The GOP nominating contest is, against all odds, poised to become a two-candidate race within the next 48 hours, something pundits had only dreamed about last summer. As anyone who hasn’t been living under a rock knows, the two likely GOP candidates are former President Donald Trump and former UN Ambassador and South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley. Against Trump, Haley seems outmatched, with a fairly narrow path to victory in a primary contest that stretches between January and June.
Much will depend on what happens in the next two to four weeks. If Haley can pull off a strong second place showing in Iowa and manage a narrow victory over Trump in New Hampshire, then she has a real shot, albeit a slim one, at winning the GOP presidential nomination.
Most of the ‘smart money’ and professional pundits put her chances at around 15% to 20% against Trump, the 800-pound gorilla of American politics. But Greymantle places her odds considerably higher — in the 40% to 45% range versus Trump. Why?
As I’ve argued in these pages before, Greymantle wagers that more GOP voters than will admit it to pollsters are sick of Donald Trump’s dominance of GOP politics and would like an alternative. If Nikki Haley can beat Trump in New Hampshire on Jan. 23, fight him to a draw in Nevada on Feb. 8, and then narrowly best him in her home state of South Carolina on Feb. 24, then I believe her odds shift to a 55% chance of overall victory in the GOP nominating process.
If Haley pulls it off, a lot of smart people are going to feel wrong-footed. They won’t have seen it coming. The question will be: How? How did she do it? How was it even possible?
Greymantle believes a Haley victory is likely to come down to two words: Women rule.
WOMEN HOLD THE BALANCE OF POWER IN AMERICA
To put it a bit more elegantly, women now hold the balance of power in U.S. politics and society. That’s not the same as holding the most power in America, and it certainly doesn’t mean that women hold the commanding heights of power in the U.S. business or (all) cultural realms. So, I will state it again. A Haley victory will mean that women hold the balance of power in America, which is to say that they hold the swing votes that carry the keys to the doors of power in American life.
The evidence supporting this new reality is becoming clearer each year. More American women than men are earning college degrees. Younger women are starting to out-earn men of the same age. More women are heads of household than ever before. Despite the persistent wage gap between men and women, more women are out-earning their husbands.
When it comes to electoral politics, more women are occupying executive positions of power in America than at any time in history. Out of 50 states, 12 of them are led by female governors (and two of those are openly gay!). Even in states led by male governors, women often hold positions of real power in the state legislatures or as high-ranking officials in the state bureaucracies and court systems.
The rising power of women in America suggests that they will be the arbiters of whatever major political decisions are made in the future.
NIKKI HALEY, AS VIEWED BY REPUBLICAN WOMEN AND MEN
In Haley’s case, the conclusions outlined above appear a bit counter-intuitive. Nikki Haley actually polls somewhat better among Republican men than she does among women. Trump has polled better among Republican women than he has among Republican men since early 2023.
Greymantle doesn’t read too much into these poll numbers, however. As with all polling data, Greymantle views the results as suggestive rather than determinative.
GOP polling data likely reflects the greater social traditionalism of Republican women, i.e. they are more comfortable with men being in high leadership roles and would therefore tend to prefer a male candidate over a female candidate, all else being equal. However, I believe this is all the GOP polls actually reflect, except possibly the long-term exposure of Republican women to the right-wing media complex, which ceaselessly portrays Trump as unjustly persecuted by “The Establishment”.
Republican women might prefer a male candidate to a female one in the main, but if you give them the choice between a solid and credible woman and an unreliable man, they could very well choose the woman over the man, if the woman otherwise appeals to them.
If the social conservatism of Republicans were so all-embracing, then Haley would be polling lower among men than she currently is. The relatively favorable views Republican men hold of Haley compared to other recent GOP candidates such as Mike Pence and Chris Christie suggests that GOP men view Haley as a strong candidate and credible presidential contender. A majority may still favor Trump over Haley — for now — but they regard Haley positively.
For Haley, that’s something upon which to continue on a path to victory.
A MAJORITY OF AMERICAN WOMEN HAVE NEGATIVE VIEWS OF TRUMP…
Stepping away from the GOP base and looking at the U.S. as a whole, it’s pretty clear that a plurality of American women hold negative views of Donald Trump. Given that roughly 70% of Americans either don’t want Trump to run again for President or have negative views of Mr. Trump, and given that women tend to support Democratic candidates and/or are registered Democrats by a margin of 1.2 to 1, it does not take a brain surgeon to deduce that Trump will fall flat among women nationally, even if the women in his base continue supporting him. He simply has major problems where female voters are concerned.
