Republican presidential candidates Nikki Haley, left, and Ron DeSantis take a break during the NewsNation Republican presidential primary debate on Dec. 6, 2023, in Tuscaloosa, Alabama.Justin Sullivan/Getty Images
Too little or too late? Just right or not enough?
With the Iowa caucuses, the first test of the 2024 Republican primaries, a little more than a week away, Donald Trump’s principal rivals for the party nomination have begun to open fire on the former president. The ceasefire that has been in effect for almost a year suddenly seems over.
“In his commercials and in his temper tantrums,” former governor Nikki Haley of South Carolina, who was Mr. Trump’s ambassador to the United Nations, said this week, “every single thing that he’s said has been a lie.”
Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida, who has subtly courted Mr. Trump’s constituency since entering the campaign in late spring, attacked Mr. Trump for being insufficiently committed to fighting abortion and illegal immigration and, in a separate Des Moines town hall meeting, criticized Mr. Trump’s louche lifestyle. “You’re not going to have to worry about my conduct,” he said. “I’ll conduct myself in a way you can be proud of. I’ll conduct myself in a way you can tell your kids: ‘That’s somebody you should emulate.’ ”
Both candidates – Mr. DeSantis hoping for a breakthrough in the Iowa caucuses a week from Monday, Ms. Haley hoping for the same thing eight days later in New Hampshire’s primary – trail Mr. Trump by substantial margins and are struggling against each other to be the principal alternative to him.
Mr. Trump is an accomplished negative campaigner; he refers to Mr. DeSantis as “DeSanctimonius” and Ms. Haley as “Birdbrain.” His rivals, cautious not to alienate the huge chunk of Trump supporters, have been chary to respond in kind. This week’s twin attacks in Des Moines suggest the beginning of a new, perhaps desperate, phase in the Republican campaign.
As Mr. Trump and countless other American political professionals will attest, negative campaigning is often effective campaigning.
“The argument against attacking Trump is that it might backfire and thus end up hurting the candidate who does the attacking,” said William Mayer, a Northeastern University expert in the politics of presidential nomination fights. “But given Trump’s big lead in the polls, the only way Haley or DeSantis can win is by taking him down a few pegs. Attacking Trump might not work, but refusing to attack him is almost certainly a losing strategy.”
The politics of attack may be especially effective in the unusual circumstances of the 2024 election, when the five remaining Republican candidates are facing a presumptive nominee who is out of office and yet campaigns as if he were an incumbent – and is regarded that way by his ardent supporters, who believe he rightfully won the 2020 election.
“Trump’s primary opponents have been behaving as though they are trying to keep Trump’s supporters from hating them for a 2028 presidential campaign rather than actually trying to beat Trump in 2024,” said Sarah Purcell, an historian at Iowa’s Grinnell College. “It’s an odd hybrid. If Trump were an incumbent, he wouldn’t face any challenge.”
Broad criticism of Trump had been slow in coming; former vice-president Mike Pence took tentative steps into those dangerous waters over the summer but his campaign never took flight and he withdrew in late October. Two former governors, Chris Christie of New Jersey and Asa Hutchinson of Arkansas, have been outspoken critics of the former president, but neither has broken through – and, perhaps a measure of the peril entailed thus far, neither has qualified for Wednesday’s debate.
In recent weeks, Mr. Christie has singled out Ms. Haley for criticism, arguing that as the candidate regarded as on the ascendancy she had a special obligation to take on Mr. Trump. She had made glancing criticisms of the 45th president before, mostly suggesting, gingerly and with special care, that he did not fulfill his 2016 campaign promises.
The fresh Haley attacks on the former president were prompted by a Trump advertisement that referred to her as “High Tax Haley”– the kind of description that often is effective among Republicans, who since the Ronald Reagan years have argued that high taxes are threats to both personal liberty and national prosperity. The tax issue is especially resonant in New Hampshire, the only state without either an income or sales tax and where, since the ascendancy of governor Meldrim Thomson Jr. in 1973, candidates from both parties routinely have taken what is known as “the pledge,” effectively putting broad-based taxation off the bargaining table.
A companion to taxes in modern Republican politics is illegal immigration, with Mr. DeSantis arguing that as president, Mr. Trump deported fewer undocumented immigrants than Barack Obama.
The problem the two leading candidates confront is that they recognize they cannot win the nomination without peeling away some fraction of the Trump bloc and cannot win the White House without a substantial chunk of the core Trump base. “They haven’t yet figured out how to crack that nut,” said Dennis Goldford, a Drake University political scientist who is a student of the politics of Iowa caucuses.
As a result, the two have taken discrete elements of Trump politics and the Trump persona and concentrated their attacks on those. For Mr. DeSantis, it is policy, including abortion; in April he signed a six-week abortion ban in Florida. For Ms. Haley, it is the chaos that envelops Mr. Trump and his entourage.
“Allowing for the fact that Iowa caucuses and the New Hampshire primary are about expectations more than delegate numbers, I think it’s still too little, too late,” said Dr. Goldford. ”They needed to convert the ‘chaos’ into a reason not to support Trump rather than a reason to support him.”
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