Haley’s Double-Edged Sword, The Inevitable & Another County in Florida Flipped - Top 3 Takeaways – January 23rd, 2024
- The double-edged sword. It’s gotten late early in the Republican primary competition as the field of Republican candidates is down to just two as the first primary of the season takes place in New Hampshire today. While Governor DeSantis said his second-place finish in the Iowa caucus “punched his ticket” to New Hampshire, as it turned out...it didn’t. Instead, it only punched a ticket to South Carolina for a few days in route to coming back home to Florida. DeSantis endorsed Trump, Trump then retired the nickname “DeSanctimonious” (as he’d done previously with “Little Marco" and "Lyin’ Ted") and looked ahead to deliver a potential knockout blow to Nikki Haley, perhaps as soon as tonight, in the New Hampshire primary. Haley got what she wanted, which was a two-person race, but therein lies the double-edged sword. Haley was and is right about one thing. There’s only room for one non-Trump candidate in the race, if anyone other than the former and perhaps future President of the United States has any shot at winning. And it’s important for Haley that it happened quickly, with only one state having voted prior to the head-to-head matchup taking shape. However, while Haley wanted a two-person race and in terms of accumulating delegates she needed, it could ironically have snuffed out whatever chance she might have had to pull out an unlikely win in New Hampshire. DeSantis hadn’t polled with much support in New Hampshire (or just about anywhere else for that matter), but for the supporters he had, they’ll now break by a greater two-to one margin for Donald Trump. The most recent polling out of New Hampshire, just prior to DeSantis’ exit from the race, found that 62% of DeSantis’ supporters would back Trump if DeSantis wasn’t an option, with only 30% backing Haley. And the first post-DeSantis poll out of New Hampshire, with only Trump and Haley in the mix reflects this. Trump’s lead over Haley grew from an average of 15 points with DeSantis in the mix to a commanding 27-point advantage without him in the mix. New Hampshire has consistently been the state Haley has polled the best in. Should the polls prove close to being true, Haley would have gotten what she wanted with DeSantis dropping out, but in reality, is worse off for him having done so. The irony of ironies is that DeSantis’ dropout just might be what Trump needed to knock Nikki out. That could effectively happen tonight should Trump dominate Nikki Haley in her best performing state. Going head-to-head with the 800-pound gorilla may sound best in theory, but when there’s no one else to distract the gorilla from you...be careful what you wish for. It’s a double-edged sword.
- The inevitable. Wall Street opposition to Trump collapses, as ‘pipe dream’ of primary defeat ends. Last Friday, one of my top takeaways, along with the greatest speech ever delivered – which took place at the WEF, focused on a CNBC article reporting on the dominant conversation among the often-creepy elites at the World Economic Forum. It was evidently all Trump all of the time and most specifically a belief that he wouldn’t just win the Republican primary for president but that he would win the presidency back from Joe Biden in November...oh and that many execs weren’t “concerned”. In fact, again to the seeming surprise of the reporters, many seemed to want it to happen. Imagine that. Anyway, as factions of the often godless, soulless and slanderous news media are starting to come to the realization that Donald Trump may become president again because it’s possible that most people want him to be president again, there was another CNBC article about the mood of America’s top corporate execs on Monday that should come as a welcome bit of news to many about the role that companies are intending to play politically this year in the election process. None. At least publicly. In the article entitled Wall Street opposition to Trump collapses it’s stated that... Many Wall Street executives have made a calculated decision not to speak out against Donald Trump, and in some cases they will consider supporting the Republican former president. This view reflects one shared by large portions of Wall Street, who are scrambling to come to grips with the idea that Trump is the likely GOP nominee for president and he could beat Biden in November. This story is relevant for two reasons. The first is in terms of financial support. In the 2020 election Joe Biden’s campaign took in a record $74 million from corporate America and its executives which dwarfed like contributions to the Trump campaign. It seems that the tide is set to change. But what it also represents is something even bigger. For years we’ve seen woke corporate sellouts push radical leftist social agendas. Nowhere has that battle been more visible than in Florida with Disney. What the latest CNBC story suggests is that companies and their executives appear to finally be backing away from them in preparation for a second Trump presidency. Maybe just maybe all lives will matter, men pretending to be women won’t be celebrated, the homosexual alphabet will stop growing, June won’t be quite as queer, and ESG will be DIA. Even just a couple of those would be significant progress.
- And then there were 11. Florida’s political transformation from a swing state into a red state isn’t entirely complete...but it’s one county closer. For all intents and purposes, it appears as though Florida has become a red state politically, but what about literally? The Florida Division of Elections dropped the updated voter registration information statewide reflecting the final total for 2023 and there were two bombshells in the report. The first, was that Florida’s Democrats lost over 566,000 registered voters, including nearly a hundred thousand in Florida in December alone. The second, was that in the process of the mass Democrat defections from Florida’s voter rolls, St. Lucie County flipped. For the first time in St. Lucie’s history, it is now a Republican majority county leaving only eleven Democrat majority counties in Florida. And while we wait and watch what will be in this presidential election year, should the trend hold, there could be more before Election Day.