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Some people look at America and see vulnerability.
The socialist left sees an opportunity to rewrite history. China and Russia are on the march. They all think we can be bullied, kicked around. You should know this about me. I don't put up with bullies. And when you kick back, it hurts them more if you're wearing heels. I'm Nikki Haley, and I'm running for president. Hello and welcome to this Nikki Haley presidential announcement edition of the FiveThirtyEight Politics Podcast. I'm Galen Druk.
Nikki Haley is a former state legislator and two-term governor from South Carolina, ambassador to the UN under former President Trump, and is now the first major candidate to challenge Trump in the 2024 Republican presidential primary. If she were to win the nomination, she would be the first woman and first Asian American to lead the Republican ticket. That is perhaps a big if, which is part of what we're going to talk about on today's podcast.
At 51, she is also one of the youngest people in the pool of possible Republican contenders. And she leaned heavily into that pitch for younger leaders in her announcement on Wednesday, saying, quote, America is not past its prime. It's just its politicians are past prime.
theirs. And she also said, we won't win the 21st century if we keep trusting politicians from the 20th century. She also called for mandatory mental competency tests for politicians over 75. I'm sure you don't need me to tell you that this happens to be a significant dig at her rivals in both the presidential primary and potential general election. So let's discuss. Here with me to do that, our editor-in-chief, Nate Silver. Hey, Nate.
Hey, everybody. Also here with us is senior writer Amelia Thompson-DeVoe. Hey, Amelia. Hey, Galen. Okay, so I am going to kick this off by asking you to imagine a scenario for a second. You were to go to sleep right now.
And you don't wake up until I wake you up in the summer of 2024 to tell you that Nikki Haley just won the Republican presidential nomination and that you are doing a live TV hit right then, the moment I wake you up. You don't know any of the context, but I say, you got to go, you got to do it. And the first question is, how did Nikki Haley win? This is some scary Rip Van Winkle shit, Galen.
How did Nikki Haley win the 2024 Republican nomination? And Nate, kick us off. Oh, I'm the guinea pig? Me first. So here's what happened. It turned out that the electorate
Really didn't have a taste for for Donald Trump right that these polls saying that Republicans feel ambivalent about him running again were true and Also, he kind of ran a half-assed campaign, right? It wasn't clear if he's running as a publicity stunt or really running and so like Trump became something of a non factor at some point and
And I'm making this up as I go. And Ron DeSantis, he was like a little too sanctimonious. He was like, picked some of the wrong fights. And ultimately Trump endorsed his cabinet member, Nikki Haley. And so she won in a very close race over DeSantis after Trump petered out. Oh, wow. Okay. All right. All right. Amelia, you want to give it a go? Okay. So...
While I was asleep for many months, I'm very well rested. Nikki Haley won. And it happened because Donald Trump just ran a lackluster campaign. He sort of lost his capacity to shock and awe. And a whole bunch of white men ran as well. So, you know, I mean, we saw
Mike Pence getting in. We saw Pompeo getting in. Tim Scott stayed out, even though it seemed like he might jump in. And Nikki Haley really managed to distinguish herself, even from people who seemed like they were sort of the up and comers, like Ron DeSantis.
by being able to take on some of the issues in the Republican Party in a fresh and interesting way, talking about how she was anti-abortion as a woman or sharing her perspective on critical race theory as a woman who is the child of Indian immigrants. And she really turned out to be a much more dynamic figure than I certainly was imagining. And
managed to make her way to the nomination through this larger field of people after Trump sort of fizzled out. All right. All right. I'm impressed. I'm impressed. I think you made it through that live TV hit. Now, a vision, a world where I wake you up in the summer of 2024.
And you say, Galen, you're full of it. Why did you wake me up and lie to me? I know that Nikki Haley didn't actually win the nomination. There's no live TV hit that I have to do. And I say, no, I'm serious. I'm serious. And you got to tell me like, look, I'm a student of political history and political statistics. And here's all the reasons I'm sure that Nikki Haley didn't actually win. So go away. Let me go back to sleep. I'm not doing this live TV hit.
