Nikki Haley Flounders In Iowa Despite Democrats’ Best Efforts To Meddle On Her Behalf
Democrats’ shady efforts to propel Nikki Haley to victory in Iowa’s Republican caucus failed miserably after former President Donald Trump was projected the winner of the contest early Monday evening.
In the days leading up to this week’s caucus, legacy media outlets ran articles suggesting Democrats and left-leaning independents would switch their party registrations to “Republican” in order to vote for the former South Carolina governor. On Saturday, The New York Times noted how these voters seem to be “drawn to Ms. Haley because they see her as a more moderate Republican candidate” and how “some Democratic voters said they preferred her even over Mr. Biden.”
Axios — another left-wing publication — ran a similar article the following day highlighting Democrats’ plans to “crash the state’s Republican caucuses Monday night.” Democrats sought to “become ‘Republicans for a day’ to vote for Nikki Haley — but mostly, against former President Trump,” according to the outlet.
Similarly, in New Hampshire, some operatives are trying to get Democrat-leaning unaffiliated voters to cast their ballots for Haley in the Granite State’s semi-closed primary on Jan. 23. The tactic reflects a strategy Haley herself bragged about when she told reporters last month: “If we get independents, if we get conservative Democrats, that’s what the Republican Party should pursue. Our goal is to get as many people in the tent as we can.”
Flooding a Republican primary with Democrat votes is the same tactic former Rep. Liz Cheney and her backers attempted in an unsuccessful bid to defend her seat in Congress from primary challenger Harriet Hageman in 2022.
Further, tonight’s failed effort to propel Haley forward isn’t the first time Democrats have interfered in Iowa. The Democratic National Committee (DNC) meddled in the 2020 Iowa Democrat caucus, which — “combined with missteps by the state Democratic Party” — resulted in delayed and questionable election results.
A December 2020 audit of the election later found that when “the DNC’s database conversion tool failed to work correctly, it caused the DNC to wrongly stop the [Iowa Democrat Party] from reporting its results, and the IDP’s entire planned reporting process was thrown into disarray.” The DNC’s interference in the process was ultimately determined to be “the catalyst for the resulting chaos in the boiler room and in the IDP’s attempts to manually collect and confirm caucus results by hand.”
“If the DNC had not interjected itself into the results reporting process based on its erroneous data conversion, caucus night could conceivably have proceeded according to the IDP’s initial plan,” the report reads.
While then-candidate Pete Buttigieg was eventually declared the winner, the chaos orchestrated by the DNC and state party angered supporters of Sen. Bernie Sanders, who finished a close second. As The Federalist’s Tristan Justice previously noted at the time, the horribly-run caucus was not the first in which the Vermont senator’s presidential aspirations were seemingly kneecapped by Democrat Party heads. During Iowa’s 2016 Democrat caucus, Sanders was “shorted delegates in areas that favored the Vermont senator over former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.”
Such shady tactics have since continued into 2024 in an obvious attempt to boost President Joe Biden. In February 2023, the DNC passed a new 2024 presidential primary calendar that made South Carolina the first state on the Democrat primary schedule. While Iowa and New Hampshire have historically marked the first electoral contests in the presidential primary process for both major political parties, the DNC’s decision to schedule South Carolina first was, as NBC News described, due to Iowa’s caucuses being viewed as “too white and too undemocratic.”
It’s worth mentioning that Biden — who supported the decision — lost both Iowa and New Hampshire in the 2020 Democrat primary, finishing fourth and fifth, respectively. It was his dominating victory in South Carolina’s primary that put Biden on track to become Democrats’ presidential nominee.
Most recently, the office of New Hampshire’s attorney general issued a cease-and-desist order to the DNC after the organization purportedly violated the state’s voter suppression laws ahead of New Hampshire’s scheduled Jan. 23 primaries.
Shawn Fleetwood is a staff writer for The Federalist and a graduate of the University of Mary Washington. He previously served as a state content writer for Convention of States Action and his work has been featured in numerous outlets, including RealClearPolitics, RealClearHealth, and Conservative Review. Follow him on Twitter @ShawnFleetwood
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