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Has anyone seen Republican Nikki Haley supporters in the wild?
I read a paywalled article the other day in Australian media optimistically hoping for a sudden realignment of fortunes, that Trump might possibly lose the primary.
The article is realistic that Haley's chances are quite low but it favours her nonetheless. I also saw NYT charts that said Haley won the debates. I still doubt that the NYT knows what makes for a good Republican candidate. Their support may be toxic.
Of course, there are polls showing that Haley is coming close to Trump. The funny thing is that nearly all the unrehearsed commentary I've seen about Haley is extremely negative. Even the Boomers commenting below the Australian article seem to favour Trump. Online people have mocked her for the 'I wear heels. They’re not for a fashion statement. They’re for ammunition' comment, which is admittedly pretty bizarre. I never saw any support for her, only people urging Trump not to pick her as VP. Even DeSantis had some traction on twitter, even if it was just his supporters getting shouted down by the overwhelming Trump chorus.
But I'm slightly self-aware, it's no good saying 'well nobody I know voted Nixon' when I'm not even American. Is Haley the new astroturf candidate like Jeb Bush or am I living in an infobubble? Should we all just trust the polls that say she's the primary challenger? Do you see people in real life or online who favour her? If you do, are they actually Republican primary voters as opposed to Democrats? Do any of you support Nikki Haley? Does she have a chance, perhaps if Trump is sent to prison?
It might be dated but Haley seems to have a cliff problem. Second choice of most Trump voters a couple of weeks back was RDS by a large margin.
I’ve met people who have positive things to say about her. With that said, I think she has largely not had any criticism thrown her way (it is starting — only question is (1) will it be effective and (2) will it be effective immediately).
With all of that said, she is supported by people I hate and therefore I will not vote for her.
The reason Ron Desantis is still a much bigger threat is almost 80% of Desantis voters have Trump as 2nd choice. Knocking him out hurts Haley. OTOH almost all Haley voters dont have Trump as #2.
As a RDS voter, I’m pretty much RDS or bust (covid heavily influenced my political choice coupled with RDS’ general competence such as in Ian).
I have a decent preference for Trump over Haley mainly because while I think both would suck Haley reminds me too much of Bush. So maybe I fall in that camp?
As a "COVID Voter" (for lack of a better term), what is it about Desantis that makes you like him so much? Yes, I understand that at a superficial level he waged the most opposition to restrictive COVID policies among politicians who had actual influence over those policies (i.e. not Trump, who was powerless at the state and local level), but I didn't really see any fundamental differences between him and anyone else. Insofar as I can tell, there are two categories of COVID skeptic:
The kind of person who believes restrictions such as stay at home orders and broad business closures are antithetical to basic principles of liberty and shouldn't be on the table in a democratic society, and
The kind of person who thinks that the response was overblown in proportion to the threat, i.e. that there may be some circumstances where restrictive interventions are justified, but COVID wasn't one of them.
In my admittedly limited experience, the kind of person who is still bitter enough about COVID restrictions in 2023 is the kind of person who fits more into camp #1 and believes that the restrictions are evidence of our tolerance for creeping authoritarianism. To that end, I don't see what Desantis has to offer. He had no problem issuing stay-at-home orders and business closures early in the pandemic, and he didn't change his tune until six months in. By that point, existing restrictions in Florida were more of a mild annoyance than anything else, and loosening restrictions was the norm in most places, even those with Democratic governors.
The point I'm trying to get at here is that his anti-restrictionist sentiment always came across to me more as political posturing than as an expression of underlying principal. If that were the case, he'd never have implemented any restrictions in the first place and would have stood firm when there was pressure from practically everywhere in the country. But he didn't. He was certainly smart enough to realize that the existing restrictions were more theater than anything else, and that there was widespread recognition that they were such and there was corresponding pressure to get rid of them, and he responded to that pressure because he also recognized that it was unlikely to lead to the disaster some were predicting. But that's not principle, it's politics. It doesn't make him any different than governors of more restrictionist states who were walking back the restrictions more slowly because they knew they needed political cover in the event cases spiked.