Wait, the case by Nikki Haley didn't win? I mean, isn't that obvious? Look. Well, give me the data, Nate. Nikki Haley is kind of a candidate in the Mitt Romney mold. You know, I've been to New Hampshire a couple times, Galen. You can always tell. They have nicer cars. They have nicer clothes, right? The Mitt Romney voters. Upper middle class to upper class. They like Nikki Haley type of candidates. Yeah.
Brooks Brothers, right, but they're not a majority of the Republican Party far from it and About half of them from the start were more anti Trump than anything else so figured the only way to stop Trump is with DeSantis so Haley got about you know, it's 15% the electorate. Let's say she got about half of it so she got seven or eight percent and then she quietly dropped out after the after the early primaries and and endorsed DeSantis and
All right. Amelia? I mean, look, Haley just failed to distinguish herself. She's someone who on paper seems like she should be a good Republican candidate, but there's not much that does really distinguish her on a policy level, on a personal level. Obviously, this is a history-making campaign, but I have yet to see what she...
offers Republican voters, and I can't see Republican voters getting excited about her. And I think that if Tim Scott gets into this, like she may not even she'll have like pretty stiff competition for South Carolina, even. I just don't think that she did particularly well in any of the early states. I think she probably dropped out
fairly soon. And yeah, who knows who she endorsed? Maybe DeSantis. I'm less worried about Haley distinguishing herself from candidates number four through 25. She has a pretty good resume that includes foreign policy experience. She, I think, is like never, I think she may never have lost an election, but she's won all the high profile ones that she's run, right? She is more
explicitly Trump skeptical in certain ways. Her comments about moving on from very old candidates, her comments about January 6th, right? She's been a little clearer about that, right? I'm less worried about her standing out. She's a woman of color. We can talk about maybe we should have a subsegment on how that plays in the GOP. But I think she kind of stands out from the pack relative to numbers four through 15. But like, she has to be one and two. And that part seems hard to me.
I don't even know about that, Nate, because she, I mean, I guess it depends on who candidates four through 15 are, but she's just someone who seems like she has kind of checked all the boxes, but I just don't,
know how she finds her footing in today's GOP when, yes, maybe the anti-Trump people are excited about her. That's not a huge group of people. And she's clearly trying, you know, in her announcement video, she talks about race right from the beginning. She's clearly trying to touch on some of the issues that are big, the culture war issues. But she's not like
She's not a culture warrior, you know, that's not like a language she speaks. And I just don't see her standing out really in any way. That sounds harsh, but she will stand out in some ways because she's a woman of color and that could work to her advantage in some ways and obviously could be a big challenge.
Yeah, I mean, to add just a little bit of data to what you're saying, Amelia, I was chatting with our colleagues at ABC News earlier today, and a question that they asked me was like, who is a Nikki Haley voter? And so I went into the crosstabs and was like, okay, do we have any indication of who a Nikki Haley voter is?
It is not disproportionately women. In fact, in the polling I've seen so far, likely Republican primary voters who are women are disproportionately undecided. But men supported Haley slightly more even than women. It wasn't overwhelmingly voters of color, although Hispanic voters did seem to like Haley a little bit more, although the sample size tiny there.
The one area I saw where she really did disproportionately well was amongst Republicans or Republican-leaning independents who voted for Biden in 2020. Okay. Which perhaps tells you everything you need to know about her candidacy. I don't know. Like,
I don't think that at this point in a race, we should be in the business of precluding anyone's candidacy in a way. And especially one as major as Nikki Haley's like she is a very accomplished person who I think many people could have imagined running for president at some point in her career. We're not like this isn't a situation where we're assessing the likelihood of like Marianne Williamson becoming president or Andrew Yang becoming president or something like that.
So I think, you know, we should remain like open minded here. But I am really curious if there is a precedent, if there is something about the Republican Party that polls aren't picking up, like how should we talk about her candidacy? I mean, I don't think there's a lot of precedent for having two candidates who are polling as well as the two front runners this early, right? Maybe Clinton, Obama, although Clinton was
ahead of Obama, but one of those two won it, right? It wasn't like John Edwards came up from behind and then won. Yeah, look, I think there would have to be, by the way, those like independent voters are worth a little something. They're worth more if there isn't a competitive Democratic primary, which you don't know about yet. Right, because then they can, more of them will vote in the Republican primary in places like New Hampshire. That's a good point. In New Hampshire. I mean, Haley could be a good New Hampshire candidate.
