Iowa and New Hampshire have exposed the pathologies of Republican voters.
NIKKI HALEY HAS NOW BEATEN DONALD TRUMP TWICE, in Iowa and New Hampshire, among two groups of voters who, in a saner world, would be deciding the Republican presidential nomination. The first group is Republican primary and caucus voters who acknowledge that Trump legitimately lost the 2020 presidential election. The second group, which overlaps with the first, is Republican primary and caucus voters who accept that if Trump were to be convicted of a crime, he would be unfit to serve as president.
Haley’s problem—and the problem for her party, our country, and the world—is that neither of these groups represents a majority of Republicans or Republican primary voters. Most rank-and-file Republicans deny the results of the 2020 election and are willing to support a convicted criminal for president. The Republican electorate is deeply pathological. And Haley’s losses to Trump are a measure of that pathology.
NOBODY SHOULD MAKE EXCUSES for Haley’s defeats. This is the party she chose to run in, and—like Trump in 2020—she lost fair and square. But what’s happening to her is less important than what’s happening to her party. One after another, candidates who stood for any semblance of decency, honesty, or acceptance of reality—Mike Pence, Asa Hutchinson, Chris Christie—have been forced out. They’re gone because, as Christie put it on a hot mic two weeks ago, Republican voters “don’t want to hear it. We know we’re right, but they don’t want to hear it.”
Haley will be the next to go. The Republican primaries have become a test not of the candidates, but of the sanity of the Republican electorate. And sanity is losing.