Interesting column from EJ Dionne:
Is the Republican Party irrevocably committed to Donald Trump? GOP voters will begin to answer this consequential question in Iowa on Monday and eight days later in New Hampshire. Believe it or not, there is a chance the verdict will be no.
This is not one of those defy-the-conventional-wisdom-for-the-heck-of-it takes. You can’t look at polls outside New Hampshire and pretend the Las Vegas odds-makers are wrong in viewing Trump as the overwhelming favorite to win the Republican nomination.
But there is a difference between likelihood and inevitability, just as there is a difference between the few Republicans who are firmly anti-Trump and a larger group willing to ponder escorting him off the national stage.
The candidate who has understood these distinctions best is former U.N. ambassador Nikki Haley. This is why she is poised to run second to Trump in Iowa and has a real chance of beating him in New Hampshire. Trump’s campaign clearly sees the threat and has moved from attacking Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis to assailing her.
Republican pollster Kristen Soltis Anderson offered a shrewd and appropriately tentative reading of the party’s electorate: “There’s not an anti-Trump majority,” she told me. “But it might be possible to build a Beyond Trump Majority.”
The decisive GOP group, she said, are voters who “say there are things they like about Trump, and things they don’t like about Trump.” Some, maybe many, will vote for him anyway because they “harbor the hope that they can get good Trump and bad Trump will go away.” But others are persuadable because “bad Trump” still troubles them.
The same polling showing Trump with a strong lead in Iowa also offered glimmers of the ambivalence about him. A December CBS News-YouGov poll found that found that 76 percent of likely caucus-goers were considering voting for Trump for a variety of reasons, including — by big margins — that they felt “things were better under Trump” and that “he represents Iowa values.”
But only 54 percent said their support reflected a desire “to show support for his legal fights,” and just 40 percent said they backed him because they “want payback for 2020.” In other words, about half of Trump’s potential voters rejected two of the core rationales he offers for his candidacy.
Unlike DeSantis, who ran, in the words of Iowa State University political scientist David Peterson, as “diet Trump,” Haley realized there was a market for a Republican candidate who was stylistically different from Trump, could draw more middle-of-the-road voters in November and move the country past the “chaos” of the Trump era.
But unlike former New Jersey governor Chris Christie, whose frontal attacks on Trump endeared him to many Democrats and the relatively small constituency of anti-Trumpers in the party, Haley knew she couldn’t ask Republicans who had voted for Trump twice to admit they were wrong. “She has managed to walk a fine line,” Republican pollster Whit Ayres told me. “She avoided the Chris Christie message that Trump is unfit for office while at the same time making a case that it’s time to move on."
https://wapo.st/48z4F2Z
