With a brand new endorsement from New Hampshire Gov. Chris Sununu in hand, former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley is poised to become the candidate of Republican moderates and the main alternative to Donald Trump in the GOP presidential primaries — or so claims one report after another. It’s an easy way to think about the race and the axis of disagreement within the Republican Party: the hard-right Trump on one side, the moderate Haley on the other.
Some more moderate GOP voters will indeed be drawn to Haley, if only because she is not Trump. But this is not an ideological contest; the fact that multiple news outlets are framing it that way shows how misleading it is to fall back on old categories when trying to understand today’s Republican Party.
As an unusually shrewd politician, Haley has managed to dance around the pro-Trump/anti-Trump dividing line.
When Trump seized control of the GOP in 2016, he scrambled its usual platform: discarding some traditionally conservative positions (such as support for free trade), embracing others (tax cuts, opposition to abortion rights), and even creating new standards separating “real” Republicans from RINOs (“Republicans In Name Only”). The most important standard was and still is support for Trump himself — not only merely his views but his very person, a figure of worship to whom true Republicans must abase themselves in the most abject way possible.
As an unusually shrewd politician, Haley has managed to dance around the pro-Trump/anti-Trump dividing line without ever placing herself neatly on one side or the other. She managed to serve two years as his ambassador to the United Nations and leave without having him turn on her in rage, unlike so many of the others who served in his Cabinet.
That history, and her opposition to Trump today, has nothing to do with ideology. Yet perhaps out of a vain hope that the Republican Party can become something it won’t, some persist in describing her as a “moderate.”
Let’s set that record straight once and for all. The fact that actual moderate voters might find her more appealing than Donald Trump doesn’t make her a moderate. Nor does her style — calm, measured, and friendly in affect — make her a moderate. Yes, ideologues are supposed to be loud and angry, but you can be a quiet extremist. Just look at the current speaker of the House, Mike Johnson.
Few issues illustrate Haley’s skill at packaging extremism as moderation better than abortion. When asked about the issue, Haley points out that the national abortion ban other candidates advocate simply won’t pass through Congress as long as the filibuster exists, then goes on to list policy choices that we can supposedly all agree on. “Can’t we all agree that we should ban late-term abortions? Can’t we all agree that we should encourage adoptions?” she said at the first Republican primary debate. “And can’t we all agree that we are not going to put a woman in jail or give her the death penalty if she gets an abortion?”
On issue after issue, Haley is not just conservative but very conservative.
Actually, we can’t all agree on those things (aside from not executing women, which is a pretty low bar). But when pressed, Haley says she’d sign a federal abortion ban if it made it to her desk. In other words, she’s not offering a different position on abortion, she’s just trying to soften the blow, and recommend that the party temporarily employ a different strategy to achieve the same end of eliminating reproductive rights.
On issue after issue, Haley is not just conservative but very conservative. As governor, she refused to expand Medicaid, denying health coverage to thousands of her constituents. “Not in South Carolina,” she pledged. “We will not expand Medicaid ever.” She may have been the most anti-union governor in the country during her tenure, proudly calling herself a “union-buster” who was so venomously opposed to collective bargaining that she discouraged companies from bringing jobs to her state if they were union jobs. “I didn’t want any company to come to South Carolina if they were unionized,” she said. “I didn’t want them to taint our water.”
She enthusiastically embraces her party’s anti-trans culture war, says Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” law didn’t go “far enough,” opposes restrictions on guns, and has proposed a “term limit” of five years for all civil servants, which would throw the federal government into utter chaos. She has promised to impose speech codes on every school in America to crack down on criticism of Israel.
The GOP still has a moderate wing, even if sometimes it seems you need an electron microscope to find it. But Nikki Haley is not part of it. The skill with which she has convinced so many seasoned reporters otherwise is evidence that we need to talk about intra-party divisions in a more complex way. Ideology matters a great deal, but there are other equally consequential divisions, especially among Republicans.
Haley is on the right side of many of those lines. She doesn’t share the enthusiasm of Trump or many other Republicans for lunatic conspiracy theories. She seems willing to accept election outcomes when Republicans lose. And she hasn’t (yet) laid out a plan for authoritarian abuse of government power, or mused about being a dictator, even only for a day. Things have gotten so bad that a strong Republican candidate who isn’t a committed enemy of democracy can seem like a breath of fresh air. Just don’t call it “moderation.”