It is probably Kamala who would be favored just mostly because of party and policy. Right now it's not rocket science what Biden is doing to focus 2024 on the GOP's proposed budgets to slash social security if they get the power to do so. Then there's the fact that Majorie Taylor Greene and co are literally running the House of Representatives. I'm not saying Kamala is by far the best Democratic candidate (not even close) but it doesn't take someone like Barrack Obama to move the Democratic coalition voting base right now when you have so much to run against with the current GOP. The fact is, until the GOP cleans it act up virtually any Democrat can beat virtually any Republican. That's just the way the coalition is built right now based on the blend of unpopular policy, and social extremism on the right.
Very stupid for the Dems to try to foist Kamala on us. Just a horrible candidate. I suppose she would have some chance against Trump. Despite the whole Corporate Dem roll out in 2020 with lots of initial money, she just sucked as a candidate and was running 7th among the candidates before in her own state of California.
I agree, @glynch. She has all the charisma of a turnip. We need a candidate who's a damn good politician. A politician in the sense that he or she can give a hell of a stump speech. Get the crowd cheering, get the party's juices flowing, get the people involved, attract independents. The opposite of Joe Biden at over 80, or at any other age. Harris just doesn't have it, not by any stretch of the imagination, in my opinion. I don't "hate" her, but I simply don't see her winning in 2024. I think that Biden can beat trump, even as ancient as he is, but I don't think trump will end up being the nominee of the far-right GOP. In my opinion, anyway. I certainly could be wrong.
As a said .. not even close (to the best candidate). I thought I was clearly speaking to the electoral conditions that would still favor her or any generic democrat. I don’t think anyone has to worry about her anyways because based on the SOTU Biden looks very capable but at his age of course things can change. Even then, in a primary there would still be more to choose from than Kamala so I wouldn’t get too concerned. Trumpers are just hurting for someone to demagogue.
I don’t think any Democrat could beat any Republican now and I think if Haley can get to the general she will be a formidable candidate. Much of the Republican agenda is very unpopular along with the MAGA personality. I would give Haley a better chance at distancing herself from that than DeSantis and certainly Trump who would be all about that. Haley if course has to get through the Republican primary and that is where I’m not sure her chances are that good.
An interesting, even powerful, “guest essay” about Ms. Haley. For those who have access, the Times also has an extensive article about her filled with various Republicans/conservatives (most, maybe all, the more “normal” version - non-trumpers), several of whom write for the Times, like David Brooks, who give their opinions about Haley’s chances at winning the nomination. Anyway, back to this column: Nikki Haley Threw It All Away Feb. 13, 2023 By Stuart Stevens (Mr. Stevens is a former Republican political consultant who has worked on many campaigns for federal and state office, including the presidential campaigns of Mitt Romney and George W. Bush.) I remember the first time I saw Nikki Haley. It was in a high school gym before the 2012 South Carolina Republican presidential primary. Tim Scott, who was then a congressman, was holding a raucous town hall, and Ms. Haley was there to cheer him on. The first woman to be governor of South Carolina, the first Indian American ever elected to statewide office there, the youngest governor in the country. Whatever that “thing” is that talented politicians possess, Ms. Haley had it. People liked her, and more important, she seemed to like people. She talked with you, not to you, and she made routine conversations feel special and important. She seemed to have unlimited potential. Then she threw it all away. No political figure better illustrates the tragic collapse of the modern Republican Party than Nikki Haley. There was a time not very long ago when she was everything the party thought it needed to win. She was a woman when the party needed more women, a daughter of immigrants when the party needed more immigrants, a young change maker when the party needed younger voters and a symbol of tolerance who took down the Confederate flag when the party needed more people of color and educated suburbanites. When Donald Trump ran in the 2016 Republican primary, Ms. Haley stood next to Senator Marco Rubio, the candidate she had endorsed, and eviscerated Mr. Trump as a racist the party must reject: “I will not stop until we fight a man that chooses not to disavow the K.K.K. That is not a part of our party. That is not who we want as president.” She was courageous, fighting on principle, a warrior who would never back down. Until she did. The politician who saw herself as a role model for women and immigrants transformed herself into everything she claimed to oppose: By 2021, Ms. Haley was openly embracing her inner MAGA with comments like, “Thank goodness for Donald Trump or we never would have gotten Kamala Harris to the border.” In one sentence, she