What’s in it for Haley to continue?
And more on how to cover presidential candidates.
Is there any reason for Donald Trump’s last challenger to persist? My colleague Tamara Keith observed on NPR today that Donald Trump is running virtually as if he were an incumbent president—in terms of name recognition, media attention, fundraising, and dominance of his party organization.
And for an incumbent, Trump’s 54-43 percent win over Nikki Haley in New Hampshire was not that good. He did badly among the unaffiliated or independent voters he will need in November.
Does this mean Trump could lose the nomination in later states? The odds are long. In many later states the Republican Party is more Trumpy and unaffiliated voters can’t participate. Sarah Longwell, an analyst who says she “desperately wants an alternative to Donald Trump,” told NPR this morning that she thinks Trump has a lock.
Even so, there may be something in it for Haley to keep trying.
This occasion brings to mind 1992, when a genuine incumbent, George H.W. Bush, won the New Hampshire primary. A challenger, the conservative commentator Pat Buchanan, captured 38 percent of the vote. This was widely seen as a sign of the incumbent’s weakness. Buchanan stayed in the race, losing every state but receiving more than two million votes. He got plenty of media attention. He captured the leadership of his party’s insurgent wing, political ancestors of the modern Trump movement! He gained the right to deliver a fiery televised speech at the Republican convention.
None of this endangered Bush’s nomination, but all of it exposed the trouble that loomed for him in the general election, which Bush lost in a three-way race against Democrat Bill Clinton and independent Ross Perot.
So it matters to Trump how long Haley stays in.
And it may matter for her future. There are Democrats who have used an extended primary run to establish their leadership of a party faction—Jesse Jackson in the 1980’s and Bernie Sanders in 2016 and 2020, for example.
There are candidates in both parties who simply raised their national profiles, from Mitt Romney in 2008 (he set himself up to run again) to Pete Buttigeig in 2020 (he got out of Indiana, where he’d reached a ceiling as a Democrat, and reached the national stage).
Haley portrays her performance in New Hampshire as good enough to continue. Her contributors will decide how long she can. But for now, her concession speech Tuesday night (which had an upbeat tone that set off Trump) claimed her leadership of a faction of the Republican party: the portion that wants to move on from Donald Trump, who is 77 years old, four times indicted, and loser of the popular vote in two previous general elections. And apparently has some trouble with independent voters.
Of course, several things are different for Haley than they may have been for past primary candidates. For one thing, Trump has pulled Republicans into line behind him again and again, including many who first criticized him as unfit and then contradicted themselves by declaring their fealty. Many who would not do so have had to leave electoral politics. Sticking it out against Trump would be a risk.
The primary season prompts us to keep talking about how to cover politicians including Trump. I think the goal is to show people as they are. As always, I speak only for myself, not for NPR.
When Trump delivered his New Hampshire victory speech Tuesday night, he acknowledged it was not a conventional one. He was angry at Haley for refusing to submit to him and even acting like she had won. He let his hostility and resentment pour out.
When we summarized the speech the next morning, it was important to take the time to characterize that accurately and fairly. Had we simply said Trump declared victory—giving the impression that it was the expected victory speech—that might have fit all the conventions of a news story, but would not have represented what he said. So we chose words and selected audio to capture both the substance and the tone.
When journalists summarize someone’s words to fit a news story, they may be tempted to “clean up” the remarks, using only those few phrases that seem to support the focus of the story at hand while dropping all of their misstatements and asides.
Sometimes this is understandable. You don’t want to waste the audience’s time with irrelevant remarks. We need not report everything anybody says.
But we do want to give a proper impression. Trump’s speaking style is rambling, free-associative, filled with personal critiques and grievances along with self-praise and conspiracy theories. We should represent this fairly—trying dispassionately to represent what someone sounds like without going out of our way to make them sound better, worse, or otherwise different than they are.
To that end, this week we played a long story on Morning Edition that analyzed four recent Trump speeches, aiming to pull out broad themes and give a sense of his speaking style. News stories and clips on social media do not always convey these bigger themes. It’s valuable for people to hear Trump as he is—along with proper context and factual information to help the audience make sense of what he says.
A link to the NPR story is below.
Thanks for reading Differ We Must, my exploration of our modern divisions. It’s a companion to my book Differ We Must, which tells Lincoln’s life story through his meetings with people who differed with him. This suggests how I cover the news: with one eye on the present, and frequently an eye to the lessons of the past.
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