The neck-and-neck race between Nikki Haley and Ron DeSantis is far from over. In an unexpected turn of events, the former U.N. ambassador finished third, trailing the Florida governor in the Iowa caucus.
Haley, who is also the former governor of South Carolina, was expected to finish in front of Mr. DeSantis, at least according to polls.
Instead, he won 21 percent of the vote to her 19 percent. Former President Donald Trump won by a landslide with 51 percent of the vote.
In New Hampshire, the numbers are much different.
Ms. Haley is heading into next week’s critical New Hampshire primary as a close second to President Trump. According to a recent University of New Hampshire poll, she is just seven points behind the former president.
The same poll, conducted for CNN, put Mr. DeSantis at a distant 5 percent behind Ms. Haley.
Even before his mediocre finish in Iowa and the projected numbers in New Hampshire, many pundits had already started writing off Mr. DeSantis’s campaign.
On Christmas Eve, The Daily Beast wrote that Mr. DeSantis’s advisers were preparing “to make the patient comfortable ahead of dropping out.” Politico ran a headline describing his campaign as “pre-mortem.”
“DeSantis took too long to go after Trump and he never recovered from that,” Henry Olsen, an adjunct lecturer at the conservative Hillsdale College’s School of Government, told The Epoch Times.
Mr. Olsen, a well-known elections analyst who currently serves as a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, predicted in early December that Haley was going to pull ahead of Mr. DeSantis.
He said it seemed Mr. DeSantis had difficulty “making the jump to the national stage.” In depicting Ms. Haley as an underdog candidate, Mr. Olsen also believes that Mr. DeSantis’s popularity suffered due to the high expectations placed on him. In contrast, Ms. Haley, regarded as a longshot candidate, faced far fewer expectations
Ultimately, he said it boiled down to a better voter appeal strategy. He called Ms. Haley “artful” in how she “cultivated” herself as an alternative to President Trump without attacking the Make America Great Again candidate. On the other hand, Mr. DeSantis struggled with what Mr. Olsen viewed as an inherently weak strategy to become a more polished version of Trump
“He was always fighting [on] two fronts in the sense that he had to peel away voters from Trump to win the nomination, but he had to also secure the support of people who didn’t like Trump,” said Mr. Olsen. “It just didn’t work out for him,” he added.
Mr. Olsen cautions against writing off Mr. DeSantis just yet. While Mr. Trump and Ms. Haley are moving on to campaign in New Hampshire, the first-in-the-nation primary state, Mr. DeSantis is heading to South Carolina, Ms. Haley’s home state, to continue his campaign.
From The Epoch Times