February 26, 2024
Permission to republish original opeds and cartoons granted.
After being crushed in South Carolina by 20 points, Nikki Haley can’t win and she knows it
By Robert Romano
Former President Donald Trump demolished former South Carolina Republican Gov. Nikki Haley in the Feb. 24 South Carolina Republican presidential primary by 20 points, 59.8 percent to 39.5 percent, leaving almost no hope that she could defeat Trump outright for the GOP nomination with Trump leading national and state primary polls by more than 50 points on average.
So far, Trump has swept Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada and South Carolina, a feat never before achieved in a competitive GOP primary. Incumbent presidents running for another term on the other hand do that all the time, owing to their incumbency advantage, which the former president appears to be retaining as he runs for a third time in 2024.
There is also the simple logic that if Haley could not win her home state of South Carolina that she represented for eight years, she cannot win.
At this point, it is entirely possible that Trump sweeps the state primaries completely. The one place he might not win would be something like the March 3 Washington, D.C. primary, which Trump similarly lost in 2016 to Sen. Marco Rubio 37 percent to 14 percent. But would a loss in D.C. really hurt Trump, or solidify the view among GOP voters that once again Trump is running as the outsider while an entrenched Republican establishment based out of the nation’s capital attempts to subvert the will of voters?
Moving forward, there simply does not appear to be any possible path to victory for Haley, with Trump also leading the March 5 Super Tuesday states of Alabama, California, Massachusetts, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Texas and Virginia with massive leads, according to a Jan. 23 to Feb. 4 Morning Consult poll, leading by more than 50 points on average.
And then the states after that look even worse for Haley, with supermajorities in the Morning Consult in every state: Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Louisiana, Michigan, Missouri, New Jersey, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.
Nationally, Trump is leading Haley in the GOP nomination by an average by 62 points, 77 percent to 15 percent, according to latest results from RealClearPolling.com including in subsequent Morning Consult polls that were taken this month. It’s not even close.
All of which has now led the Charles Koch donation network to withdraw financial support from the Haley campaign, with Americans for Prosperity Action CEO Emily Seidel in an internal Feb. 25 email obtained by Politico stating “given the challenges in the primary states ahead, we don’t believe any outside group can make a material difference to widen [Haley’s] path to victory. And so while we will continue to endorse her, we will focus our resources where we can make the difference. And that’s the U.S. Senate and House.”
Leading up to the primary former Gov. Nikki Haley on Feb. 20 stated that she would not leave the race even if she lost her home state: “South Carolina will vote on Saturday. But on Sunday, I’ll still be running for president. I’m not going anywhere.”
That led Americans for Limited Government President Rick Manning, who has endorsed Trump, the same day to renew his call for Haley to drop out of the race, stating, “Nikki Haley says she’s ‘not going anywhere.’ She’s correct. Her campaign for the Republican nomination is dead as GOP voters are overwhelmingly rejecting her.”
It’s hard to find an argument against that. In a competitive primary, by now, a major candidate would have at least a victory or two from the early states to justify their continued position in the race. In 2016, for example, Ted Cruz had won Iowa, while Donald Trump had won New Hampshire and South Carolina, and so the race went on until Trump clinched the nomination.
In fact, no candidate has won in modern history for either party without winning Iowa, New Hampshire or South Carolina, which usually serve the role of winnowing down the field. Haley lost all three. The 2024 GOP nomination appears to be a fait accompli with no candidate able to truly compete against former President Trump. Now, it’s just a matter of time.
Robert Romano is the Vice President of Public Policy at Americans for Limited Government Foundation.
To view online: https://dailytorch.com/2024/02/after-being-crushed-in-south-carolina-by-20-points-nikki-haley-cant-win-and-she-knows-it/
Seth Mandel: How Hamas Hijacked British Democracy
By Seth Mandel
After all the false alarms, the crisis of British democracy is finally here. The cause is not a nebulous concept like “disinformation” or a prime minister getting ousted by her own party in less time than it took a head of lettuce to brown, as was the amusing case with Liz Truss in 2022. The actual democratic process has come under assault, and London is buckling under the pressure.
This all came to a head on Wednesday. Now there is full agreement across the political spectrum on what happened and why. The unanswered question is whether the “Mother of Parliaments,” as England’s contribution to democracy is known, will do anything about it.
On Wednesday, the opposition Scottish National Party put up a resolution calling for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza. Normally, the House of Commons would then vote on it. But the speaker of the House jettisoned the normal process and first allowed the Labour Party to water down the language in the resolution.
Why did the speaker let Labour hijack someone else’s bill? Because, he said, he feared Labour members of parliament would be assassinated by pro-Hamas thugs if they didn’t get the language exactly right.
“I will defend every member in this House. Every member matters to me in this House,” Speaker Lindsay Hoyle explained. “And it has been said, both sides, I never, ever want to go through a situation where I pick up a phone to find a friend of whatever side has been murdered by a terrorist.” Then he referenced a 2017 terror attack on parliament and said: “I also don’t want another attack on this House. I was in the chair on that day. I have seen, I have witnessed.”
The obvious question is: If Labour members thought they’d be in danger for voting against Hamas’s wishes, why wouldn’t they just vote for the SNP ceasefire bill? The answer is that it would embarrass Labour leader Keir Starmer, who has been desperately trying to remove the stain of anti-Semitism left by his predecessor Jeremy Corbyn and didn’t want to see dozens of Labour members vote for the SNP’s anti-Israel resolution. So he convinced the speaker of the House to break tradition and protect Labour by letting them go first.
Chaos ensued. Members of the Tories and SNP walked out. The speaker found himself fighting to keep his job, offering emotional apologies. Prime Minister Rishi Sunak scolded the cowards of the Commons: “I think the important point here is that we should never let extremists intimidate us into changing the way in which Parliament works. Parliament is an important place for us to have these debates. And just because some people may want to stifle that with intimidation or aggressive behavior, we should not bend to that and change how Parliament works. That’s a very slippery slope.”
But a Jewish member of parliament delivered some harsh truths on Thursday. “If we have a rerun of the debate we had yesterday, we will have exactly the same thing happen again, which is that members will not vote with their hearts because they are frightened and they are scared,” Tory MP Andrew Percy said on the House floor. “And what do we expect? For months I’ve been standing up here talking about the people on our streets demanding death to Jews, demanding jihad, demanding intifadas as the police stand by and allow that to happen.”
Percy then called attention to something that had happened the night before, an episode both deeply shameful to Britain and chillingly dystopian. Pro-Hamas protesters projected the genocidal slogan “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” onto parliament’s Elizabeth Tower, better known as Big Ben.
“This is going to continue happening, because we’re not dealing with it,” Percy admonished. “So if we have a rerun of this, can the leader explain to me what will be any different, and how will members vote with their hearts and their consciences? Because too many will not, at the moment, because of the threats we’re receiving—threats like telling us to leave this country, in some of our cases, and telling us that they want us or our families to be subjected to pain and to death.”
MPs facing increased death threats have found their homes targeted by activists. Some have increased their personal security and have been told to stop advertising some of their in-person appearances.
All this while they are violating parliamentary norms and changing their votes out of fear.
In the U.S., legislators act out of fear of losing the support of pro-Hamas voters. In the UK, they vote out of fear of being murdered by the same. British democracy is approaching a truly dark hour.
To view online: https://www.commentary.org/seth-mandel/how-hamas-hijacked-british-democracy/
Urge Nikki Haley To Drop Out Of The Republican Presidential Race!
To view online: https://limitgov.salsalabs.org/urge-nikki-haley-to-drop-out-of-gop-race/index.html