By comparison, I live in Pennsylvania, and Tom Wolf took a lot of heat for the restrictions he implemented in March of 2020. But the more rural areas of the state were fully open by the middle of May, and the more urban areas were open by early June (except Philadelphia, but Philadelphia is kind of its own thing so we don't talk about it). After that, the only serious restriction was a bar and restaurant (and, oddly, courthouse) closure from early December to early January, which was implemented when cases were out of control and things were expected to get worse around the holidays. But once that expired things were pretty much over. Other restrictions lasted into spring of 2021, most of them dumb, most of them more annoying than restrictive, none of them seriously enforced. Like capacity limits. Restaurant owners bitched about these to no end, but if you went out you weren't waiting for a table. People who were concerned about the virus weren't going out, period; the capacity restrictions did nothing to allay their fears, but they also did nothing to restrict actual business.
Yes, a lot of this stuff was dumb to the nth degree and largely unnecessary, and I assure you that a lot of people on the left who were otherwise concerned about COVID thought that at the time. But that seems more like an argument that would work on someone who falls into camp #2, i.e. the problem with the COVID restrictions was that they were dumb and unnecessary. This is where Desantis seems to fall, but it seems odd to me for this to be the main reason to vote for the guy. I mean, I'm sure there are plenty of dumb and unnecessary laws on the books in Florida right now that Desantis isn't exactly making a priority out of addressing, so I don't know that his stance on COVID speaks to some greater strength regarding dumb laws. And it's not like COVID-style pandemics are expected to come around every few years where he can put his opposition to specific dumb laws in action. All it really shows is that he took a particular stance on an issue that was relevant for about six months, and not that relevant in most places. It doesn't say anything about his stance on fundamental issues of freedom, because we know he had no problem implementing the restrictions when he thought they were necessary. Sorry, this went on longer than I expected it to, I'm just confused by how someone can think Desantis's stance on COVID is relevant in 2024 and not be concerned that for fully half the time his stance on COVID actually was relevant it wasn't any different from anyone else's.
I don’t think liberty is absolute. It is possible that a pandemic could in theory justify things like stay at home orders.
Florida may not have gone “open” right away but they shifted policy two months in once they realized covid was not one that justified the extreme restrictions — 2 months was extremely quick and showed (1) an understanding of the virus and (2) a presumption more in favor of freedom instead of safety. Florida basically adopted the GBD specifically focusing on targeted protection noting the differential death rate. There is a reason he was labeled Deathsantis. Also, if you go back and listen to RDS during this time you’ll realize he actually had a deep understanding of the facts. He wasn’t just making a political decision.
DeSantis within six months prohibited local restrictions and had kids back in school. That was very different compared to most of the country.
Re PA, I can’t speak to every day life. We were looking at buying a house in eastern PA / NJ early 2021. Due to covid restrictions we weren’t allowed to physical view houses in PA since we weren’t PA residents. Philly schools didn’t return to in person learning until Aug 2021 and then were required to mask. That is a full one school year later and with stupid masks compared to Florida. So no, it was not basically the same. It was much worse. I think you live in the Pittsburgh area. They didn’t unveil plans to go back to in person learning until June 2021.
There is a weird revisionist history where people pretend all states were pretty much the same. No. Florida was much more open and much sooner compared to most states. I was in Florida multiple times during the pandemic. It was entirely different compared to the northeast. There is a reason there was a mass exodus to Florida. Where I am in NJ didn’t get “normal” until 2022. That is at best basically 1.5 years after Florida. Look I was deep into covid policy at the time. You can’t make me misremember what happened. I know you are on the left and the left was terrible on covid so the left is trying to retcon all of this (see Gavin Newsome). Won’t work on me. I lived and live in NJ. I visited Florida a lot (almost moved there despite buying recently in NJ). It was radically different.
Trump wielded a lot of power since a lot of nonsense derived from the CDC. Trump could’ve fired Collins. He could have fired Fauci. He could’ve not side lined Atlas (if you read Atlas’s book, you’ll see that Trump seemed to agree with Atlas but lacked the courage to implement his messaging in full).
Finally crisis reveals character. I don’t need to know about how a leader does when the sun shines. I need to know how he does in crisis. DeSantis wasn’t brash but at the same time was willing to take a very different tact compared to the narrative based on a clear understanding of the facts and a freedom oriented perspective. He passed the test with flying colors when many others failed (if you want happy to pull up detailed stats on it).
As to PA, I don't know what you're real estate agent told you but I can assure you there were no restrictions on looking at houses, excepting during the initial phase when everything was shut down, but certainly not by 2021. There may have been people who didn't want to risk showing houses to people from out of state and made up laws to avoid an argument, but PA never jumped on the train where they restricted anyone from out of state. In May 2020 they put out guidelines for the real estate industry in accordance with their reopening plan, but it didn't say anything about out of state travel. It also only applied to counties in the red and yellow reopening phases, and every county was in the green phase by the end of June, and they ditched the color system after that.
