The GOP Civil War Deepens

Koch Network Endorses Nikki Haley in Bid to Push G.O.P. Past Trump

The New York Times

The political network founded by the Koch brothers is endorsing Nikki Haley in the Republican presidential primary race, giving her organizational muscle and financial heft as she battles Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida for second place in Iowa.

The group announced its plans in a memo on Tuesday.

The commitment by the network, Americans for Prosperity Action, bolsters Ms. Haley as the campaign enters the final seven weeks before the first nominating contest. Since the first Republican primary debate, Ms. Haley has steadily climbed in polls, and is closely competing with Mr. DeSantis for the second-place slot in Iowa. Former President Donald J. Trump remains the dominant front-runner in the race.

Ms. Haley, who has described Mr. Trump’s time as past, has gained support from donors and her candidacy has received approval from elite opinion-makers, many of whom describe her as the best alternative to Mr. Trump.

But Ms. Haley’s campaign does not have the organizational strength that Mr. DeSantis does, thanks to work the super PAC affiliated with his campaign has been doing for much of the year.

The endorsement from the super PAC established by David and Charles Koch could help change that. It will give her access to a direct-mail operation, field workers to knock on doors and people making phone calls to prospective voters in Iowa and beyond. The group also has money to spend on television advertisements.

It also helps fuel Ms. Haley’s momentum heading into the final weeks before voting begins.

Americans for Prosperity Action has been among the country’s largest spenders on anti-Trump material this year, buying online ads and sending mailers to voters in a number of states, including Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina. All told, the group has spent more than $9 million in independent expenditures opposing Mr. Trump.

One mailer in Iowa, paid for by AFP Action, shows images of Mr. Trump and Mr. Biden and reads, “You can stop Biden…by letting go of Trump.”

But so far none of that spending has benefited any of his rivals, who have been busily battling each other.

The Koch network is well financed, raising more than $70 million for political races as of this summer.

The group has been committed to opposing Mr. Trump’s return as leader of the Republican Party. In a February 2023 memo, Emily Seidel, the president of Americans for Prosperity, wrote, “We need to turn the page on the past. So the best thing for the country would be to have a president in 2025 who represents a new chapter.”

But Here’s The Deal;

Nikki Haley Is Coming for Your Retirement

By Paul Krugman

Opinion Columnist

It feels like years ago, but actually only a few months have passed since many big Republican donors seemed to believe that Ron DeSantis could effectively challenge Donald Trump for the Republican nomination. It has been an edifying spectacle — an object lesson in the reality that great wealth need not be associated with good judgment, about politics or anything else.

At this point, both conventional wisdom and prediction markets say that Trump has a virtual lock on the nomination. But Wall Street isn’t completely resigned to Trump’s inevitability; there has been a late surge in big-money support for Nikki Haley, the former governor of South Carolina. And there is, to be fair, still a chance that Trump — who is facing many criminal charges and whose public rants have become utterly unhinged — will manage to crash and burn before securing the nomination.

So it seems worth looking at what Haley stands for.

From a political point of view, one answer might be: nothing. A recent Times profile described her as having “an ability to calibrate her message to the moment.” A less euphemistic way to put this is that she seems willing to say whatever might work to her political advantage. “Flip-flopping” doesn’t really convey the sheer cynicism with which she has shifted her rhetoric and changed her positions on everything from abortion rights to immigration to whether it’s OK to try overturning a national election.

And anyone hoping that she would govern as a moderate if she should somehow make it to the White House is surely delusional. Haley has never really shown a willingness to stand up to Republican extremists — and at this point the whole G.O.P. has been taken over by extremists.

That said, Haley has shown some consistency on issues of economic and fiscal policy. And what you should know is that her positions on these issues are pretty far to the right. In particular, she seems exceptionally explicit, even among would-be Republican nominees, in calling for an increase in the age at which Americans become eligible for Social Security — a bad idea that seems to be experiencing a revival.

So let’s talk about Social Security.

The first thing you should know about Social Security is that the actual numbers don’t justify the apocalyptic rhetoric one often hears, not just from the right but from self-proclaimed centrists who want to sound serious. No, the exhaustion of the system’s trust fund, currently projected to occur in roughly a decade, wouldn’t mean that benefits disappear.

It would mean that the system would need additional revenue to continue paying scheduled benefits in full. But the extra revenue required would be smaller than you probably think. The most recent long-term projections from the Congressional Budget Office show Social Security outlays rising to 6.2 percent of gross domestic product in 2053 from 5.1 percent this year, not exactly an earth-shattering increase.

It’s true that the budget office projects a much bigger rise in spending on Medicare and other major health programs. But much of this projected rise reflects the assumption that medical costs will rise much faster than economic growth, which has been true in the past but need not be true in the future. Indeed, since 2010, Medicare spending has been far less than expected. And there is every reason to believe that smart policies could further curb health care costs, given how much more America spends than other wealthy nations.

Still, Social Security does face a funding gap. How should it be closed?

Anyone who says, as Haley does, that the retirement age should rise in line with increasing life expectancy is being oblivious, perhaps willfully, to the grim inequality of modern America. Until Covid struck, average life expectancy at 65, the relevant number, was indeed rising. But these gains were concentrated among Americans with relatively high incomes. Less affluent Americans — those who depend most on Social Security — have seen little rise in life expectancy, and in some cases actual declines.

So anyone invoking rising life expectancy as a reason to delay Social Security benefits is, in effect, saying that aging janitors must keep working (or be cast into extreme poverty) because bankers are living longer.

How, then, should the Social Security gap be closed? The obvious answer — which happens to be favored by a majority of voters — is to raise more revenue. Remember, America collects less revenue as a percentage of G.D.P. than almost any other advanced economy.

But Haley, of course, wants to cut income taxes.

On social issues and the fate of democracy, she appears to be a pure weather vane, turning with the political winds. On fiscal and economic policy, she’s a hard-right advocate of tax cuts for the rich and benefit cuts for the working class. If calling someone a “populist” has any meaning these days, she’s the exact opposite.