Nikki Haley will lose the 2024 Republican presidential primary. Every candidate who ran against former president Donald Trump faced a nearly impossible task—and Haley made it worse for herself by taking one of the least popular positions in American politics: raising the retirement age.
Haley, whom the mainstream media and establishmentarians, including New Hampshire Gov. Chris Sununu, tried pitching to us as a serious contender, finished third in the Iowa Caucuses. The smart money says she’ll lose every state, including New Hampshire, where she’s invested heavily, and her home state of South Carolina.
Haley has many flaws as a candidate. She governed South Carolina, which ranks poorly on issues like crime, education, and economic opportunity. She’s a foreign policy hawk who formerly was on the Board of Directors at Boeing, one of the largest defense contractors in America. Her obsession with foreign countries fails to resonate with voters concerned with domestic issues, especially since she failed her Ukranian geography quiz at a presidential debate. Combine that with how she wants to raise the retirement age to 70 for younger Americans, and you have a losing candidate.
Only 10 percent of Americans support raising the Social Security age to 70, according to a 2023 Associated Press poll, while 15 percent support raising the Medicare eligibility age to 67. If the poll asked about raising the Medicare age to 70, my guess is support would have dropped to 10 percent.
Taking such an unpopular position in the race makes Haley an extreme candidate. Even other awful positions that most politicians would never dare say publicly are far more palatable to millions of Americans than this garbage.
In December 2015, then-candidate Trump said he wanted a "total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States." It was discriminatory and an unconstitutional position, but 36% of Americans agreed with him (58 percent, including me, opposed). This never happened, but a lot more Americans saw this as preferable to raising the retirement age.
You could get far more Americans to take blatantly white nationalist positions than you could in favor of raising the retirement age. A 2019 Pew Research poll showed that 38 percent of Americans said the country becoming majority non-white will weaken American culture, and a 2021 Pew poll found that 22 percent saw the declining share of white Americans as bad for society. I disagree with white majoritarianism. White liberals are the bane of my existence in Massachusetts, but more Americans embrace that wrong-headed ideology than support entitlement reform.
Telling young Americans they’ll have to pay more taxes in their lifetimes to receive less in return doesn’t win voters. Social Security and Medicare are the perfect place for politicians to embrace the tax-the-rich ideology, given the regressiveness of the FICA tax. Most Americans pay more in payroll tax than income tax, but income over $168,600 faces no FICA tax. The right will never win this issue by making working people suffer.
Trump's base is older voters, not the ones for whom Haley wants to cut benefits. Instead of appealing to those younger voters, she’s running on punching them in the face. Since Bernie Sanders appealed to many by promising he’d use the government to improve their lives, it’s hard to see how Haley can court them by doing the opposite. I doubt it’ll work in New Hampshire, home to many college students, or any other state.
Political positions aside, the biggest problem GOP presidential candidates faced is that Republicans still like Trump, even if they dislike his tendency to say stupid, crazy, and false stuff. He’s still the guy who presided over a strong stock market, cut taxes, gutted some of the worst aspects of Obamacare, built hundreds of miles of border wall, enacted a public charge rule on immigration, kept the country out of any new foreign wars, and put justices on the Supreme Court who overturned Roe v. Wade and race-based affirmative action in college admissions.
The Trump presidency had many disappointments—he made policy mistakes—but one can see why Republicans like him. Trump also mocks the liberal politicians we despise, like Elizabeth Warren, making him even better. Let's see Nikki Haley make a Pocahontas reference.