Haley’s missed opportunity: Iowa slows its roll to New Hampshire

Nikki Haley had hoped to vault into New Hampshire ahead of next Tuesday’s first caucuses, with a second-place lead in Iowa and a strong argument to ensure the 2024 nomination battle was a two-candidate race between her and Donald J. Trump.

Instead, as Ms. Haley staggers into New Hampshire, the pressure is on to show she can compete with Mr. Trump.

Her disappointing third-place finish in the Iowa caucuses on Monday showed that despite all the hype, her momentum ultimately stalled in the face of a Republican electorate still in thrall to the former president. That included not only Trump’s blue-collar base, but also the bastions of highly educated Republicans in and around Des Moines that she was expected to dominate.

In her speech after the caucuses, Ms. Haley, the former governor of South Carolina, sharpened her attack on Mr. Trump, questioning his age and his ability to unite a fractured country. She lumped Trump in with Biden as backward-looking barriers to an American revival.

“The question for Americans is now very clear: Do you want more of the same or do you want a new generation of conservative leadership?” she asked, to loud applause and chants of “Nikki, Nikki.” “Our campaign is the last hope to stop Trump and Biden’s nightmare.”

Still, Ms. Haley’s final result in Iowa most likely breathed new life into the campaign of her rival, Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, and indicated that, for all the excitement surrounding her campaign in recent weeks, her pitch may have been limited. appeal to the Republicans.

With more than 95 percent of precincts reporting late Monday, Ms. Haley received 19 percent of the vote, Mr. Trump 51 percent and Mr. DeSantis 21 percent. Vivek Ramaswamy, a technology entrepreneur and political newcomer who has toured the state relentlessly on a largely self-financed bid, came in fourth with 7.7 percent before dropping out and endorsing Mr. Trump.

Ms. Haley’s allies on Monday projected confidence that she was heading to more favorable territory in New Hampshire, where she hopes to turn the race into a head-to-head battle against Mr. Trump. The state’s Republicans are more moderate and less religious, and independents can vote in the primaries, all factors that could work in Ms. Haley’s favor.

“New Hampshire and Iowa are two very different states,” said Kimberly Rice, co-chair of her New Hampshire campaign.

“It’s a two-point difference,” said Representative Ralph Norman of South Carolina, referring to the divide between Ms. Haley and Mr. DeSantis. And he argued that it was Mr. DeSantis “who put his eggs in just one basket” — his campaign spent a lot of money in Iowa.

For Ms. Haley, who was Trump’s first ambassador to the United Nations, a steady underdog campaign, aided by the struggles of Mr. DeSantis’ operation, was not enough to win over a deeply conservative Republican electorate, driven by social issues such as abortion. and shaped by evangelical sensibilities.

She may also have had to deal with Republican voters’ long-standing skepticism toward female candidates. After a Haley campaign stop in Waukee, Iowa, last week, Bruce Norquist, a 60-year-old cybersecurity consultant from Urbandale, Iowa, said Ms. Haley was not strong, citing the threats posed to the country by disinformation campaigns from China. and Russia and what he said were attempts to tamper with voting machines.

“I’m afraid Nikki Haley isn’t skeptical enough,” he said. “Democracy is at stake.”

The last Iowa Poll Conducted by The Des Moines Register, NBC News and Mediacom, she found she finished second, but based on these numbers, the survey showed Ms. Haley had serious problems.

Only 9 percent of her supporters said they were extremely enthusiastic about voting for her. Most said they were mildly enthusiastic or not at all enthusiastic. On Caucus Day, enough of those voters either didn’t show up or switched votes.

That wasn’t the case for Trump voters, who shrugged off concerns about the nomination of a former president who faced 91 felonies from four criminal prosecutions, a looming fraud verdict that could dismantle his New York real estate empire and a pending decision on the defamation of a woman he has already held liable for sexual abuse.

The site of her caucus watch party gave early signals of her final position. Just as Haley supporters were expected to gather in an elegant ballroom at one end of the hotel, caucusgoers left a room down the hall, where Trump had emerged victorious by 16 votes. Mr. DeSantis was second with 14, and Ms. Haley was third with eight.

The final days of the Iowa campaign were defined by the battle for second place and increasingly vitriolic accusations and counterattacks between Ms. Haley and Mr. DeSantis on the air and in press interviews.

Until recent months, Ms. Haley appeared to be struggling to make up ground in Iowa, but a burst of momentum in the polls, both in Iowa and across the country, had created expectations she could not meet. Americans for Prosperity, the conservative network backed by the fortunes of billionaires Charles and David Koch, backed her, spending more than $150,000 in recent weeks appealing for votes.

Mr. DeSantis, who bet his candidacy on statehood, built a formidable ground operation and won the support of Gov. Kim Reynolds and Bob Vander Plaats, an influential leader of the Christian right in Iowa.

Ms. Haley took a cost-effective approach, which streamlined her operations and kept her overhead costs low. She and her crew flew commercially and stayed in affordable hotels. She left most of her ad spending to her allied super PAC until just before the holidays. Ms. Haley, a former accountant, was obsessed with the campaign budget and often checked spreadsheets of expenses line by line, her senior campaign officials said. She received a daily email with how much money the campaign had raised the previous day, and reviewed a more detailed campaign budget weekly.

The approach was in stark contrast to that of Mr. DeSantis, who has been flying private planes and traveling around Iowa on campaign buses (including one paid for by his allied super PAC) since the early days of the campaign, and who would eventually be forced to to implement staff cuts while facing a cash crisis. But those investments ultimately paid off.

After the first national Republican debate in Milwaukee in August, Ms. Haley’s fundraising soared, crowds at campaign events began to pick up and she began rising in the polls, especially in New Hampshire.

But those weren’t the voters who showed up at the caucus. Ms. Haley’s argument that she was the best Republican to thwart Biden’s reelection may have been persuasive among college-educated Republican voters, 39 percent of whom supported her in a New York Times/Siena College poll conducted last month released.

But in a broader Republican electorate that Mr. Trump has transformed into a bastion of voters without college degrees, Ms. Haley had the support of just 3 percent of those voters, according to the Times/Siena poll.

The voters she had lukewarmly won over expressed their doubts. Sitting on a high stool in Pella, Iowa, Bryan Healy, 70, a retired manufacturing company owner who voted for Mr. Trump in 2016 and Mr. Trump in 2020, said Ms. Haley should be more aggressive toward a “dangerous” and “autocratic” Mr. Trump.

“It’s time for Nikki to stop running for vice president; she must be standing in front of the gate,” he said.