“Can you hear that sound?” a jubilant Nikki Haley asked a jazzed-up crowd as she strode onstage Sunday night.
“That’s the sound of a two-person race.”
The former South Carolina governor had just got what she wanted for months – a one-on-one clash with Donald Trump for the Republican nomination.
But she must still prove she can make a head-to-head duel with the ex-president last through Tuesday’s New Hampshire primary and beyond, after Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis suddenly shelved his White House bid.
Trump’s critics have long argued that if he ever faced a one-on-one fight for the Republican nomination against a single candidate who united all the party’s opposition against him, he’d lose.
The theory is about to be put to its ultimate test.
Haley will never have a better chance than in New Hampshire, among an electorate in which moderate and independent voters play a crucial role, to beat Trump in a single contest and to prove she can mount a nationwide challenge against him. A victory, or very close runner-up spot, will be vital to the former South Carolina governor’s capacity to run through her home state’s primary next month and into the Super Tuesday major-state primaries at the beginning of March.
“There’s two people in this race. That’s what we wanted all along,” Haley told CNN’s Dana Bash on the trail Sunday, moments after DeSantis quit the campaign.
But Haley faces an existential question for her own campaign Tuesday. Is the front-running ex-president, who is hugely popular among GOP base voters after turning his unprecedented legal morass into a rallying call, simply too strong at this point for anyone in the party to beat him? And if there is a consolidation of the Republican pack, it seems to be around Trump, not her, as three of the ex-president’s defeated rivals –…
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