Former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley may be down, but she's not out and damn if she's not on point following the New Hampshire primary. So on point, in fact, the Biden campaign is tweeting out excerpts of her stump speech in South Carolina.
"Out of everything [Donald] Trump said in his rant, he didn't talk about the American people once," Haley said at a North Charleston event, ripping Trump's post-New Hampshire speech. "He talked about revenge."
Cut it, cue it, and blast it out.
Without a doubt, Trump is decisively winning the Republican primary and, short of suffering a sudden heart attack, will claim it. But in the process, something very unsettling is happening for his campaign: The primary contest is exposing all of his general election vulnerabilities.
That's not going to get any better moving forward. As long is Haley stays in the race, she is simultaneously cultivating the anti-Trump vote and fueling Biden's general election campaign.
In fact, anti-Trumpers are salivating over the New Hampshire results.
“It was definitely not a good night for Donald Trump,” Mike Madrid, co-founder of the anti-Trump group The Lincoln Project, told Politico.
“By most metrics, the path to [stopping Trump] has become much clearer,” Madrid said. “The anti-Trump lane is discernible. It’s palpable. It’s big. It’s something that we can work with in a real, meaningful way.”
The exit polls from Iowa and New Hampshire have been bandied about plenty. But if you look at them through the lens of Haley becoming a vessel for gettable Biden voters, they are truly illuminating.
In New Hampshire:
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46% of Republican primary voters said they would be dissatisfied if Trump won the nomination; 34% said they wouldn't vote for him in November.
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42% said a convicted Trump wouldn't be fit for the presidency.
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62% of Republican voters said they didn't identify as part of the MAGA movement; nearly two-thirds of them voted for Haley.
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64% of undeclared voters voted for Haley.
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94% of Haley voters said they would be dissatisfied if Trump won the nomination.
So Trump wins the Granite State and then does what? He rails against Haley—who secured 43% of the vote—reminding that 94% of Trump-dissatisfied Haley voters exactly why they dislike Trump.
Iowa, as Trump-friendly as it is, also held warning signs:
The bottom line here is that Haley has effectively become a surrogate for the Biden campaign who happens to be running in the Republican primary. Naturally, some of her arguments are a knock on Biden. But Trump is displacing Biden as Haley’s real target and her voters are more animated by and united against him. With every jab Haley takes at Trump, she is softening him up for the Biden campaign.
Even better, Trump's thin-skinned reprisals are helping to fuel her campaign. Trump posted Wednesday on Truth Social, "Anybody that makes a ‘Contribution’ to Birdbrain, from this moment forth, will be permanently barred from the MAGA camp."
On Thursday, MSNBC anchor Stephanie Ruhle tweeted that a Haley donor said fundraising had spiked after Trump threatened her donors.
Sure enough, NBC News reported Friday that Haley’s campaign said it had raised $2.6 million since the New Hampshire primary, with a little less than half of that coming from grassroots and online contributions following Trump’s social media meltdown.
Haley's now living rent-free in Trump's head. And while his well-regarded campaign managers managed to muzzle him after the Iowa contest, they have totally lost control of him now.
So if you're Team Trump, the best thing you can do to kneecap Haley and stanch the bleeding is shut down a nominating process that is increasingly exposing all your biggest vulnerabilities.
That's exactly why Trump allies tried to strong-arm the Republican National Committee into naming him the winner after just two state contests. The resolution, which became public Thursday, has been withdrawn, but RNC leadership has made its wishes perfectly clear.
Because winning the nomination the old-fashioned way is going to break Trump in the general election.
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