from conservative elites and conservative media.

• The midterm elections made Trump look weak and a loser. Unlike in the 2020 election, Republicans admitted defeat. Trump himself acknowledged that the midterm elections were disappointing. This time there were no alternative facts.

• The midterm elections allowed DeSantis, who won by a landslide, to contrast favorably with Trump without having to attack or attack him directly.

We will never know what would have happened if DeSantis had acted quickly to take advantage of the opportunity. He waited months to announce his candidacy, and the favorable circumstances did not last long.

In late January, Trump went on the attack and DeSantis did not strike back. Instead, the blows against Trump came from the criminal justice system, not the right. Conservatives rallied behind him, as they have done time and time again.

The wagons had already circled by the time DeSantis started attacking Trump this summer.

What could have been

DeSantis briefly held on to a pledge to unite moderate and conservative opposition to Trump around a new set of issues: the coronavirus response and the “woke” left.

The wide range of anti-woke and anti-pandemic politics meant there were many moderates and conservatives who thought they agreed with DeSantis. They imagined him as a politician much like them, in the same way that both anti-war progressives and centrist Democrats saw themselves in Obama in 2008.

That was not the case. The coalition behind the imaginary DeSantis crumbled.

• The new songs lost their power. The pandemic ended. 'Woke' steadily disappeared from the news. The uproar over critical race theory subsided. More traditional issues, including abortion and the border, became more salient.

• The issues did not provide a clear contrast to Trump, who could hardly be derided as “woke” and was not particularly remembered for his support of Covid-related restrictions.

• The issues dragged DeSantis into the world of the far-too-online right, leaving his speeches full of arcane abbreviations such as ESG. and devoid of any coherent, overarching message.

A delicate balancing act

DeSantis campaigned as if completely oblivious to the delicate balancing act of coalitions required to defeat Trump.

For example, he never seemed to have thrown a bone to the party's establishment Republican wing. He couldn't even be acceptable to moderates in Ukraine, a favorite issue of the neoconservatives who inevitably had to play a role in any anti-Trump coalition.

DeSantis also offered little contrast with Trump in this regard. The strategy, known as “Trumpism without Trump,” assumed that Republican voters were willing to part ways with Trump personally even if they supported his views on the issues. Needless to say, that turned out to be wrong.

DeSantis would have struggled to maintain an ideologically diverse anti-Trump coalition even if he had been as adroit as Obama in his 2008 victory over Hillary Clinton. The fight against “woke” was not a war in Iraq. National security, abortion, rights and other issues still divide Republicans, as they did in 2016.

But to get a glimpse of what a successful alternative to Trumpism might one day look like, the imagined DeSantis of the early campaign is a good place to start. Campaigning against the excesses of the left has the potential to unite the right while appealing to a group of disaffected moderates or even liberals. If these or other new issues overwhelm the old ones, there could suddenly be an opening for conservative politics to look very different. — Nate Cohn

Read the full newsletter here.

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