But like we actually, by the way, don't know the GOP calendar. We don't know if the GOP will follow all the changes that Democrats made. The GOP may still have Iowa fairly early, which I don't know would help Haley particularly. But yeah, there would have to be something we didn't know about the GOP electorate. Because let's keep in mind, we were all, or at least I was, like an idiot in 2016 being like, yeah, there are some –
very right-wing, fire and brimstone GOP voters, but they do the sensible thing in the end and elect Mitt Romney, the electable conservatives, moderate conservatives, which was obviously not true anymore. Maybe something sunk in after the midterms. I would tend not to think so. The GOP did, in my view, a poor job of nominating electable candidates in 2022. There's no real sign of a turnaround, but
Who knows? The GOP has lost three of the last four presidential elections, faced with the prospect of losing four out of five. Maybe that would bring them to their senses a little bit potentially. I doubt it. I doubt it, right? But we have to acknowledge some intrinsic uncertainty given the history of punditry sometimes being wrong.
Nate, I'm curious, when you say bring voters to their senses, you're suggesting, I think, that Nikki Haley is a better general election candidate than DeSantis or Trump. Do you actually mean to say that? Do you actually think that she is a better general election candidate than DeSantis or Trump? I think DeSantis is variable based on
the type of primary that he runs and how easily that he is able to pivot. Right. I tend to think DeSantis will go to pretty extreme lengths to box out Trump. And he already is to some extent. And that might make him less selectable. Whereas Haley is like drawing a few more bright lines, I think, and might leave herself like less selected.
damaged in a general election. But I mean, the reason why DeSantis is doing that is it's probably the winning strategy, right? Or at least the strategy to be in the top two is to imitate enough of Trump, outflank him on the right sometimes, right? Also, they can argue about electability. And so, I mean, that's a problem for Haley.
Well, and Haley's also in a difficult position where she really needs to kind of engage with Trump in order to get attention. Like a lot of people don't, a lot of Republican voters also don't know who she is, which she'll need to fix. And she probably wants to get, you know, she wants to distinguish herself from Trump. Like that's the brand she's trying to set out. But if she engages with Trump, she's a woman of color and Trump has a history of, you
in a racist and sexist way. We all know this. Maybe he will act differently in this campaign. I don't think so. He's already said some stuff about Nikki Haley, like that she's too ambitious, which is a pretty gendered insult to throw at her. And I just want to pull up some data that I included in the write-up that I did with Meredith. Republicans
just generally don't prioritize electing women as much as Democrats do, talking about Republican and Democratic voters. So according to a Pew survey from 2019, 33% of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents believe there are too few women in politics compared to 79% of Democrats and
and Democratic-leaning independents. And then another poll found that actually 22% of Republicans think that men generally make better political leaders than women compared to 4% of Democrats. And this lines up with other research that came out of the 2016 election, which found that Trump's overt sexism toward Hillary Clinton
actually seemed to endear him to some voters. They thought that was a plus that made him a more attractive candidate for them. So this is a tricky question.
tricky party that Haley is running in. I'm sure there are some Republican voters who are excited about the idea of more diversity in their politicians, but a lot of Republican primary voters do hold fairly traditional views about gender. And, you know, they may not see the fact that Haley is a woman as really anything, you know, they may just see it as kind of a neutral or some of them may see it as a negative. Yeah.
Yeah, look, I think that's a well-articulated point. And I think kind of race and gender operate somewhat differently. I mean, I think sometimes if a party is viewed sometimes by the public as being, you know, maybe a bit racist, then maybe nominating a candidate of color is kind of an answer to that, right? And now the GOP has nominated, you know, some candidates of color. But with women, it's a little different.
Different maybe? I don't know. You know, there probably are some percentage of conservatives who still think that being president is a man's job, right? Let's also not forget that, like, there were a lot of extremely well-qualified women Democrats who ran in 2020, and, like, almost all of them underperformed expectations. Yeah. So, you know, that, I think, is interesting data as well.
Yeah, I just wanted to say here, these electability conversations are really complicated because sometimes you have these conversations and you're like, oh, you know, voters just don't see women as electable. And like that can ricochet through the culture. And then people are like, OK, we're not going to elect a woman because she is not going to be able to win a general election.
