Mark Davis: Nikki Haley could surge after Iowa, but here’s why it won’t matter | Opinion

The opening days of 2024 offer the promise of answers to questions that filled the air last year in the Republican presidential race. Can anyone catch Donald Trump? Will election returns confirm or thwart storylines born from months of polls? If the last two plausible Trump rivals are Ron DeSantis and Nikki Haley, which will survive to face the frontrunner one-on-one?

At long last on Monday, real people will cast actual votes that will open doors of discovery. In our curious habit of affording outsized influence to sparsely populated early states, we will assign enormous significance to the tastes of a number of hardy Iowans roughly equal to the population of one medium-sized American city. Eight days later in New Hampshire, a similarly sized sliver of America may essentially bring the race to an end before millions of their fellow Republicans weigh in.

Not that divergent results necessarily await in more populous regions. National polls reflect what Iowa may yield — a dominant Trump followed by two roughly equivalent distant runners-up in DeSantis and Haley. Chris Christie’s exit from the race Wednesday and a recent Haley poll bump in New Hampshire have darkened the prospects for DeSantis, who seemed the dominant Trump competitor when he announced his candidacy in May.

Some expected the Florida governor to leap immediately into the broad vicinity of Trump’s polling potency, another example of the power of manufactured narratives. Whether this came from overestimating Trump’s vulnerability or DeSantis’s skill set, it was wholly unrealistic. As such, instead of unfolding gradual messaging designed to peak on caucus night, DeSantis has had to spend months explaining why he hasn’t caught Trump yet and fighting the idea that the failure to do so is a death blow.

Meanwhile, Haley is enjoying favor in the corner of Republicanism where moderate globalist tastes are preferred over the high-octane populism of Trump and DeSantis. She will inherit most of the Christie vote, an admittedly small number that could nonetheless nudge her toward an eyebrow-raising result or two, especially in quirky New Hampshire, where her recent poll progress and a pocket of Christie support has brought Trump below 40 percent.

So what happens if the January story turns out to be Haley’s rise, to such a degree that DeSantis leaves the race? Is that a tantalizing prelude to subsequent states where closer results may begin to paint a different picture?

Not a chance, for two reasons. First, Haley’s appeal has a ceiling. There are not enough Republicans available across America who are enthused over her insistence that Ukraine is a vital U.S. national security interest or that the term “illegal immigrant” is too harsh, as she said in 2015. Her accomplishments as U.N. ambassador and South Carolina governor are praiseworthy, but any flash of January success will constitute a maxing out of her appeal.

The other factor that will keep her moment brief is the more significant result that would accompany a DeSantis exit — the migration of his voters to Trump. Devoted DeSantis fans have surely not enjoyed the “DeSanctimonious” nickname from Trump, nor the silly notion that it was somehow disloyal to run against Trump in view of his support for DeSantis in the 2018 race for Florida governor.

But when priorities are boiled down, DeSantis voters appreciated the Trump agenda; they simply favored its return in a more disciplined candidate able to serve two terms. The moment that option vanishes, those voters are likely to return to the candidate they probably voted for twice already.

As DeSantis and Haley attacked each other in fits of urgency in a CNN debate Wednesday night, Trump enjoyed the opportunity in a simultaneous Fox News town hall to riff about his vision and throw barbs at his rivals on the campaign trail and his pursuers in the courtroom. Far from the battered victim that his detractors expected by now, he seems energized by the obstacles ahead, offering his best answer yet to the charge that his return invites “chaos.”

“We have chaos now,” he asserted, pointing to crises as vast as the border and the economy, as daunting as the hazards of woke culture in the military, and as jarring as Hunter Biden’s raucous appearance this week at a House committee hearing.

Barring shocking surprises in the coming weeks, Trump-hesitant GOP voters may soon have to evaluate whether their varied gripes about him might need to take their place behind the urgency of uniting to beat Joe Biden.

Mark Davis hosts a morning radio show in Dallas-Fort Worth on 660-AM and at 660amtheanswer.com. Follow him on Twitter: @markdavis.