…AND MORE OF THEM ARE REGISTERED TO VOTE
As of 2022, there were 7.4 million more women registered to vote than men. This was down slightly from 2020, when 10 million more American women were registered to vote than were men. It’s possible this number could rise again in 2024 as interest in politics increases. Given women’s strong preference for Democratic candidates and the fact that 55% of American women voted for Biden in 2020, I would say that, if you are a Republican woman and want to see Joe Biden voted out of office, then you would tend to support a candidate that other women will find more palatable than Mr. Trump.
REPUBLICAN WOMEN ARE TOO BUSY TO RESPOND TO POLLS
Greymantle’s personal experience of speaking with Republican women on job-related matters has led him to believe that Republican women’s support for Donald Trump is not nearly as strong as polling data suggests. Gaggles of blue-haired grandees may show up at Trump’s campaign events in Iowa and Mississippi, but most GOP women stay home because they have other things to do.
College-educated women now out-earn college-educated men in the United States. The odds are that this is just as true for Republican women as it is among Democrats and Independents. When GOP women aren’t working, they are tending to their families, still stuck doing most of the cooking and more of the housework, while struggling to manage the family budget and find time for an occasional walk or a night out for a glass of wine with their women-friends.
Most of the above is true for women without college degrees, as well. Those women not only have to handle all of the additional cooking and housework and child care that their college educated sisters do, but they earn less money than their husbands and have even less time to relax. More of them are divorced, so have to handle everything at home without a partner.
Given the harried life of the American woman, Greymantle would make gladly make a bet that the majority of Republican women have never responded to a poll. Those who do respond to polls are likely from the wealthiest demographic (i.e. they have more time on their hands) or the most committed partisans. The rest simply don’t have time to answer polling questions that come in on their cell phones. Nor, do I expect, do they have much time to watch Fox News. Their husbands and boyfriends probably do. It’s on in the background in their homes, but Republican women aren’t watching. They’re too busy preparing dinner or making sure the kids do their homework.
When I’ve chatted to Republican women in the Midwest, they’ve often preferred Laura Kelly (Democratic governor of Kansas) to her Republican rivals and had neutral views towards local Democratic elected leaders. For Republican women in Kansas and Illinois, for instance, there exists a desire to avoid chaos and establish fiscal stability. I didn’t sense much stomach for ideological crusades or zero-sum-game tribal battles that could lead to unforeseen consequences.
In light of these patterns — which are anecdotal and incomplete, but nonetheless suggestive of a desire for safety — Greymantle has formed the view that GOP polling data fundamentally overestimates Republican women’s support for Mr. Trump. If you combine that with data suggesting that 47% of Republican men have a positive view of Trump while the other 53% hold somewhat negative views, even if they have voted for him in the past), then you might come to the conclusion that Trump has a ‘soft white underbelly’ beneath his armor of steel.
Trump has weaknesses. They aren’t huge weaknesses, but they’re real.
AND THEN THERE’S THE OVERTURNING OF ROE V. WADE
Then there’s the overturning of Roe v. Wade. The U.S. Supreme Court’s June 2022 ruling that overturned the 1973 precedent has sent shockwaves through American political life. While few expected it in June 2022, it has become increasingly clear that the overturning of Roe has generated a massive political backlash, principally among women, against the Republican Party’s official anti-abortion stance and, most practically, against many Republican office-seekers.
Without the overturning of Roe, it’s unclear (at least to Greymantle) that Democratic candidates would have prevailed so decidedly against Republicans in the November 2022 mid-term elections, turning an expected ‘red wave’ into a ‘red ripple‘. The Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health decision clearly played a major role in flipping the governorship of Arizona blue and keeping the governorships of Illinois, Michigan and Wisconsin Democratic in spite of aggressive Republican get-out-the-vote initiatives.
Trump is correctly seen as the true author of the Dobbs decision, given that he appointed three of the five judges who voted to overturn Roe — Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett — during his term as President. Trump has moderated his position on abortion considerably since 2022 and is now advocating much fewer restrictions on abortion access, but Greymantle would say that the damage has been done.