Sample sizes of one are sample sizes of one. And so even if we say Democrats prioritize electing women or people of color, well, they clearly didn't in 2020. They nominated Joe Biden. And then we can also look at Nikki Haley's experience as a politician in her life when she ran for governor of South Carolina. She was president.
a relatively unknown person who ended up creaming the three white men that she ran against in both the initial primary and then in the runoff, she won by like 30 points. And that's in South Carolina, a state where the Republican primary voters are pretty conservative. So one, you never know what's going to happen. And two, we were talking about electability in a general election. There's a force that works differently in Republican politics than in Democratic politics.
by dint of the fact that, well, just in general biases that the public has, and also by dint of the fact that women are more likely to vote for Democrats, the public views women as more liberal, whether or not they actually are based on their own policy preferences. And so when a woman runs as a Democrat, that has the double effect of people saying, okay, this is a woman who's a Democrat. We also think women are more liberal. So they immediately think, oh, okay, that's a pretty liberal candidate.
And as we saw in 2016, people saw Hillary Clinton as very liberal and probably more liberal than she truly was on policy.
However, when a Republican woman runs for office in a general election, those two things kind of cancel each other out in that she's viewed as more conservative because she's a Republican, but she's viewed as perhaps more liberal or more moderate because she's a woman. And so sometimes in general elections, it's easier for conservative women to come off as moderate. And I think there have been arguments along these lines to say, like, why—
right-wing parties have been more likely to nominate or uplift women to head of state positions in Western countries.
But that's a tricky issue in a Republican primary. And I should add that also voters have a tendency to view candidates of color as being more liberal, too. So Haley, with multiple identities, has kind of like multiple sets of stereotypes to contend with. And it is totally true that the GOP has been electing more women at the national level. 2020 was a really good year for especially Republican women of color being elected to Congress.
So I certainly think, you know, I don't mean this to say that Republicans will not vote for women. That is not true. But I think that Nikki Haley, as a woman of color running for president in a Republican primary, is going to have to deal with.
and gender stereotypes that even make this harder for her, harder for her to appeal to the Republican primary electorate than, say, someone like Marjorie Taylor Greene, who is obviously very prominent in the GOP right now, you know, has had no trouble convincing people that she's very conservative because she's white and women of color have to deal with the fact that they're often, you know, sort of when they're
as forceful as politicians often are, they're perceived as too aggressive because of racial stereotypes. And so that is tricky for someone like Nikki Haley, who would probably have to lean more into the, you know, who would want to lean in more into the mama grizzly type mold, but that can be difficult as a woman of color. And so I,
I think it is certainly possible for female candidates in a Republican contest to walk that tightrope. What I think is especially challenging is that Haley is...
She's not someone who is incredibly appealing to the Republican primary electorate for other reasons, at least like not at this moment. Like and so I think if she's activating those stereotypes and she's not offering something else, that's going to be really hard for her. I think that's going to be really hard for her.
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Amelia, on the topic of what Nikki Haley is offering, what she's pitching to Republican primary voters, based on her announcement video and the speech she gave in South Carolina on Wednesday, you know, what kind of pitch is she making?
Well, in her announcement video, she started with a pitch that has been pretty bread and butter for her really going back to her campaign for governor of South Carolina in 2010, where she talks about growing up as the child of Indian immigrants in South Carolina and how in a world where, you know, people thought of race in terms of black and white, she was different. And she's
given versions of this story before, but she'll, you know, she'll move from that moment of saying I was different to saying, but...
I focus on the things that are good in America, not the things that are bad in America. And I focus on America's future, not its past. And people say that we are a bad country because we have a racist history. I don't see things that way. That's, you know, she said something very similar in her 2020 RNC speech.
She's very much she's quite adept, I think, at using her identity to speak with authority and a sort of about racial politics in a way that could resonate with GOP voters, you know, sort of speaking to this anxiety about feeling like, you
People are saying America is racist and people are critical of America's history and wanting to talk more critically about America's history with race specifically. That is something that she opened with and that is certainly terrain that she is very familiar with. Yeah, Nate, how are you thinking about the pitch that she's making? Look, I mean, again, I think that rhetoric will be attractive to the Romney, moderate conservative Republicans. I just don't think there are
enough of them in the party. I mean, can I talk about something else too? Like Nikki Haley is someone who probably has a long career ahead of her as like a pundit. I don't mean that in like a, in a pejorative way. Right. But as like, kind of like, you know, if she is seen as like the reasonable Republican quote unquote, but more interesting, like Adam Kissinger or something then like that, you know, you get on TV a lot for that. I don't mean to sound like
Totally cynical, but if you start out where you're at 3% in the polls and these two guys are at 38%, that's a lot of ground to make up. Your incentives might not be trying to optimize the chance you actually get nominated because it's solo to begin with. It might be the maximizing future life possibilities.
