We’ve entered the home stretch in the lead-up to the 2024 Republican presidential primary. And while Donald Trump continues to lead every major survey of the race, Nikki Haley seems to have at least some momentum to be his chief primary rival.
But does Haley have a real chance to win the nomination? History shows us she has a plausible road map.
Let’s start with the bad news for the former South Carolina governor. She’s still polling at about 10% nationally, while Trump tops 60% in many surveys. Not only is she 50 points behind the former president, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis is in between them, polling at about 15%.
No one behind in the national polls by as much as Haley at this point in the primary calendar has ever ended up winning the nomination.
Primary contests, though, aren’t national affairs. They’re sequential contests, in which a state’s voting patterns can be affected by what happened in states that voted before it.
The early major contests on the Republican side are Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina. Trump leads in all of them, but by less than he does nationally.
A late October Des Moines Register poll had Trump at 43% to Haley and DeSantis each at 16% in Iowa. That’s a large lead. It’s not insurmountable.
Republican George H.W. Bush in 1980 and Democrat Dick Gephardt in 1988 were down by at least 20 points at this point before the caucuses. They both went on to win Iowa.
Haley, however, doesn’t need to win Iowa to secure the GOP nomination. What she needs is a boost coming out of the Hawkeye State.
That’s what happened to Democrat Gary Hart in 1984. He finished a distant second to Walter Mondale in Iowa, though he did better than the pre-caucus polls had suggested.
Indeed, history shows us that the best way to predict the New Hampshire primary results is to…
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