There’s a GOP Case Against Trump That Could Sway Voters. Only One of His Rivals Is Making It.

The instant media consensus after Wednesday’s Republican presidential debate was that millennial investor-turned-provocateur Vivek Ramaswamy was the big winner. And there’s no question that he succeeded in making himself the center of attention, if not always in a good way. But the only person on stage who made any headway in the possibly quixotic quest to dethrone former President Donald Trump from atop the polling hierarchy was former South Carolina Gov. and U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley, whose sharp performance was highlighted by a pragmatic, rather than a moral or emotional, case against Trump.

As a liberal, it was quite satisfying to watch former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie take the fight directly and pugnaciously to Trump, calling his behavior in the aftermath of the 2020 election “beneath the office of the president” and warning his fellow Republicans that “someone’s got to stop normalizing this conduct.” But judging from the audible boos in the Milwaukee debate venue and the snap polls afterward, Christie is about as popular with hardcore Republican partisans as the U.S. women’s soccer team. You can appreciate him for doing God’s work here, but he has zero chance of winning.

So far only Haley, who at least isn’t despised by the voters she needs, has begun to make the kind of case against Trump that will work with Republicans. And that means facing this hard truth: GOP partisans are still largely in thrall to Trump, but they also want to win in 2024 after four years in the wilderness. And Haley’s tactical decision to refrain from substantive attacks on Trump in favor of arguments about his unpopularity with the American people and many liabilities as a candidate is probably the only way that she—or anyone—can really reach Republican voters without alienating them. She pointed out that a supermajority of Americans desperately want to avoid a Biden-Trump rematch. And Republicans, she said, “have to face the fact that Trump is the most disliked politician in America. We can’t win a general election that way.”

Haley was strong even when she wasn’t attacking Trump. Her most memorable moment was probably her showdown with Ramaswamy, when she dismissed him as a lightweight who would make America less safe. “You have no foreign policy experience,” she said, “and it shows”—a slam for which she received audible, rapturous cheers from the crowd. Along with Christie and former Vice President Mike Pence, Haley tried to make the case that the United States can fix its domestic problems without abandoning traditional overseas allies like Ukraine and Israel. But in today’s GOP, those old-fashioned, hawkish sentiments are seemingly being kept alive on a ventilator by a small cadre of traditional-minded Senate Republicans. They are increasingly out of step with the America First primary electorate and thought leaders, who identify more with tyrants like Vladimir Putin than they do with his victims.

Appealing to electability, then, is likely the only path forward—for her or for any of Trump’s other competitors. And because Ron DeSantis, Ramaswamy, and Pence refuse to make this pitch, the field has been left wide open for Haley. The catch is the same problem that plagues Republicans nationwide: The party never did an autopsy after its 2020 drubbing, because party leadership blithely accepted Trump’s lies and/or delusions that he was the true winner. That is one of the main reasons that Republicans have been unable to change course in the aftermath of multiple disappointing electoral cycles in a row. The whole party is carting around Trump’s 2020 loss like the corpse in Weekend at Bernie’s, and as a consequence, voters don’t think he has an electability problem.

After 2016, Democrats took the opposite approach. Partisans and party leaders did a lot of soul-searching that included turning J.D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy into a bestseller, trying to divine the motives of early-morning diner patrons in every Trump town in America, and searching for the right mix of policies and personalities that might reverse the Democrats’ declining fortunes in exurban and rural areas. The sense that the party needed its next nominee to have some appeal with the white working class led inexorably to Joe Biden’s successful candidacy.

Importantly, that nomination didn’t necessarily represent a partywide consensus as much as it did the settlement of internal debates about what happened in 2016. As University of Denver political scientist Seth Masket wrote in Learning From Loss, the stinging defeat and ugly reality of Trump’s presidency led party insiders and eventually primary voters to “fall back on a formula that had worked in the past” over the bitter protestations of progressives who wanted a more transformational candidate to take on Trump.

Republican insiders who want to move on from Trump don’t have the luxury of working from an autopsy, because almost to a person they went along, giddily or reluctantly, with the attempt to overturn the election. And so the voters that Haley is trying to reach are cross-pressured. On the one hand, they remain steadfast believers in Trump’s greatness and the idea that the election was stolen from him. On the other, the GOP’s disappointing midterm election results had the former president’s fingerprints all over them, and the same flaws they have had to cognitively excuse for the past seven years seem to be getting harder to wave away. “He’s new at this” has turned into “This is just who he is.”

And that’s where Haley comes in. She is still a massive long shot for the nomination, but at least she is approaching the problem from the only angle that makes sense if you’re trying to beat Trump rather than becoming either his running mate or his cellmate. Haley’s numbers may also rise as the implications of Trump’s legal troubles become more tangible and as donors realize that DeSantis is flailing, Pence is Christie-level radioactive with the base, Tim Scott is unspeakably dull, and Ramaswamy is a gadfly. And her best bet is to keep pressing that electability case against Trump—next time even louder and more forcefully.