DeSantis, Haley, and what might have been

MILWAUKEE — Unity was a major theme of the second night of the Republican National Convention, but GOP primary voters also got a look at what might have been.

There were back-to-back primetime speeches by two of former President Donald Trump’s vanquished primary challengers, former U.S. Ambassador Nikki Haley and Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL).

DeSantis immediately came out and threw red meat to the Republican base, forcefully making the case for Trump and against President Joe Biden. Haley was more reserved and pitched her remarks to independents and Trump-skeptical Republicans — they types of voters she attracted when she finished second in the primaries.

“We should acknowledge that there are some Americans who don’t agree with Donald Trump 100% of the time,” Haley said after reaffirming her support for the former president. “I happen to know some of them. My message to them is simple: You don’t have to agree with Trump 100% of the time to vote for him.”

Then Haley drove the point home. “Take it from me,” she said. “I haven’t always agreed with President Trump. But we agree more often than we disagree.” It was almost an invocation of Ronald Reagan’s rule that someone who agrees with you four-fifths of the time is an 80% friend rather than a 20% enemy.

It was muted compared to Haley’s 2020 Republican convention speech, in which she reprised former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Jeane Kirkpatrick’s 1984 “Blame America First” convention address and cast Trump as Reagan.

But Tuesday night’s remarks in Milwaukee were the sort of speech only Haley could really give. She made it further than seemed possible in a primary campaign where Trump always had a commanding lead while she represented the remaining pockets of resistance.

DeSantis by contrast came in hot with his very first line. “My fellow Republicans, let’s send Joe Biden back to his basement and Donald Trump back to the White House,” he said energetically, almost shouting. “Life was more affordable when Donald Trump was president, our border was safer under the Trump administration and our country was respected when Donald Trump was our commander-in-chief.”

DeSantis likened the Biden administration to Weekend at Bernie’s, the 1989 film in which two vacationing salesmen pretend their dead boss is alive, dragging his corpse around.

Unlike Haley, there was little hint in DeSantis’s speech of past hostilities with Trump.

“He’s been sued, he’s been prosecuted, and he nearly lost his life,” DeSantis said of Trump. “We cannot let him down, and we cannot let America down.”

If you judged only from the crowd reactions, you would have thought DeSantis made it further in the primaries than Haley. But the Florida governor dropped out after a distant second-place showing in Iowa while Haley made it to Super Tuesday, winning a pair of primaries, and receiving a nontrivial share of the vote in several contests after she dropped out.

Like Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) eight years ago, DeSantis found it difficult to run to the right of Trump. Much of the Republican base gravitated once again to the man who had been titular head of the party since 2016.

Haley appealed to voters who haven’t been happy with the transformation of the GOP under Trump. There is evidence her support was inflated by drive-by Resistance and Never Trump votes who were unlikely to back any Republican nominee in a general election. Yet some of her more than 4 million voters were definitely stubbornly anti-Trump Republicans who do not like his tone or some of his policies.

This limited how far Haley could go in the Republican primaries. But it does raise the question of whether she could have completed a GOP ticket. Even Lara Trump, the co-chairwoman of the Republican National Committee and the former president’s daughter-in-law, mentioned the possibility of not liking some of his tweets. The social media posts are a shorthand for his temperament. 

Republican primary voters spoke with a commanding voice on which candidate they wanted to be their presidential nominee, even if they got to hear from other options on Tuesday night. But it might make them wonder about the running mate pick this week.

It wasn’t just DeSantis and Haley. Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL), who appears to have made it further in the Trump veepstakes than the other two, gave a powerful speech. Rubio movingly paid tribute to Corey Comperatore, the 50-year-old man killed in the attempt on Trump’s life. “There is absolutely nothing dangerous or anything divisive about putting Americans first,” the Florida senator said.

But if the election turns in November as it did in 2020, on the votes of college-educated suburbanites, especially women, it will be asked whether Haley could have added more to the Republican ticket than Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH).

Either way, DeSantis, Haley, and Rubio likely hoped on Tuesday night they were also giving Republican primary voters a glimpse into what might still be.