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Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis has blanketed Iowa at the expense of all other early-voting states in a Hail Mary bid to keep his campaign alive against prohibitive front-runner and former President Donald Trump.
Now he faces a surging Nikki Haley, who could steal second place from him in the Iowa caucuses on Monday and potentially force him out of the race.
The two candidates are statistically tied. Polling averages show Ms. Haley with 16.3% of the vote, a slight edge over Mr. DeSantis’ 16%. Ms. Haley, a former governor of South Carolina and Mr. Trump’s ambassador to the United Nations, has undoubtedly been helped by a late spending binge on advertising in Iowa.
In the Republican presidential debate Wednesday, Mr. DeSantis is poised to attack Ms. Haley on a handful of issues that he hopes will diminish her in the eyes of Iowa voters and help him remain the leading alternative to Mr. Trump.
These are Mr. DeSantis’ expected five lines of attack:
Inspired by Hillary
Ms. Haley said it, and Mr. DeSantis has repeatedly attacked her over her comments in interviews, including with The New York Times, crediting Hillary Clinton as the inspiration for her entry into politics.
“The reason I actually ran for office is because of Hillary Clinton,” Ms. Haley said in 2012. “She said that when it comes to women running for office, there will be everybody that tells you why you shouldn’t but that’s all the reasons why we need you to do it, and I walked out of there thinking, ‘That’s it. I’m running for office.’”
During an Iowa town hall event aired Monday on Fox News, Ms. Haley accused Mr. DeSantis of “lying because he’s losing.”
Ms. Haley said she “never said Hillary Clinton was an inspiration,” as Mr. DeSantis has repeatedly claimed, but Mrs. Clinton was one of the women in politics she observed when she “was looking to run” for office.
Flip-flopping and the Civil War
Raising taxes after promising she wouldn’t, breaking her pledge not to run for president against Mr. Trump, and awkward comments leaving slavery out of the Civil War have landed Ms. Haley in trouble with voters, many of whom back Mr. Trump.
Mr. DeSantis is sure to expose those weaknesses on the debate stage.
He recently told an Iowa town hall that Ms. Haley’s response to a question about the cause of the Civil War was “a word salad.” She avoided citing slavery as the reason behind the Civil War but tried to clarify her remarks the next day on a New Hampshire radio show.
Ms. Haley explained another flip-flop to Fox News on Monday: She abandoned her pledge not to run against Mr. Trump because of the disastrous U.S. military withdrawal from Afghanistan and other Biden failures.
“When I said that I would never run against him, we hadn’t had the debacle in Afghanistan, we hadn’t had inflation go through the roof, and we didn’t lose the midterms by ridiculous numbers,” Ms. Haley said.
As for Ms. Haley’s flip-flop, she first opposed a state gas tax as South Carolina’s governor from 2011 to 2017 but later supported a tax. Ms. Haley disputes the premise of the claim because she conditioned her support on a 2% cut in the state income tax.
China
Mr. DeSantis has targeted Ms. Haley, who campaigns as a China hawk, over her recruitment and support of Chinese businesses as South Carolina governor, including a fiberglass company affiliated with the Chinese Communist Party.
New Hampshire vs. Iowa
Mr. DeSantis is unlikely to resist a jab about Ms. Haley’s stinging comments about Iowa voters.
Campaigning in New Hampshire last week as a strong second-place Republican candidate, she told voters in the first-in-the-nation primary, a week after the Iowa caucuses, “You know Iowa starts it. You know that you correct it.”
Popular Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds, who endorsed Mr. DeSantis, responded by saying, “I trust Iowans to make their own decisions. No ‘corrections’ needed.”
Bathroom bills and transgender children
Parental rights and education are top concerns among Iowa’s Republican caucusgoers and leave Ms. Haley vulnerable to attacks for her refusal to sign a bill as governor that would ban biological boys who identify as transgender from using girls’ bathrooms.
Mr. DeSantis signed such a bill in May as part of a package of measures combating transgender treatments for children and teaching LGBTQ issues in Florida’s public schools.
Ms. Haley has defended her 2016 decision and said she avoided signing the bill because only a few children were affected, but now “the issue has exploded.”
Ms. Haley has spoken about protecting women’s sports and opposing participation by men identifying as women. She told voters in the December debate, “I will do everything I can to stop that because it’s the women’s issue of our time.”
• Susan Ferrechio can be reached at sferrechio@washingtontimes.com.
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