I've seen a lot of people saying she's running for vice president with this, which is a little weird to me. I don't see Nikki Haley as the vice presidential pick of either of the two front runners currently, but I'm curious what you guys think of that. I think you could see it for DeSantis. I think you could obviously not see it for Trump. Right, it won't happen for Trump.
To add some context to this, it's not just pundits saying this. I saw South Carolina Republican Representative Nancy Mace on TV the day that Nikki Haley announced that she was running. And of course, Nikki Haley endorsed Nancy Mace in her primary in 2022, even though Trump had backed a challenger against her, et cetera. And she was talking about how much she likes Nikki Haley and how supportive she is, but declined to endorse her. And what she said was,
listen, like whether it's at the top of the ticket or as VP or whatever, we need to have a woman on the ticket in 2024. And I think she was hinting at seeing Nikki Haley as that, you know, potential person. So I think it's not just pundits thinking about this. I think it's also potentially people in the Republican Party. When it comes to like, what is she balancing out? Clearly, Ron DeSantis lacks foreign policy experience, which is a big part of what she's talked about. If you sort of listen to her announcement speech,
She talks a lot about Iran and China and traveling around the world and sort of not backing down when it comes to bullies and all that kind of stuff. So there are angles that you could see there where I take your point about running for president as a way to boost your career kind of no matter what. But I don't think it's crazy to think that she could be like a DeSantis style pick for vice president, especially like you said, if he's running to the right trying to box out Trump and needs to moderate his image in a general.
Yeah, no, if he succeeds in vanquishing Trump, I don't think he needs to necessarily have like an olive branch through meaning Trump voters or I don't know. I just think that would be like, I mean, we saw with like Sarah Palin, when you kind of nominate a kind of hero of the base, kind of a bomb thrower, I guess, like it didn't actually help John McCain very much, I don't think. And so, no, she would be a very traditional, except in the sense that GOP has only nominated white men for vice president, but she'd be very traditional kind of
vice presidential choice in that respect, right? Well-qualified, makes up for some of the deficiencies of DeSantis, including being like-- so I don't think Republicans are-- newsflash-- Republicans are not woke like Democrats are, right? So there's going to be no movement in the GOP that says we just for equity reasons have to nominate some women sometimes, right?
But like it does provide some type of answer to if your party is accused of being misogynist and racist, you can say, well, well, we actually nominated an Indian American woman as our vice president. So how can we be those terrible words that you're calling us? Right. You know, I'm not sure it's that persuasive, but like but I think there's might be something there. Yeah. The foreign policy argument that is compelling, Galen, for DeSantis. I just don't see Republicans voting.
prioritizing identity for a vice presidential pick in the way that Democrats might, again, for equity reasons or other reasons, Nate. So she's going to have to build her case. I don't think that as she is right now, she would necessarily be a compelling enough candidate for someone to pick as VP.
Yeah, I mean, I think listening to her speech on Wednesday, I think this podcast is coming out on Thursday. So it would have been yesterday. We're recording on Wednesday. You did hear her building her argument on things that we do know Republican voters care about. The argument on race, like she in many of her speeches at one point, she'll say very explicitly, America is not a racist country. She'll talk plenty about China and competition with China and how she addresses bullies and
I see her building a bit of that argument on things that we know that Republican voters care about, even if sort of there's like two aspects to Nikki Haley that don't make a ton of sense right now in the Republican Party, which is one, maybe a sort of more moderating voice, less of that. Oh, like I'm a fighter and we're looking at a pessimistic image like she is running in the optimistic direction.
lean in large part. So maybe that is a little discordant with the Trump style of Republican politics. And the other thing that's a little discordant is that she actually became popular during the Tea Party. And when she ran as a candidate in 2010, she was talking about
basically entitlement reform and making cuts to Social Security and Medicare. And you will maybe not be surprised to hear that Donald Trump had a response to Haley's announcement on Wednesday and threatening Medicare and Social Security were the second thing on the list of criticisms that he had of Nikki Haley. So the kind of more populist style wing of the party as well is maybe not where Haley fits well into.
