The most important question in the GOP presidential race for the next few weeks isn’t if anyone can narrow Donald Trump’s imposing lead over his rivals; it’s whether Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis or former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley can surpass the other clearly enough to create a genuine one-on-one contest with the former president.
The answer to that second question likely will go a long way toward answering the first. No one in the party disputes that all the candidates face long odds of toppling the current front-runner. But many of the Republican strategists skeptical of Trump now view the race as a kind of stair-step: before any other candidate can really challenge Trump, they argue, he or she must achieve what his 2016 rivals could not by clearing the field to create a binary choice with him.
“You’ve got to have one real challenger: two or three doesn’t help you,” said Tom Rath, a former New Hampshire state attorney general and GOP strategist who has been active in every primary there since 1964. “The more splintered this field stays, the better it is for Donald Trump.”
For much of this year, most Republicans assumed that DeSantis was best positioned to emerge as Trump’s principal rival. And GOP strategists supporting the Florida governor still argue that he remains the only alternative with both the breadth of appeal in the party and the national campaign organization to truly threaten Trump.
But many Republican strategists believe that DeSantis’ struggles to connect with voters, and his choice to run at Trump solely from the right, have opened a lane for Haley to eclipse the Florida governor. Some Republicans believe Haley has already done so — partly because she now appears to have a much clearer path than DeSantis to strong showings in New Hampshire and South Carolina, the two critical early states that follow the kick-off Iowa caucuses…
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