The thing about Nikki Haley’s disastrous 2024 campaign that everyone is missing
On the one hand, I’m hesitant to give Nikki Haley’s 2024 presidential campaign any attention at all. She’s already so broadly unpopular, she’s not likely to end up being relevant in terms of competitiveness (see also Mike Pence), so why should I even spend time on her?
On the other hand, the mainstream media (left, right and center) has spent years openly salivating over the prospect of a Nikki Haley presidential campaign, under the premise that it would be a ratings gold mine. So even though Haley’s career is basically over and she’s merely limping into the 2024 race because there’s nothing else for her to do, the media is still predictably trying to prop her up as the most relevant candidate of all time.
There’s also the reality that the major media outlets are getting the Haley story completely wrong, particularly as it relates to Donald Trump. So if the media is going to keep shoving inaccurate narratives about Haley in our faces every day, I suppose I should at least periodically try to set the record straight.
That’s my long winded way of saying that I don’t want to be writing about someone as irrelevant as Nikki Haley any more than you want to be reading about her, but there’s still something important about her candidacy. Specifically it’s about why she’s running, in spite of her unpopularity.
People like Haley, Pence, Chris Christie, John Bolton, and Mike Pompeo are at the stage of their careers where they’re has-beens as politicians. They’ve worn out their welcome with voters across the board, and they’re never again going to viable candidates for office. But they still have widely recognized, if widely scorned, names. And so there’s only one thing left for them to do: use their name recognition to make money by whatever means possible.
These days that usually means either landing a political analyst gig on television and/or landing a book deal. Recurring TV gigs can pay well but are a grind. But having a ghostwriter help you crank out a political book is an easy one-time cash grab, and it can be extremely lucrative – if you’re able to use the media to hype the book launch. You just include a few tidbits of juicy dirt in the book about other politicians, you leak those tidbits through the media during the preorder stage, and you end up with such a preorder frenzy that it doesn’t matter if everyone forgets the book even existed a month later. So what does this have to do with 2024? Everything.
If someone like Nikki Haley or Mike Pence can launch a 2024 campaign and keep it alive all the way to Iowa and New Hampshire, they can use that national media feeding frenzy as an opportunity to lay the groundwork for the book they’re planning to release once they drop out. It doesn’t matter if they’ve never been polling above 1% the entire race. All that matters is that they can keep their campaign technically alive the entire time, so that they can still be a candidate by the time of Iowa and New Hampshire.
If they can do that, they can land a huge book deal, pull off a major preorder cycle, walk away from their failed presidential campaign with a huge payday from a publisher, wipe their tears on their money, and then use it as a springboard for booking lucrative speaking engagements and such going forward. But again, they have to keep their campaign going all the way until the start of primary voting. Which means they have to keep at least a trickle of donations coming in. Which means they have to keep finding ways to get the media to portray them as viable candidates. And that only happens when it’s a primary race with no dominant frontrunners to begin with.
And so when it comes to Nikki Haley and Mike Pence deciding to run for President in 2024, the real story is that they don’t expect there to be a real frontrunner on the Republican side. And that’s because they expect Donald Trump’s numerous upcoming criminal indictments, along with his trials and prison sentences, to keep him from realistically being a 2024 participant. And they’re right.
It’s not that people like Haley or Pence know anything that you don’t know. But at this point, all you have to do is two things. First, look at the fact that Trump is weeks or days away from being criminally indicted in Fulton County and Manhattan, and that he’s obviously being indicted on an array of DOJ Special Counsel charges. Second, tune out every bit of the ratings-driven media hype about a supposed “Trump 2024” campaign, and instead think about what’s actually going to happen to someone who’s indicted on an array of felony charges across three jurisdictions. They don’t then magically become available for a presidential race.
Frankly, people like Nikki Haley and Mike Pence are just doing what I always urge all of you to do: focus on what is actually and factually going on, while tuning out the media’s ratings-driven fictional hype. They can clearly see what the rest of you should be able to clearly see: Donald Trump is going to prison. They can also see that the media’s other ratings-friendly darling, Ron DeSantis, sticks his foot in his mouth so often it might as well be surgically implanted there.
The 2024 Republican presidential primary is looking like it’s going to be a clown car full of middling candidates. That means we may get deep into the primary process before it becomes clear to anyone who the Republican frontrunners are going to be. That means that the media will simply keep propping up every established name on the Republican side, no matter how poorly they’re polling, because they don’t know how else to cover the primary. And that in turn means that unpopular yet established names like Nikki Haley can sit back and let the media carry them all the way to the post-Iowa caucus book deal promised land.
In other words, the only real story regarding Nikki Haley’s 2024 candidacy right now is that it’s further confirmation of what everyone paying close attention already knows. Donald Trump is heading for the prison process, not the primary process. DeSantis is a dummy and a weakling. And the Republican field is going to be wide open, for anyone who wants to use the primary process for their own personal gain, no matter how non-viable they may be.