But she hasn't been in Congress, which Ron DeSantis has. Go on. So to have a record of votes you took in the Paul Ryan era versus she does not, right? She was in the South Carolina legislature. You know, that to me seems like those hits might hit a little bit less than they would with Ronnie D.
So I'm going to, I'll list the arguments that Trump has made to give you some sense of, you know, this is. Are you just a mouthpiece for Donald Trump's propaganda? Mm-hmm, mm-hmm. So this is the first. Are you just a ventriloquist? Yes, yes. You didn't realize that this podcast has been hosted by Donald Trump for six years? I would say stenographer.
That too. So this is the first main challenger, you know, major challenger to Donald Trump. So we're going to learn in some ways how this is going to play out. Like all of this is really abstract and hypothetical until people actually announce for president and
kind of do battle with Trump. So he was a couple weeks ago saying, yeah, she should get in, she should get in. And we all know that what he does want strategically is a splintered field because that could help him win with a plurality of the primary vote, like 30, 35% or so. But here's his list of criticism of Nikki Haley.
Hillary Clinton is an inspiration to Nikki Haley. He pulls this from an interview she did with the New York Times saying, the reason I actually ran for office is because of Hillary Clinton. Next is that she supported Paul Ryan's plan for entitlement reform, threatening Medicare and Social Security. Next, third one, instead of finding a peaceful solution to the Ukraine-Russia war, Haley has supported sending more American fighter planes to fuel the war. See, this is so interesting to me. It's like- That's fascinating. Like-
What? What party's primary is this? Like, criticizing her for supporting cuts to entitlements and criticizing her for being hawkish towards one of America's biggest military adversary? I mean, it goes on down the line. He talks about immigration, transgender bathroom bills, et cetera, et cetera. But those two things were just like, wait, what? I mean, you know, we've talked about this a lot. People always get annoyed by it. But Trump...
In 2016, did appeal to some voters who described themselves as moderate and had an appeal to some of the general electorate as moderate in part because of he was not fighting the Paul Ryan budget cuts type of campaign, even though when he got in office, he's obviously working with the GOP in Congress. He was not kind of a George Bush candidate.
foreign policy interventionists. So I think it's like on brand with Trump as things have moved on more and more to culture war issues.
Well, and it's also on brand with Trump that the first thing in that list was comparing her to Hillary Clinton. I mean, that is just such, you know, like an immediate callback to everything that happened in 2016 and all the people who hated Hillary Clinton and Nikki Haley is a woman, you know, absolutely.
I mean, that's the first thing that jumps out at me. I hear what you're saying, Galen, about this sort of feels like the tables have turned in a lot of ways for the Republican Party, but that is really on brand Trump. And I think if she did become a threat to him, which I don't think he sees her as a threat now, we would get a lot more of that Trump that we saw in 2016 against Hillary Clinton.
Yeah, right now he's rooting for her to stay all the way through the whole primary and get like 6% of the vote in every state.
Right, exactly. As long as she's like polling in single digits and still around, I'm sure he's actually like very happy to have her there. But if she if she turned into a threat, then, you know, the fact that like immediately comparison to Hillary Clinton, like that tells you something significant about what Trump thinks one of Haley's biggest weaknesses is or one of one of the points where he can hit her most easily. Yeah.
All right. Let's wrap up with just some hard numbers. Maybe I should have mentioned this at the beginning, but I will do it before we sign off. In the national polling that I have seen so far, Nikki Haley is getting around 3% to 5% support. And some of these polls are likely Republican primary voters, and some of them are just a larger universe of voters.
potential Republican voters. We have this conversation a little bit on the podcast on Monday. In South Carolina in particular, she's polling closer to like 12%, but behind both all three, Trump, DeSantis, and Tim Scott. Tim Scott was polling in 14% in the poll of South Carolina that I saw. New Hampshire, you know, doing a little bit better, but still in the single digits, like 8% in recent University of New Hampshire poll behind DeSantis.
and Trump. And we crunched the numbers back in 2019 when we were watching the Democratic primary play out to try to understand how predictive primary polls are at this point, you know, the first half of the year before the actual primary. And it turns out they're pretty predictive. Would at this point, Nikki Haley winning the nomination be basically unprecedented?