managed to attack women and immigrants while praising the man she had vowed never to stop fighting. She had gone from saying “I have to tell you, Donald Trump is everything I taught my children not to do in kindergarten” to “I don’t want us to go back to the days before Trump.” As a former Republican political operative who worked in South Carolina presidential primaries, I look at Ms. Haley now, as she prepares to launch her own presidential campaign, with sadness tinged with regret for what could have been. But I’m not a bit surprised. Her rise and fall only highlights what many of us already knew: Mr. Trump didn’t change the Republican Party; he revealed it. Ms. Haley, for all her talents, embodies the moral failure of the party in its drive to win at any cost, a drive so ruthless and insistent that it has transformed the G.O.P. into an autocratic movement. It’s not that she has changed positions to suit the political moment or even that she has abandoned beliefs she once claimed to be deeply held. It’s that the 2023 version of Ms. Haley is actively working against the core values that the 2016 Ms. Haley would have held to be the very foundation of her public life. Her defining action as governor was signing legislation removing the Confederate flag from the State Capitol. This came after the horrific massacre at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, and after social media photos surfaced of the murderer holding Confederate flags. Ms. Haley compared the pain Black South Carolinians felt to the pain she experienced when, as a young girl named Nimrata Nikki Randhawa, she saw her immigrant father racially profiled as a potential thief at a store in Columbia. “I remember how bad that felt,” Ms. Haley told CNN in 2015. “That produce stand is still there, and every time I drive by it, I still feel that pain. I realized that that Confederate flag was the same pain that so many people were feeling.” Then came Donald “You had some very fine people on both sides” Trump, and by 2019 Ms. Haley was defending the Confederate flag. In an interview that December, Ms. Haley told the conservative radio host Glenn Beck that the Charleston church shooter had “hijacked” the Confederate flag and that “people saw it as service, sacrifice and heritage.” In her 2019 book, “With All Due Respect,” the sort of autobiography candidates feel obligated to produce before launching a presidential campaign, Ms. Haley mentions Mr. Trump 163 times, overwhelmingly complimentary. In one lengthy passage, she insists that she was not alluding to him in her 2016 Republican response to President Barack Obama’s State of the Union speech, when she called on Americans to resist “the siren call of the angriest voices.” It is always sad to see politicians lack the courage to say what should be said, but sadder still to see them speak up and later argue any courageous intent was misinterpreted. It didn’t have to be this way. No one forced Ms. Haley to accept Mr. Trump after he bragged about assaulting women in the “Access Hollywood” tape. No one forced her to defend the Confederate flag. No one forced her to assert Mr. Trump had “lost any sort of political viability” not long after the Capitol riot, then reverse herself, saying she “would not run if President Trump ran,” then prepare to challenge Mr. Trump for the nomination. There is nothing new or novel about an ambitious politician engaging in transactional politics, but that’s a rare trifecta of flip-flop-flip. Mr. Trump has a pattern of breaking opponents who challenge him in a primary. Ms. Haley enters the race already broken. Had she remained the Nikki Haley who warned her party about Mr. Trump in 2016, she would have been perfectly positioned to run in 2024 as its savior. But as Ms. Haley knows all too well, Republicans aren’t looking to be saved. The latest Morning Consult poll shows Mr. Trump and Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida together drawing 79 percent of Republican primary voters. Ms. Haley is at 3 percent, one percentage point more than Liz Cheney. The female star of the current Republican Party isn’t the daughter of immigrants taking down the Confederate flag. It’s Marjorie Taylor Greene, who sells “Proud Christian Nationalist” T-shirts while becoming arguably the second-most-powerful member of the House in little more than one two-year term. If Mr. Trump wins the Republican nomination (and I think he will), he may well choose the election-denying loser Kari Lake as his running mate, not the woman who twice won governor’s races the old-fashioned way: with the most votes once the ballots were counted. There is a great future behind Nikki Haley. She will never be the voice of truth she briefly was in 2016, and she will never be MAGA enough to satisfy the base of her party. But no one should feel sorry for Ms. Haley. It was her choice. NYTimes.com
Wrong !! re the Dems winning the presidency. Of course until they start delivering the goods to the working class -- not just messaging they won't accomplish much of their messaging. They will use their narrow often vanishing margins in the Congress as a reason to please their donors, but not their average constituent. Judoka you are usually so contented. How is it going at work and home? As a refugee from Wisconsin, Minnesota does get depressing during the winter. Especially in early April.
