The New Hampshire primary has proven to be a graveyard for dozens of presidential campaigns over the decades, and Tuesday’s contest was no different. Adios and farewell to Nikki Haley, former UN ambassador, former South Carolina governor, and now, former challenger to Donald Trump.
She may speak bravely about continuing the campaign into South Carolina next month but any path to the nomination she had is gone. She limps out of New Hampshire with no momentum, no sign that Trump is flagging, and no hope.
In truth, she was never a “strong” candidate. The Republican electorate had changed too much for her to ever be competitive. As The Dispatch’s Nick Catoggio points out in his excellent summation of the state of the Republican Party post-New Hampshire, Nikki Haley may have been the “Last Reaganite” to run for the GOP nomination.
“The ‘future’ of conservatism, at least as it exists within the Republican Party, is gone,” writes Nick. Liz “Cheney was purged, Mitt Romney is retiring, Mitch McConnell is a thousand years old and doubtless will soon retire. Young leaders of the Tea Party era, from Scott Walker to Bobby Jindal to the explicitly anti-Trump Paul Ryan, are out of politics. There’s nothing left.”
Trump beat them all. He didn’t beat them by reasoning with them, using superior arguments, or presenting better ideas. Trump beat them down by using hammers and tongs to destroy them, to pound them to dust, to obliterate them.
America had never seen this kind of attack politics. And the voters loved him for it.
Before there was MAGA, before there was the Tea Party, before there was the Evangelical Right, there was Ronald Reagan, the last president to bridge the establishment/populist divide until Trump.
Trump is the “enthusiastic” choice of 80% of Republicans in New Hampshire. That’s an astonishing level of enthusiasm when you consider that enthusiastic voters almost always show up at the polls to vote. And it’s convincing evidence that whatever hold Ronald Reagan and his style of politics had on the Republican Party, is now in the grave never to rise again.
I suppose we can call that progress. America stands still for nothing, for no one. “America has rolled by like an army of steamrollers. It’s been erased like a blackboard, rebuilt, and erased again,” admonishes Terence Mann (James Earl Jones) in “Field of Dreams.” And it will continue to change regardless of who gets elected or defeated.
That, too, was a lesson of the Reagan Era. Reagan supplanted Franklin Roosevelt in the eyes of many Americans as the most beloved politician in the country. But Reagan was far more “Trumpian” than people will give him credit for. He was “warmly ruthless,” according to Reagan’s former economics guru Martin Anderson. And no one ever mistook the former union negotiator for a soft touch. He outmaneuvered his Democratic opponents with a deftness that surprised contemporary analysts and pundits who attributed his accomplishments to “luck” or the weakness of the Democrats.
“There’s no place left in the GOP for Nikki Haley and people who think like her. If the result in New Hampshire accomplishes nothing else, it should at least make that clear,” writes Catoggio. Haley would have been comfortable in an era where politics wasn’t an all-out war. Bitterly fought, yes. But “destroying the enemy” was never an option. That’s because Reagan and those who believed in what he stood for wanted to govern the United States, not rule it.
In a nation of 330 million people of every color, every belief, and every ideology, the only way to govern is to compromise with all sides. Now that one of the last compromises is gone, whither the American experiment in self-government when that government is only satisfied when it dictates an outcome to please its rabid partisans?