Nikki Haley’s bold strategy to beat Trump: Play it safe

At a packed community center in southwestern Iowa this month, Nikki Haley broke from her usual remarks by issuing a warning to her chief Republican presidential rivals, Donald J. Trump and Ron DeSantis, using a favorite line: “If they hit me, I hit back – and I hit back harder.”

But during that Dec. 18 appearance and in the days that followed, Ms. Haley, the former governor of South Carolina, did not exactly slam her opponents as promised. Her jabs were instead surgical, dry and policy-driven.

“He went to DC and said he was going to stop the spending, and instead he said voted to raise the debt limit” Ms. Haley said of Mr. DeSantis, a former congressman, in Treynor, near the Nebraska border. At that same stop, she also defended herself against his attack ads and criticized and questioned Florida Governor DeSantis over offshore drilling and fracking his choice for a political surrogate in Iowa.

She was even more cautious in pursuing Trump, continuing to draw only indirect contrasts and pointedly noting that his allied super PAC had started running anti-Haley ads.

“He said two days ago that I wasn’t climbing,” she said, but that now “attack ads were coming my way.”

With less than three weeks to go until the Iowa caucuses, Ms. Haley is treading carefully as she enters the crucial final stretch of her campaign to shake the Republican Party free from Mr. Trump’s clutches. Even as the former president insists a big lead in the pollsMs. Haley has emphatically played it safe, betting that an approach that has left her as the only non-Trump candidate with any kind of momentum could ultimately prevail as the primary season unfolds.

While on the road, she rarely answers questions from reporters. She barely deviates from her stump speech or makes headlines. And she continues to walk a fine line when it comes to her biggest obstacle to the Republican nomination: Mr. Trump.

“Anti-Trumpers don’t think I hate him enough,” she told reporters this month in New Hampshire, where she has the support of Chris Sununu, the state’s popular Republican governor. “Pro-Trumpers think I don’t love him enough.”

Ms. Haley’s consistent strategy has allowed her team to build a reputation for being lean and stable where other campaigns have failed: As Mr. DeSantis’ support has waned and unrest has overtaken his allied super PAC, even some of his advisors privately state that they believe hope is lost.

“I keep coming back to the word ‘disciplined,’” said Jim Merrill, a Republican strategist in New Hampshire who was part of Sen. Marco Rubio’s 2016 presidential campaign and Mitt Romney’s bids in 2008 and 2012. “She has conducted an extremely disciplined campaign.’

Yet Mr. Trump remains the heavy favorite for the nomination despite dozens of criminal charges and legal challenges aimed at kicking him off the ballot in several states.

Ms. Haley’s apparent unwillingness to attack her rival, even in the face of what appear to be political setbacks for him, has raised questions among voters and other Republican competitors — most notably: former Governor Chris Christie of New Jersey – about whether she can win while missing crucial opportunities to derail her main opponent.

“A lot of people in this area are running against Trump without doing much to oppose him,” said Adolphus Belk, a political analyst and professor of political science at Winthrop University in Rock Hill, S.C., Ms. Haley’s home state. “If you’re running to be president of the United States, it seems like a necessity to hire the person who has the greatest leadership.”

A recent poll from The New York Times and Siena College showed Trump leading his Republican rivals nationally by more than 50 percentage points, a staggering margin.

The poll offered Ms. Haley a glimmer of hope: Nearly a quarter of Trump’s supporters said he should not be the Republican nominee if he were found guilty of a crime. But 62 percent of Republicans said that if the former president were to win the primaries, he should remain the nominee — even if he were subsequently convicted.

The challenge for Ms. Haley is to draw more support from the Republican Party’s white working-class base. The Times/Siena poll found she received 28 percent support from white voters with a bachelor’s degree or higher, but only 3 percent from those without a degree.

As she sweeps through Iowa and New Hampshire, Ms. Haley has stayed true to a calibrated approach that aims to appeal to all factions of the Republican Party.

Her stump speech highlights her background as the daughter of immigrants and her upbringing in a small, rural South Carolina town, but in general terms. She nods to her status as the only woman in the Republican primary and to the potentially historic nature of her bid, but only in subtle ways.

Even as she has risen in the polls and consolidated significant anti-Trump support among donors and prominent Republicans, she has continued to cast herself as an underrated underdog, with a message focused heavily on debt and spending, national security and the crisis at the border. .

And she has not wavered from her broad call for a “consensus” on abortion, even as some conservatives say she does not go far enough in supporting new restrictions. At the same time, Democrats are trying to hit her from the other direction: the Democratic National Committee was founded last week billboards in DavenportIowa, where she campaigned and accused her of “extreme abortion bans.”

Still, Ms. Haley has evolved on some fronts. In recent weeks, she has argued more aggressively that she is the most electable Republican candidate — an argument that Polls show there is some merit – and criticized what she describes as a dysfunctional Washington.

This month, after Republicans blocked an emergency spending bill to finance Ukraine and demanded strict new border restrictions in return, she accused both President Biden and some Republicans of making a false choice between these priorities, as well as aid to Israel, the Republican legislation is also part of that.

“And what do you hear now from DC – do we support Ukraine or do we support Israel?” she said at an event in Burlington, Iowa. “Do we support Israel or secure the border? Don’t let them lie to you like that.’

She has stepped up her criticism of Mr. Trump for his tone, his leadership style and what she describes as his lack of perseverance on policy. ‘praising dictators’.

But when faced with tougher questions from voters about Trump’s potential danger to the country’s democracy or why them indicated during the first debate that she would support him as a nominee even if he were convicted on criminal charges, she tends to fall back on a familiar answer. She says she thinks “he was the right president at the right time,” but that “chaos, rightly or wrongly, follows him.”

“The point is, normal people aren’t as obsessed with Trump as you are,” she says told ABC News’ Jonathan Karl this month, she took a swipe at the news media when asked for her thoughts on the way Mr. Trump is campaigning on the idea of ​​“retaliation” against his political enemies.

Such efforts to avoid alienating Trump supporters have helped generate interest, if not always engagement.

Before her event in Treynor, Iowa, Keith Denton, 77, a retired farmer and longtime Republican, said he supported Trump “100 percent” and had only come to see Ms. Haley because his wife was unsure whether he would support her. . But after Ms. Haley was done, he tracked down a reporter to acknowledge that he was now seriously considering her.

“I have to eat my words,” he said, adding that Ms. Haley had “said some things that changed my mind.” First, he said, “I thought she was more of a warmonger, but now I see she’s against war.”

But at a distilling plant in Osceola, 84-year-old Jim Kimball, a retired doctor, veteran and anti-Trump Republican, drew nervous laughter from the audience when he asked Ms. Haley a few bold questions about the Jan. 1 Capitol riot. August 6, 2021: “Did Mr. Trump Trample or Defend the Constitution? And is he a candidate for president or emperor?”

As usual, Mrs. Haley weighed her words. She said the courts would “decide whether President Trump did anything wrong” and that he had the right to defend himself against the legal charges he faces, but she expressed disappointment that when he was given the opportunity to to stop the Capitol, he didn’t. .

“My goal is not to worry about him being president forever – that’s why I’m going to win,” she finished to loud applause.

But afterward, Mr. Kimball said he wished she had said Mr. Trump was unfit to be president and that he was still considering whether to run for her or Mr. Christie.

“I wish she had the courage of Liz Cheney,” he said, referring to the congresswoman who was ousted from the Republican leadership in Congress and then from her seat in Wyoming by pro-Trump forces in the party. “But she doesn’t want to end up like Liz Cheney, so you get the answer you get.”

Ruth Igielnik reporting contributed.