Time is running out for the Republican presidential contenders vying to supplant Donald Trump as the party’s 2024 standard-bearer.
A new poll released Sunday showed Nikki Haley gaining serious ground on the former president in New Hampshire’s first-in-the-nation-primary next month. But that night in Altoona, Iowa, where she was kicking off a five-day state swing, the former South Carolina governor was seething about the television ads aired by groups backing another rival, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis.
“I have not talked negatively about anybody,” she told the crowd at the Fireside Grill. “But if you’ve got to lie to win, you don’t deserve to win.”
Haley lit into DeSantis’ opposition to offshore drilling as governor and his votes to raise the debt ceiling as a congressman. She kept up her criticism of DeSantis on Monday, making clear that her comments weren’t a one-off but a new addition to her stump speech.
“If you punch me, I punch back,” she said in the central Iowa city of Nevada. “Ron DeSantis has lied in every one of his commercials.”
The new attacks on DeSantis were the latest chapter in the GOP’s race-within-a-race. With the Iowa caucuses less than four weeks away and Trump the dominant front-runner in national and early state polls, his rivals are battling to emerge as the party’s lone alternative to the former president and consolidate the support of Republican voters and donors who are ready to move on from him.
But instead of taking on Trump, his opponents have spent the past three days – at campaign stops, in interviews and in television advertisements – escalating their attacks on each other.
“We’ve been to this show before. It was 2016,” said Jim Merrill, a New Hampshire-based Republican strategist, referring to Trump’s first campaign for president.
Polls show…
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