Even if Trump’s support among evangelicals is still holding up, every GOP woman in the ‘GOP pro-choice closet’ knows very well that Trump will keep appointing judges and justices sympathetic to evangelical priorities if elected to a second term. That has clearly set Republican women’s minds working on the costs of supporting Trump in their state primaries.
In light of how abortion rights referenda and elections for judges have played out in states like Kansas, Ohio and Wisconsin, I would say that Trump has a problem on his hands outside of the ‘Deep South’, under which label Greymantle would mainly include the states of Alabama, Arkansas, and Mississippi. The Dobbs decision is going to be a problem for Trump in the Midwest, the Upper Midwest, the Upper South and the Western states. It may be a bigger problem in Texas than he and his people realize.
What struck Greymantle the most forcefully about the first Republican primary debate on August 23 was the way Nikki Haley made it a point to stake out a moderate, very centrist position on abortion. Her opposition to passage of a national abortion ban at the federal level was particularly striking. That her campaign began to take off at that point, with numerous anecdotal reports of “a new sense of excitement on the ground among many Iowa Republicans” points to how right-leaning women, even in states such as Iowa and South Carolina, are viewing the Haley candidacy.
WHAT PEOPLE ARE AFRAID TO SAY, BUT EVERYONE’S THINKING
In Greymantle’s experience, women can be quite shrewd about life and particularly so about politics. They are also stuck bearing children and doing more of the work in raising them, and so will incur greater costs when a child – including an adult child – is killed or incapacitated.
Civil conflicts tend to do that: kill and incapacitate people — especially young men.
Russian and Ukrainian mothers are finding that out the hard way these days, in what is essentially a kind of inter-Slavic civil war in the territory of the former Russian Empire. American mothers could learn the same bitter lesson in 2025 if things get, well, let’s say ‘out of hand’ during or after the 2024 election.
Because Donald Trump has a proven track record of not accepting defeat, both Greymantle and plenty of other Americans believe – even if they’re afraid to say so out loud – that Mr. Trump is unlikely to graciously concede defeat to Joe Biden or any other candidate in this year’s election. The word ‘defeat’ is not part of Mr. Trump’s vocabulary.
What happens then? If you believe Barton Gelman’s 2021 investigative reporting in The Atlantic on the subject of January 6, then you know the takeaway: ‘January 6 was only practice‘.
MOTHERS TO CHILDREN
A woman who is the mother of a child tends to view herself as a mother first, and as an autonomous person second (Not so when she’s merely pregnant. See the Roe v. Wade passage just above). She will make whatever decisions directly benefit her child or children.
Seeing as most American women, Republican women included, tend to have two children, on average, these days, the cost of losing even one child to wars, civil conflicts, and other violent disorders is prohibitively high. We’re not living in 1861, when women had six to eight children on average and accepted wars and epidemics that claimed family members as a bitter, but inescapable, fact of life. The women of 2024 have a rather different set of expectations.
Greymantle suspects that a fair number of Republican women are quietly factoring these type of considerations into their thinking about who to vote for in the primaries. Like I wrote above, women have a lot less time to watch Fox News than do men, and even less time to watch Steve Bannon’s podcast or tune in to Tucker Carlson’s broadcasts. I’m not saying there are no women who follow Steve Bannon or Tucker Carlson, because both men do have female fans. But, in general, women tend to be less enamored of the ‘defiance politics’ style that so many men embrace.
Greymantle believes observers of the political scene should factor into their predictions the things that people are NOT saying to one another, not only what they are saying. The questions that are not asked in polls, simply because both the answers could be too frightening or provocative. But these are topics that people are thinking about as they lie awake in bed at night.
Heard about America’s insomnia epidemic?
EVERYTHING IS PROCEEDING EXACTLY AS I HAD FORESEEN
We’re down to the wire. Voting in the Iowa Caucuses begins tomorrow at 7:00am Central Time. Events are conforming to the eminently predictable and desirable pattern that Greymantle foresaw several weeks (and months) ago. Chris Christie bowed out of the GOP contest a mere five days before voting commenced in Iowa with 2% support and after having reached 15% support among New Hampshire voters, directly behind Nikki Haley and Donald Trump. His support in Iowa was always thin, but another 2% for Haley takes her to 20% from 18% versus about 17% for Ron DeSantis.