What's the biggest upset of all time? I think Jimmy Carter was very low. I mean, at one point, Donald Trump was very low in the polls in 2016, right? So it wouldn't be unprecedented, I don't think. Or 2015. But when those candidates win, it's because you have a very weak tap of the field. And I just don't think that a field with the former president and then a guy who has managed to tie the former president basically in polls and has a lot of momentum behind it in DeSantis. I don't think there's a lot of...
opening there, right? So what I was kind of trying to figure out in the opening exercise is like, okay, there's inherently some self-destructive potential with any presidential candidate. There certainly is with Trump, and there could just be that he's passed his sell-by date. What I'm trying to think of is like, let's say that one of the two frontrunners gets knocked out and not both. Can she win then, right? If they both live up to the billing, then I think it's just the two of them, right? But like if
one of them fizzles out, then does she have a shot? If DeSantis weren't running, could she beat Trump? I mean, I don't know. I don't think so. But that seems easier than trying to beat both of them. Yeah, no, it's a good point. Final question. This kind of marks the beginning of our 2024 presidential primary coverage. Of course, Trump was already in the race, but now it's competitive. What are some questions that you're just curious about other than who wins or
that you're going to be tracking as we spend the next year before anyone actually votes? Just in terms of timing, it'll be interesting to see when other people start getting in. I mean, Haley clearly saw an advantage in putting her hat in the ring relatively early and having some attention on her before other people start jumping in. So I don't know how much all of that time,
those timing questions matter, but it will be interesting to see if Haley prompts anyone else to get in sooner or if we're going to have another lag before other folks start jumping in. I mean, I think you might as well have that first mover advantage, right? I really don't know what the rest of them are thinking, potentially, apart from, hey, it's fun to go tour the country and give speeches and you sell books that way.
Yeah, there are a couple of things you get. You get to build the infrastructure for a future presidential run. Like this isn't always the case, but you will see candidates sort of build up to the actual win. Of course, Biden is a prime example. You know, Romney was an example. McCain was an example of candidates who, you know, you run for.
Once or twice, you figure out how to do it. You get a bunch of emails or mailing addresses if we're talking about, you know, McCain or whatever. And then you win eventually. So if Tim Scott wants to be president in, I don't know, eight years, 12 years, whatever, it's still good for him to probably run for president now. And you'll be able to tell maybe what people's intentions are by like really how much they get into the mud pit with Trump would be my guess. Yeah.
I mean, there is a long-term trend toward the GOP getting somewhat more support from non-white voters, right? Mostly Hispanics, to some degree Asian Americans, and a little bit, but less so more Black men than Black women. And so, yeah, if you're making a play, a long-term play that...
republicans will be kind of rid themselves of this fever this trumpian populist fever that nominated trump i mean look like if they lose the next election i don't think it becomes crazy to think that they would start to have some serious misgivings is that am i crazy i mean because like trends don't last forever right things like there is mean reversion over long time horizons um if the you know if 82 year old joe biden
you know, gets reelected after the G.P. had this very disappointing midterm. They had a bad midterm in 2018. You know, I mean, that's a lot of elections in a row to lose. And the literature says that when they are faced with constant losses, parties do moderate. And mainly Haley is someone positioned for for a run in four years or eight years or 12 years. That's not that's not crazy. Sure.
Yeah, that's a good point. So we will wait and see what kind of pitches these candidates make and how, you know, how long they stay in and what their intentions seem to be. And we will, of course, follow more announcements as they come. But we're going to leave it there for today. So thank you, Amelia and Nate. Thank you, Galen. Thanks, Galen.
My name is Galen Druk. Tony Chow is in the control room. Chadwick Matlin is our editorial director. And Audrey Mostak is helping on audio editing. You can get in touch by emailing us at podcasts at 538.com. You can also, of course, tweet us with any questions or comments. If you're a fan of the show, leave us a rating or review in the Apple Podcast Store or tell someone about us. Thanks for listening, and we will see you soon.