I also mentioned it in my initial post but it doesn't hurt to repeat it here: Philly doesn't count. This is often more of a joke at their expense but during the pandemic they were literally on a separate system that meant statewide guidelines didn't apply to them. I don't know the exact distinction or reasoning behind this, but enough things are different about Philly that I don't bother asking questions.
As for the school thing, the school system here is different than in the South (and a lot of other places). School districts here are independent government authorities that don't always follow municipal boundaries. School boards aren't subject to the same level of centralization as they are in places like Florida. School districts here were free to set up their own COVID guidelines, and most of them were back in-person at the beginning of the school year. Some delayed a few weeks, but were otherwise in-person. The exception was the City of Pittsburgh itself, which was ostensibly in-person but seemed to regularly be reverting to online after the latest scare, but the governor had nothing to do with that, and DeSantis couldn't have done anything about it if he wanted to because the PA governor doesn't have the power to tell local governments what to do. The exception to that was the 2021 mask mandate you were referring to, but there's more to the story than that. It was initially supposed to be the district's prerogative to make the decision, but as the summer wore on, school boards and superintendents were dealing with angry parents on both sides of the issue. Wolfe couldn't tell the schools that they couldn't implement a mask mandate, but he could require them under the emergency health powers. So he required it, but the purpose of it was to deflect the criticism towards himself so the schools could get on with their business.
I got a similar impression, but I think it was less due to the laws that were in place than it was the general attitude of the people. Yeah, the further south you drove the fewer masks you saw and the more people were in bars and restaurants. But there were never any real restrictions anyone took seriously. There were some stupid rules involving bars but nothing that would really stop you from drinking there (and some of the harshest lockdown critics in my social circle actually long for those days because they inadvertently made things more social). Aside from people occasionally talking about the virus, things were pretty normal for most people by the time vaccines were widely available in the spring of 2021. I'm not saying some places weren't more restrictive, I'm just saying that having traveled to PA, OH, WV, VA, MD, and NC at the time I didn't notice too much of a difference.
It wouldn't have mattered. Trump handpicked these people as experts for his task force early in the pandemic, and it had become apparent that he found what they said politically inconvenient. They never had any real power, just a microphone and the credibility of being the nationally known authorities. By the time Atlas came on the scene it was already clear to everyone that he was hired because he said what the president wanted to hear. If he fires Fauci it doesn't stop Fauci from going on TV every 5 minutes saying the things he would have said anyway, and from still being treated as an expert by anyone who was still doing so at that point. The media would have treated Atlas as a hack and probably had Fauci on after every press conference to tell you how much of what he said you should actually believe. It's one thing to disagree with the policy implications of the information your experts provide. It's quite another to say you want to rely on expertise but then replace your guys with yes-men when they don't tell you what you want to hear. Trump already had a problem with this in his cabinet, but at least it was behind-closed-doors stuff that came out later in tell-all books. This would have been public, and in the midst of an election season no less. He made the right decision in keeping Fauci, however grudgingly, and distancing himself from Atlas.
Aside from those points, though, thanks for clarifying. If I have anything to add, I think that Desantis's gambit was less a stroke of personal genius than more of a risk/reward decision that worked out in his favor. If you really believe he did a significantly better job than other governors, one has to ask why other governors didn't follow in his footsteps? I doubt he had access to information the others didn't. He was able to tap into a growing anti-restriction sentiment by becoming the face of it, and by actually using his power to not only remove restrictions, but keep localities from enforcing them. But I think he overplayed his hand and got away with it. Most governors quietly let restrictions expire and kept up the messaging about personal responsibility because they knew that in the event of a catastrophe they wanted those powers in their back pocket. Even if they thought such a catastrophe was unlikely, they weren't willing to bet the farm on it. Desantis made that gamble, and while it may have paid off, I don't know what it shows about the man other than that he's willing to take unnecessary risks if he thinks it will earn him political points. What would have happened if COVID started spreading through Florida's retirement communities and nursing homes like wildfire after September 2020, to the point where the statistics were unequivocal? Would he have had the courage to go back on his policy? Would he claim the numbers were wrong (Even if they were pretty conclusive)? Would he say that the deaths were an acceptable cost for removing the restrictions? Luckily he was never in this position.
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