DeSantis is competing for second place in Nikki Haley’s home state

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis toured South Carolina, his rival Nikki Haley’s backyard, on Friday in an effort to blunt the state’s former governor’s rise in the Republican primaries as he capitalized on his slugfest with Democratic governor of California.

The battle to claim the mantle of the most viable Republican alternative to former President Donald J. Trump intensified this week. Ms. Haley, a former ambassador to the United Nations, won the backing of the political network founded by billionaire industrialist brothers Charles and David Koch and secured the backing of major donors such as Jamie Dimon, the CEO of JPMorgan Chase. The turmoil in Mr. DeSantis’ campaign apparatus continued unabated Friday with the departure of his super PAC’s chairman, Adam Laxalt.

But Mr. DeSantis’s primetime showdown on Fox News with Gov. Gavin Newsom on Thursday night appeared to buoy him as he barreled through South Carolina’s Upstate region near Greenville and the midlands outside Columbia before ending in Charleston and the Lowcountry.

At Ms. Haley’s home base, Florida’s governor and his surrogates seemed unfazed by all the developments. They called Mr. Dimon’s endorsement a wink from a Hillary Clinton supporter and dismissed the Koch Network’s decision as evidence that Ms. Haley was merely supporting incremental change from Wall Street.

“I don’t know what you could say about her tenure as governor here, but I have never heard of any major accomplishments that she has made,” Mr. DeSantis told a town hall in Greer, S.C. she has shown a willingness to fight for you when things are hard. It’s easy when you have the wind at your back.”

Mr. DeSantis and his team have long portrayed the Republican nominating contest as a two-man race between him and Mr. Trump. But Ms. Haley’s rise in the polls and her successful recruitment of big-money donors have shattered that idea. After ignoring each other for much of the summer and early fall, the two candidates are now launching attacks and fighting each other almost daily. increasing intensity on the debate stage.

They and their allied super PACs have clashed on a sometimes bewildering variety of fronts, from standard disputes over topics like the strength of their conservative bona fides to more niche topics like parsing each other’s data on Recruiting Chinese companies in their home states. Fact-checkers have rated many of their attacks as false or misleading.

Mr. DeSantis was particularly aggressive. On Fox News this week, he called Ms. Haley an “establishment” politician who was “fundamentally out of step with Republican voters” on core conservative issues, including immigration, where she has called for more legal avenues to employ foreign workers. recruiting. His campaign set up a website that accuses Ms. Haley of supporting “every liberal cause under the sun.”

Florida’s governor also falsely claimed that Ms. Haley wanted to bring refugees from Gaza to the United States. And he has launched attacks on Ms. Haley’s past statements that sometimes mirrored his own, including hers expression of sympathy after the killing of George Floyd in 2020. (Mr. DeSantis said at the time that he was “shocked” by Mr. Floyd’s death.) He has also criticized Ms. Haley for saying in 2016 that her condition didn’t need it a law banning transgender people from using the bathrooms of their choice, even though Mr. DeSantis had said during his first bid for governor in 2018 that “engaging in bathroom wars” was not “a good use of our time.”

In addition, Mr. DeSantis’ allies have formed a new super PAC to attack Ms. Haley in Iowa. Last month the group Fight Right produced one misleading advertisement shows clips of Mrs. Haley praising Hillary Clinton. The clips were edited to remove her simultaneous criticism of Mrs. Clinton.

The Haley campaign responded with its own ad called “Desperate campaigns do desperate things.”

As Ms. Haley and Mr. DeSantis battle for second place, Mr. Trump’s position in the Republican primaries, even in South Carolina, remains dominant. Mr. DeSantis may have been willing to call Ms. Haley by name in her home state, but he continued to tiptoe around the former president using the passive voice.

On Friday, for example, he insisted he could make Mexico pay for the rest of a border wall.

“I know that was promised — it didn’t happen,” he said, without naming the promisee, Mr. Trump.

Mr. DeSantis also failed to identify that same promise when he said, “We were promised that we would be tired of winning. Unfortunately, as a Republican, I am tired of losing.”

He was less reserved when a voter last month asked about Ms. Haley’s suggestion that social media platforms require all users to authenticate and ban people from posting anonymously. Mr. DeSantis and others had criticized her comments as unconstitutional and a threat to free speech.

“What Haley said was outrageous,” Mr. DeSantis responded, adding, “Frankly, it is disqualifying.”

In an interview on Fox News, Ms. Haley responded to Mr. DeSantis’ recent criticism of her record as governor.

“Well, I think he went after my record as governor because he’s losing,” Ms. Haley said. “I mean, who else can spend a hundred million dollars and drop half of it at the polls?”

For some in South Carolina, Ms. Haley’s tenure — from 2011 to 2017 — is starting to feel like a long time ago. Tim Vath, 54, who moved to Greer toward the end of Ms. Haley’s second term, found the Koch network’s support “questionable.” Suzanne Garrison, also 54 and from Greer, raised the specter of backroom politics and suggested that Ms. Haley did not always follow through on implementing conservative policies.

“I wish more people knew the real Nikki Haley,” said Ms. Garrison, a DeSantis supporter. “I just don’t trust her.”

But in the small town of Prosperity, outside Columbia, the crowd was more mixed. Cathy Huddle, 61, of Chapin, S.C., said Ms. Haley’s performance as governor “pales in comparison” to the sweeping conservative changes Mr. DeSantis brought about in Florida.

But Alice and Robert Tenny seemed unmoved by Mr. DeSantis’ argument. Both said Ms. Haley’s experience at the United Nations gave her global knowledge and stature. And Mr. Tenny, 69, found Mr. DeSantis’s delight in his actions against Mr. Newsom off-putting.

“We’re getting a little ahead of ourselves if we sit down with the governor of another party before the first primary election,” Mr. Tenny said.