The question facing Haley and other traditional Republicans who long for a return to “normal”

Donald Trump (Photo Joe Raedle/Getty Images) and President Joe Biden (Alex Wong/Getty Images.)

American presidential candidates have a predictable and understandable tendency to latch onto words and phrases they hope will resonate with voters. Some work. Most don’t.

Non-incumbents often favor the word “change” or variations on the theme – as in Bill Clinton’s successful use of the “Courage to Change” slogan in 1992 and Barack Obama’s simple slogan, “Hope,” in 2008. George W. Bush had success with his embrace of “Compassionate Conservatism” in 2000.

And Donald Trump’s “Make America Great Again” has become so popular on the far right that it’s given rise to an entire movement known simply by its initials.

However, many challengers – think of George McGovern’s reference to the disaster in Vietnam (“Come Home America”), Walter Mondale’s effort to portray Ronald Reagan as fuzzy-headed ideologue by borrowing from a then-popular TV fast food ad (“Where’s the Beef?”), and Mitt Romney’s bland and mysterious “Believe in America” – have been less successful.

A little over a century ago, Republican Warren Harding won a landslide victory in a nation exhausted by World War I with a promise of “a Return to Normalcy.” And interestingly, it’s an approach that current Republican challenger Nikki Haley seems to have made her campaign theme.

Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley delivers remarks at her primary night rally at the Grappone Conference Center on January 23, 2024, in Concord. (Brandon Bell | Getty Images.)

Haley, who at this point appears to be merely the final speedbump for Trump as he cruises the road to his third consecutive Republican presidential nomination, has taken to calling for a “return to normal” in her speeches in the run-up to yesterday’s Super Tuesday primary. The former South Carolina governor and Trump U.N. Ambassador got some of her biggest cheers this past Saturday in Raleigh when she deployed the phrase and described her longing for a world in which her children could experience the “normal” times she did while being raised in the 1970s and ’80s.

Unfortunately for Haley and her supporters, the challenges she faces in pursuing and effecting such a “return” are big and numerous.

First are the hard numbers. Even before Tuesday’s results, she trailed Trump by almost 6-to-1 in delegates to the Republican convention and polling in most states shows her way behind. As of Saturday, the latest 538 polling average report showed her trailing Trump in North Carolina by a margin of 67% to 22%.

Even more importantly, there is the world we inhabit. Like Trump’s MAGA nonsense, Haley’s kinder and gentler “return to normal” has an obvious appeal to voters old enough to remember the 20th Century and what probably seem to many of them in retrospect like simpler times. But even if she could somehow pull off a massive voter turnaround and wrest the nomination from Trump, the notion that any president can bring back such times (or even that it’s a good idea) is delusional.

In 1972 – Haley’s birth year and the year Joe Biden was first elected to the Senate – the world population was 3.8 billion. Today, it’s more than twice that number. Even more importantly, the strain that 8.1 billion people and their resource consumption are placing on the planet is huge and manifest. It’s desperately important that humans and their governments act immediately and with great urgency to save as much of what we have as possible.

But in her remarks in Raleigh, Haley never mentioned this existential crisis or indeed, the environment at all. Instead, she called for slashing federal taxes on gasoline and diesel fuel.

Neither did she mention all the other ways – on matters of race, human equality and poverty, just to name three obvious ones — in which 1970s America was a decidedly less hospitable place than it is in 2024.

In fairness, there is no doubt more to Haley’s longing for “normal” than a mere rose-colored return to the 1970s. Much of her speech Saturday consisted of a strong rebuke of Trump (whom she referred to as “unhinged”) and the authoritarian movement he represents. And Haley’s attack on Trump’s embrace of Russian dictator Vladimir Putin – whom Haley called a “thug,” a “tyrant” and a “madman” – made clear that she also longs for a time in which the U.S. enjoyed a broad bipartisan agreement when it came to confronting foreign despots.

And so it is that Haley and her supporters – what one might describe as the traditional Republican wing of the Republican Party (the party of Reagan, the Bushes, McCain and Romney) – find themselves in a quandary as the rest of the 2024 political drama plays out.

What has a chance to be more “normal”? A nation led by an aging center-left politician who’s served in Washington for a fifth of the nation’s history (and with whom you disagree on several domestic policy issues), or one that’s led by an “unhinged” one-time president with an open affinity for dictators, revenge and the fundamental altering of America’s identity and place in the world.

Barring some unforeseen event, and whether they like it or not, Haley and her supporters, along with millions of unaffiliated voters, will soon be forced to make that choice. And the decision they make seems likely to play a big role – maybe even a deciding one – in determining the outcome.

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