Posted: 12/18/2023 3:54:16 PM EST
[#21]
Quoted:Nate Silver's latest post on his substack. Many of our less intellectually gifted posters will likely just drive by with the 2020 meme photo, but seeing the typical 538-fan demographic go apoplectic whenever he tweets something to the right of Mao (fairly common) is fun. Don't discount him entirely. Anyway, this is also a Trump thread so may as well mark "Troll" and get it over with. Nikki Haley could be the new John McCainLike McCain in 2000, she could win New Hampshire and boost her profile. But it's going to be very hard for her to win the GOP nomination.Sorry, but there’s little that’s changed since September, when I wrote that Joe Biden and Donald Trump were the highly likely nominees. That’s not exactly an unconventional take, I know, although I would note that Trump has “only” an 83 percent chance of being the Republican nominee at prediction markets, and Biden has only about a 72 percent chance. Both those figures seem low. Maybe Joe Biden should step aside — I’ve written about that a lot. But that’s not a prediction of what he will do — he’s running again, and nobody more prominent than Minnesota Rep. Dean Phillips is challenging him.
Meanwhile, the national Republican race isn’t remotely competitive, and it hasn’t really been since this spring since Ron DeSantis began to flop. Trump leads his nearest rivals nationally, DeSantis and Nikki Haley, by around 50 points (!), and has more than 60 percent of Republican voters listing him as their first choice: View Quote You could argue that Nikki Haley is on a McCain-in-2000-like trajectory. Whereas Trump has actually been expanding his lead lately in Iowa, New Hampshire is closer, with a YouGov poll this weekend showing Haley at 29 percent to 44 percent for Trump. Other polls don’t show as tight of a race, but there haven’t actually been any other high-quality non-partisan polls in New Hampshire in the past several weeks.
It’s not impossible to imagine Haley winning New Hampshire. Chris Christie has 10 percent of the vote in the YouGov poll, and if he were to pledge his support to Haley, that might make things a little closer. And the polls are notoriously swingy in New Hampshire. The problem is, it’s not clear where Haley would go from there. As Bill Scher points out, around half the Republican primary voters in the YouGov poll support abortion rights, a consequence of the fact that i) New Hampshire Republicans an unusual bunch, more secular and libertarian than Republicans in the rest of the country and ii) independent voters in New Hampshire can vote in the presidential primary of their choosing and many of them will vote in the GOP race without Joe Biden on the Democratic ballot there. View Quote TL;DRThere are also some contingencies that are hard to model — like Trump’s legal risks, though it’s not clear how much those would hurt him in a primary. Plus, there are actuarial risks because of Trump’s advanced age. If you gave me a few bucks to wager on a long-shot, I’d bet them on Haley before DeSantis. But I’ve exhausted the amount of ass-covering that I’m willing to do. We’ve reached the point where the nominee being someone other than Trump would be perhaps the most surprising development in the history of the presidential primaries. View Quote View Quote Nikki “I am gonna give the dems the chance to undermine Southern Heritage and History because of the Charleston shooting because I’m a fake Southern” Haley? Nah, we’re good.
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