How is Nikki Haley’s path to the GOP nomination like Kevin McCarthy’s removal from the Speakership?

Nikki Haley’s campaign manager released an interested parties memo suggesting that her only path to victory in the GOP presidential primary is through the states with open primaries – those where Independents or Democrats are allowed to vote in the GOP primary. Much has been made of Haley’s New Hampshire coalition relying on a heavy dose of Independents, and the campaign is seeking to assure donors and journalists that NH wasn’t a one-off arrangement. The next state she is competing in, South Carolina,¹ has no party registration and allows anyone to vote in the GOP primary as long as they haven’t previously voted in the Democratic primary. The memo goes on to say that Michigan is also an open primary, and that on Super Tuesday eleven out of sixteen states are open or semi-open. 

This is all true, but it makes the same mistake that pundits made during Kevin McCarthy’s ouster from Congress.

When a small group of Republicans motioned to vacate the chair, centrist pundits far and wide called on Democrats to vote to keep McCarthy. And once McCarthy was kicked out, those same pundits called for Democrats to join a ‘moderate’ faction of Republicans to elect a ‘moderate’ Republican Speaker. In both cases, those pundits misunderstood the role of Speaker and the process of forming a legislative majority.

To become Speaker of the House, in name, you must simply win a majority vote of the full House. But to execute the powers of the Speaker of the House, you must be prepared to win majority votes regularly and repeatedly on issues large and small. Anytime you want to pass a bill, you need a majority of the Rules Committee to vote in favor of the rule to introduce the bill, and then you need a majority of the full House to vote for the rule.² Crucially, you need this majority for every single bill you wish to pass. You don’t become Speaker by winning a single vote, you are Speaker because you can reliably win votes on a regular basis with a stable procedural coalition.  The first sign that McCarthy was going to get pushed out was not when the Motion to Vacate was filed, it was when McCarthy started losing Rules votes. 

If you view the job of being Speaker as assembling a stable procedural coalition, rather than “winning one vote once,” it quickly becomes clear that pundit calls for Democrats to support McCarthy were misguided. Kevin McCarthy’s procedural coalition did not include Democrats – if Democrats had voted against the Motion to Vacate, but then continued voting against him on rules votes and legislative priorities, that does nothing but reinforce the status quo where McCarthy can’t govern. Indeed, every time McCarthy worked with Democrats on bipartisan legislation, it angered the far right and further splintered his governing coalition. Any Democratic votes to support McCarthy would only increase the number of GOP defectors who want to remove McCarthy. The clearest example: the precipitating event that caused Matt Gaetz to file the Motion to Vacate in the first place was McCarthy passing a bipartisan continuing resolution. 

Similarly, any potential McCarthy replacement for Speaker could not rely on Democratic votes to get in office. If they did, they would quickly lose support from Republicans, and find it difficult to rely on Republican votes for their procedural coalition. If you want to become Speaker with a coalition of Democratic and Republican votes, you need to be sure that those votes will be there for you on every procedural vote down the line–and the two parties have sufficiently different legislative priorities that this is broadly impossible in the medium to long term. Even if Democrats threw all of their votes towards, e.g. Don Bacon, he would quickly get kicked out by the rest of the Republican party. 

Let’s return to Nikki Haley. Her campaign’s proposition is that there is a path to the GOP nomination which relies on winning only in open-primary states, using a coalition of Republicans, independents, and anti-Trump Democrats. You can absolutely win one state this way,³ and probably even a couple states.⁴ But eventually, to become the Republican nominee for president, you need to win a majority of Republican voters in a lot of different states. Independents and Democrats who crossed over in New Hampshire are doing the noble thing to try to deny Trump the nomination. But at the end of the day, the Republican nomination for president will be decided by Republicans. And when Nikki Haley’s campaign explicitly says that their path is based on Independent and Democratic support, they will alienate Republican voters, in the same way that McCarthy’s bipartisan continuing resolution alienated Republican Members of Congress. I would not be surprised if in the coming days, Trump makes this connection explicit and campaigns on Nikki Haley’s reliance on Democratic support. And I would be shocked if it wasn’t effective at swaying GOP primary voters away from her.

If you want to be the Republican nominee for president, you need to be able to win closed Republican primaries.

1. Haley is inexplicably skipping the Nevada caucuses.

2. Legislation can also be moved under suspension of the rules, which has historically been used for noncontroversial bills and requires a 2/3 vote. Congressional procedure is complicated and this section oversimplifies things, but is directionally correct. A Speaker without a procedural coalition who will vote with him on Rules votes is doomed.

3. She has not yet.

4. She probably won’t.