With the exception of DeSantis and Vivek Ramaswamy, the GOP nominating field is now clear. All minor candidates have dropped out, and it comes down to Trump, DeSantis and Haley going into the first week of primary voting. Christie’s voters will presumably switch to Haley in both Iowa and New Hampshire, boosting her to around 20% of the vote in Iowa and nearly 35% in New Hampshire. Haley and DeSantis are locked in second place in Iowa, but DeSantis’s poll numbers have been dropping and the decision by Christie to drop of the race puts Haley two to three points ahead of DeSantis.
DESANTIS’S MAKE OR BREAK MOMENT
The DeSantis campaign has staked everything – and I mean everything – on a strong second-place showing in Iowa. If DeSantis’s Iowa vote count comes in well below Haley’s, with DeSantis at 16% to Haley’s 21%, say, then a strong argument will be made that DeSantis should bow out of the race rather than staying in through New Hampshire. DeSantis spent a ton of money wooing Iowa voters. Haley has spent a fraction of that amount, and most of it in the past four weeks, whereas DeSantis has been basically camped out in Iowa since August. If he comes in third, he’s probably a dead duck.
Both the smart, and the decent, thing to do if he comes in a distant third in Iowa is for DeSantis to bow out of the contest gracefully, throwing his support behind Mrs. Haley. If DeSantis were to do that, then Haley’s support rises to roughly 45% in New Hampshire (assuming all of DeSantis’s voters defect to the Haley camp – a big assumption, as some will likely move back to Trump). That is within striking distance of Mr. Trump’s 44% voter support in New Hampshire, according to polling data.
It’s not much – it’s a sliver – but a sliver is better than nothing. And if DeSantis is out and it becomes a one-on-one brawl between Haley and Trump, then people are going to start getting really excited.
A VOTE AGAINST CHAOS
If Ron DeSantis drops out of the GOP contest on Tuesday or Wednesday of the coming week, then the decision facing Republican voters will be an easy one: Haley or Trump.
There will be a directness and a simplicity to it that few (in fact, no) pundits had foreseen as recently as November. There will be no further ‘winnowing of the Republican field’.
Just Haley vs. Trump.
So a lot of things are going to become really clear, really fast in the next couple of weeks.
Haley has avoided verbally beating up on Trump during the primary contest for the simple reason that a lot of Republican voters like the sonofabitch. But if DeSantis bows out, which he will do (Room of octogenarian Republican donors to DeSantis: ‘It’s not your year, kid. Sit out the next round and we’ll support you again in 2028’), then Haley is going to have to take the gloves off pretty quickly and land some hard and painful blows on Trump’s kisser.
Haley is well-known is South Carolina for not pulling any punches. When it comes down to it, the woman is a fighter, and against Trump, she knows she’s going to have to fight dirty. She will.
Trump is clearly afraid of Haley, which is why he has given her the nickname ‘Birdbrain’ and has lately come out with yet another ‘Birtherism’ conspiracy, this one involving Haley as an undocumented immigrant to the U.S. who is constitutionally ineligible to bePresident.
Greymantle believes these cheap attacks on Haley are going to backfire, however. ‘Birdbrain’ is a pretty condescending nickname to give to a very smart and accomplished woman. Now that Republican women are starting to tune in to the race, every time Trump calls Haley ‘Birdbrain’, they are going to hear every insult that every male bully from junior high school on up, including ex-boyfriends and husbands, used on them their whole lives. It’s not going to make them happy.
And the new ‘birtherism’ conspiracy against Haley is just very…old. It worked the first time against Obama before Trump was even running for office because…Trump wasn’t on the ballot. It was only a tactic to stir up fear in people and pave the way for his future candidacy. It may be true that many GOP voters still believe the birther stuff about Obama, but it only worked because Obama was an unknown quantity when he first ran for President without a national political profile.
Haley, on the other hand, is well-known nationally and has a clear political identity. She is also a Republican, and a conservative one, at that, whereas Obama was a liberal Democrat. So I don’t think the ‘birther’ attacks against Haley are going to fly. If anything, they will rebound onto Trump.
Haley’s clearest message about why she is running and why Trump should not win a second term is that ‘Chaos follows Mr. Trump’. Mrs. Haley has positioned herself as a leader who can ‘get things done, without the drama, without the chaos’.
Against a barrage of vicious attacks, if Mrs. Haley continues to position herself as the candidate who can beat Joe Biden and get things done, without the chaos, then Republican voters, particularly women, may suddenly discover that there’s a candidate in the race that they can unreservedly support.
Until the next time, I remain —
Greymantle