One can also say the GOP has not changed America but revealed it. Cozying up to dictators to win at any cost has been America's playbook on the world stage for, pretty much ever.* Now Americans are just dealing with this policy turned inward against its own citizenry. Even putting all the oil politics aside, it's not an accident that, for example, decoupling from China has supply chain only moving to other authoritarian, quasi-authoritarian and authoritarian wannabe countries. One would have thought first COVID and then the Russo-Ukraine War would have taught us better. Call me naïve, but I think we can and need to be better than this. Aspirational law like the FCPA should be expanded to labor and environmental abuses and coupled with tariffs to put American labor force back on equal footing, which will in turn address the anger and grievance politics and restore American optimism. *Unless said dictators come for America's lunch /off topic
Haley caught using obscene gesture during meet and greet with supporters -- absolutely disgusting behavior.
Nikki haley was a war monger who supports cuts to Medicare and wants to push for tax cuts on the top income bracket LOL. You think that's a good candidate in the general election? LOL! Trump ended her
From the news reports on the speech (which I didn't hear), it doesn't sound like she was pitching to me. Which is fine. I know there's a whole lot of white voters out there that need to hear that they aren't really racist or whatever, so she's providing a public service.
Y’all support cuts to Medicare and SS? Haley is your gal! https://www.marketwatch.com/amp/sto...-of-whats-causing-government-to-grow-addce22d Nikki Haley says Social Security is ‘the heart of what’s causing government to grow’
I don’t think 2024 is guaranteed for the Democrats but I do think they have a good chance of winning it because the Republican agenda is unpopular and while you might not think so the Democrats have been delivering on their agenda even for the working class. The infrastructure act, the inflation reduction Act, the CHIPS Act and several other pieces of legislation passed are already increasing domestic manufacturing and they will do a lot to things like clean drinking water and other things that will improve lives of working class Americans. I always find it entertaining that being contented is used a perjorative or that I am always contented. Especially funny considering other posters just this past week are painting me as a radical who is slinging juvenile insults. As I said in the other thread I’m not here to meet posters expectations. As for the winter here in MN it’s a pretty mixed bag. We’ve had a roller coaster of temps with it being in the 20’s today while the last few days it was in the upper 30’s and 40’s. We got almost 1” of rain on Valentine’s Day. The harder adjustment has been having spent all of December in NZ, Singapore and Hong Kong. So it’s always hard to deal with Mn winter after that but compare to other MN winters this hasn’t been that bad.
The Republican agenda is unpopular which is a problem all Republicans will have. If it’s not Trump the issue will be how much they can separate from it and at least appear to run to the middle. I think Haley has a better shot of doing that than several other Republicans. In a general election she will likely lean heavily on how she took down the Confederate Flag as governor of SC. She’s also much more charismatic than Kamala Harris and if it’s her versus Biden the age contrast will be stark. I think her getting through the GOP primaries though will be tough for her.
