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Ross Douthat
By Ross Douthat
Opinion Columnist
Like his victory in Iowa last week, Donald Trump’s defeat of Nikki Haley in New Hampshire was substantial enough to remove any real doubt about the outcome of the primary campaign yet also somewhat underwhelming as a statement of voter enthusiasm for a former president and de facto incumbent candidate.
It proved that Trump is basically unbeatable in this timeline while hinting that it could have been otherwise, that we were only a few what-ifs away from a more competitive campaign.
You can see some of those what-ifs hovering around an interesting Politico profile of a New Hampshire Republican voter who considered Haley, even donated to her, before returning to Trump when the primary arrived. The profile, by Michael Kruse, introduces us to Ted Johnson, a retired military man turned project manager for an IT security company: He’s divorced and remarried, the father of three adult sons, working from home in Bedford, N.H., and a Barack Obama voter twice over and then a Trump voter in 2016 and 2020.
When Kruse first meets him, Johnson says that Trump feels to him like a “rebel without a cause” and that he’s looking for a candidate who can help reunite the country — which draws him to Haley as her star rises in New Hampshire. Flash forward to the days just before the election, though, and Johnson has swung back to Trump, even though — or because — the former president is a “wrecking ball” who Johnson thinks will “break the system.”
You can tell it’s a good profile because the details cut in different analytical directions. If you think that Trump’s victory was always assured because Republican voters exist in a bubble of delusion and unshakable loyalty, you’ll find evidence for that assumption in Johnson’s belief that Jan. 6 was a setup organized by Trump’s enemies and in the familiar script he uses to make a populist case for Trump — that he’ll fight the self-dealing insiders, “go in and lead” and “take care of the average guy.”
But if you’re struck by Johnson’s professed (if temporary) Trump fatigue and his willingness to seriously consider Haley despite his obviously Trumpy politics, then Kruse’s piece suggests a few interesting might-have-beens. For instance:
What if Trump had been indicted only in the classified documents case? The pileup of indictments was clearly an inflection point in the primary campaign, sending Trump surging toward a secure front-running position. In Johnson’s narrative, you get a concise summary of the mentality that helped drive that surge of support: “For a guy like me, I am looking, and I’m saying, ‘Why is everybody so hellbent on getting Trump in jail or getting him not to win?’” His answer is that institutional Washington, the intelligence and law enforcement agencies especially, must be “afraid as hell” of Trump coming back, because he doesn’t tolerate their uselessness or play by their bureaucratic rules. They’re “throwing so much stuff at this guy, and it’s almost like I’m rooting for him,” Johnson tells Kruse. “This is a whole system of government going after one man who, probably, I bet, right now, 85 million people want to be president.”
But then when Kruse goes case by case through the indictments, Johnson has to concede that the classified documents case is genuinely troubling, even as he dismisses the others as either prosecutorial overreach or (in the case of the Stormy Daniels hush-money indictment) just “totally ridiculous.” He still makes excuses for Trump’s conduct with the documents, but listening to him fumble, you get the sense that a world where prosecutors pursued only that case — which is, indeed, the only slam-dunk case, the only indictment that doesn’t involve some creative legal theories — might not have generated the same base-rallying, Trump-against-the-world political effect.
What if Biden’s polling numbers had been better? Kruse notes in passing that an early indicator that Johnson would revert to backing Trump came when they talked about general-election polling and Johnson mentioned watching the news and seeing a poll showing Trump beating Biden handily. (“Trump’s ‘going to win, man,’” Kruse quotes his subject saying.) And you could argue that Biden’s bad polls were almost as important as the indictments to Trump’s resurgence and subsequent resilience. They changed the narrative created by the 2022 midterms, in which Trumpist nuttiness clearly hurt the G.O.P. and helped the Democrats hold the Senate, by making Trump look like a potential winner once again.
Whereas if you imagine a world where inflation cooled sooner and Biden was somewhat more popular, maybe Johnson turns on the TV and sees polls consistently showing Haley or Ron DeSantis beating Biden and Trump consistently losing — which cements the lessons of 2022 instead of undermining them and keeps Trump’s postmidterm fade going.
What if Trump’s final rival had been a little more populist? Just before the primary, Politico’s Ryan Lizza made the interesting point that while Haley’s campaign ads were fairly vacuous, Trump’s campaign was running policy-focused ads against her, hitting her from the right on immigration and the left on Social Security cuts — a highly effective populist combination. In the Kruse profile, Johnson specifically mentions the ads he saw on Fox News as changing his perceptions of Haley, bringing him around to viewing her as just another establishment Republican and “swamp creature.”
To the extent that those ads worked, it was because they captured something real about Haley: She does have the record of a pre-Trump Republican, the record of a foreign policy and deficit hawk, a business-friendly corporatist, an immigration compromiser. And while she tried to defuse the immigration issue by promising toughness on the border, on other fronts she didn’t try very hard to complicate her establishment image, her prepopulist persona.
That’s why DeSantis once seemed like the more plausible candidate to win a one-on-one battle with Trump. But along with the DeSantis might-have-been, there’s the question of whether Haley could have done something more to change her old-guard image — by making populist economic promises instead of talking up austerity and entitlement cuts, or taking a more cautious and realist line on foreign policy, or attacking Trump more stridently for his failures to carry out the MAGA agenda.
Maybe that would have prevented her successful consolidation of the voters who really like the old guard G.O.P., the pre-Trump party. But she needed many more voters like Ted Johnson for that consolidation to win her anything except second place. And since she’s apparently sticking around through the South Carolina primary, the only advice worth offering her long-shot campaign is to try more aggressively to win them: Go more populist, because otherwise, you’re simply going home.
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Ross Douthat has been an Opinion columnist for The Times since 2009. He is the author, most recently, of “The Deep Places: A Memoir of Illness and Discovery.” @DouthatNYT • Facebook
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