Alan Zendell, May 25, 2024

Nikki Haley’s decision and her announcement that she will vote for Donald Trump in November because “Biden has been such a disaster” was hardly a ringing endorsement for Trump, but it nicely filled the media void between Trump’s hush money trial and the jury’s verdict.

There are countless theories about why she did it. The three I hear most are: (1) she values unity in the Republican Party over her personal ambitions; (2) she sold out to Trump because most of her electoral base in South Carolina supports him; (3) she expects Trump to crash and burn before the election and she wants to be in a position to take his place.

Choice number one is ridiculous. Haley is a politician with huge ambitions who is still young enough to spend years currying favor from other politicians to achieve them. The only unity she cares about is in the block of supporters she’s trying to build.

Number two makes perfect sense for an aggressive politician with presidential ambitions. Trump proved that even if you have nothing to offer but a shameless talent for pandering effectively, and you lie convincingly to enough angry people about the cause of their problems, you can win, and though I dislike her policies, it’s clear that she has a lot more to offer as a leader than Trump does

My guess is Haley is more than willing to play that game if necessary, but for now she would like to be seen as above all that. That’s why she accepted the job as U. N. ambassador. It gave her her own stage, out from under Trump’s massive presence, and it offered her an opportunity to represent the United States’ diplomatic interests and look like a traditional center-Right Republican – and she did it well.

Then there’s option three. First, I do not believe Trump is leading Biden. Even with right-wing media blaming everything but the eclipse on Biden, the facts are pretty clear about the accomplishments he’s had in three years, and I cannot believe that more than half of American voters are either too uninformed or too lazy to think for themselves to believe Trump’s lies. More important, I do not believe the polls, and I speak from years of statistical sampling experience.

Major polls are conducted by cell phone and email interviews. Ask yourself – do you even bother to open political emails? Most people I know delete them and otherwise ignore them. Do you answer cell phone calls from unknown callers? Of course you don’t. If the pollsters aren’t talking to you, me, or the 90 percent of Americans who act like we do, who are they polling?

It’s simply not possible that the people responding to polls are representative of the voting population. What’s worse, every numbers person at every news network knows perfectly well that the poll numbers are trash, but polls are like horse races, and they’re great for television ratings. Shame on all of them for promulgating the myth that Trump is ahead.

Given all of the above, it’s not unreasonable for Haley’s team to believe Trump is vulnerable. No one knows how his trials will turn out. No one knows how one or more felony convictions will affect voters’ attitudes. No one even knows whether the burnout effect will be the deciding factor in the end. But Trump, who is about to turn 78, doesn’t have the energy he had eight years ago, and he shows more signs of aging than his 81-year-old opponent. Trump regularly confuses foreign countries and their leaders, he can barely construct an English sentence, and his rhetoric is so full of lies and sheer nonsense (drinking bleach to cure COVID?) it may be difficult for some people to tell the difference between deliberate falsifications and simply not knowing what the hell he’s talking about.

Pretend you’re Haley and imagine what things might look like after the conventions. The Israeli-Gaza conflict will likely be out of the daily headlines, and with it, a real source of disarray for Democrats. As Russia’s aggression worsens, the world will see more clearly that Ukraine is critical to our national security. Shiny new bridges and roads and internet lines will have appeared all over the country, the stock market will likely still be at record highs, wage growth will still be outpacing inflation. How does Trump look in that scenario?

I think options two and three are simply different aspects of the same strategy. Nikki Haley intends to lead her party one day, and she made her decision because she thought it put her on the best path to get there.