The numbers from the Iowa caucus certainly seem like Donald Trump is in the driver’s seat at the moment when it comes to getting the Republican nomination for president.

The final tally had Trump sitting on top at 51%, with DeSantis in second at 21% and Haley in third at 19%. Which makes Nikki Haley’s comments on Monday night even weirder.

And yes, she is looking at the New Hampshire numbers and making some broad assumptions about her standing in that state, and in South Carolina, where she was once governor. And yes, the current poll numbers reflect that Haley has mounted a challenge to Donald Trump in New Hampshire and tied him in the polls.

DDHQ Poll Alert: 2024 Republican Primary (New Hampshire)

Trump: 40%
Haley: 40%
DeSantis: 4%
Ramaswamy: 4%

American Research Group / 600 LV / Jan 12-15

Trump leads Haley by 8.0% in an average based on 43 polls surveying the race in New Hampshire.

More: https://t.co/OGjC4arYbV

— Decision Desk HQ (@DecisionDeskHQ) January 16, 2024

But given Trump’s commanding lead in South Carolina up until now, Nikki Haley cannot just slack off and consider herself number two in the race. She’s committed enough faux pas during the course of this campaign that no Republican pollster would want to lay odds on her managing to not eat her foot in an unforced error again. Which is probably why Haley is ducking out of her previous committment to a Republican New Hampshire debate that ABC was going to host. The network has now canceled the debate, since Ron DeSantis was the only candidate still committed to showing up.

“We’ve had five great debates in this campaign. Unfortunately, Donald Trump has ducked all of them,” Haley said in a statement. “He has nowhere left to hide. The next debate I do will either be with Donald Trump or with Joe Biden. I look forward to it.”

Haley faced off in a head-to-head debate against DeSantis ahead of the Iowa caucuses. A Daily Mail poll conducted by J.L. Partners found that 55% of viewers said that DeSantis won, while 31% said that Haley won.

The Florida governor criticized Haley over her decision to skip the debate, which had been scheduled for Thursday.

“Nikki Haley is afraid to debate because she doesn’t want to answer the tough questions such as how she got rich off Boeing after giving them millions in taxpayer handouts as governor of South Carolina,” DeSantis wrote on X. “The reality is that she is not running for the nomination, she’s running to be Trump’s VP. I won’t snub New Hampshire voters like both Nikki Haley and Donald Trump, and plan to honor my commitments. I look forward to debating two empty podiums in the Granite State this week.”

I’m the only one who’s not running a basement campaign at this point.

You deserve to have the candidates come up and answer your questions in forums like this. pic.twitter.com/Nc46nrxqaU

— Ron DeSantis (@RonDeSantis) January 17, 2024

Well, now the debate is off, and I hate to break it to Nikki Haley, but Joe Biden isn’t going to debate her. Not just because she is unlikely to beat Trump for the Republican nomination, but because Joe Biden has no brain cells left to rub together to fire off a neuron, and he’s just as likely to try and sniff Nikki Haley as he is to debate her. In fact, Biden won’t be debating Trump, either. His campaign will probably say something like “we don’t want Biden debating someone under criminal indictment” or something like that, but the fact is that everyone knows that Joe Biden would get squashed like a bug during an actual debate. His campaign won’t even let him debate fellow Democrats, much less Donald Trump, who would literally be running laps around Grandpa Brandon.

So, why are Ron DeSantis and Nikki Haley still staying in the race? Well, because in the words of the late Donald Rumsfeld, we have the known knowns, the known unknowns, and the unknown unknowns.

The known knowns right now include the fact that Haley at least looks competitive on paper with Donald Trump in New Hampshire. If she makes the race a tight one, or wins in the state, then all eyes will shift to South Carolina. DeSantis has to stay in the race and take Haley on for his own political future. His role as Florida’s governor is secure, but if he is serious about positioning himself for 2028, then DeSantis must challenge Haley in states that are not New Hampshire in order to keep second place. DeSantis will not be Trump’s vice president, and if he makes life hard enough for Nikki Haley, then her only option moving forward might be to hope that Trump taps her as vice president.

The known unknowns involve the Trump legal cases. Right now, we have no idea how the Fani Willis drama will shake up the Georgia RICO case. The special prosecutor, Jack Smith, was denied a fast-track ruling by the Supreme Court, which now slows, or stalls out, the federal case in Washington D.C. If Donald Trump is convicted, will that affect his poll numbers in swing states or nationally? It’s not affecting his numbers for the Republican nomination, but if a conviction tanks his numbers nationally, both DeSantis and Haley want to be the next person up.

And then there are the unknown unknowns. We have zero idea about Trump’s current state of health, or what threats there are against him, or if the incredibly thin legal theories will actually keep him off state ballots. No one can predict a “black swan event,” and if one occurs, then the Republican Party will need a contingency plan. We also don’t know if Joe Biden is going to live through November. One false step on a flight of stairs, and Kamala Harris is taking the oath of office – and that creates an entirely new situation for the Republican Party. I am sure that the DeSantis and Haley camps are considering all of the unknown unknowns. After all, a “black swan event” derailed the 2020 election. Without COVID, it’s likely that Donald Trump would have easily cruised to victory on the strength of the economy and the stability of his foreign policy. And no one could have predicted that a pandemic would throw the entire world into chaos in January of 2020.

By the numbers, the Republican primary looks to be close to over. But if 2020 taught us nothing, it should have warned us off of counting our chickens before they hatch. Team Trump might feel like they are cruising to victory, but they – and everyone else – need to keep those unknown unknowns in mind.

Featured image: Donald Trump and Nikki Haley in 2018 at the United Nations, Official White House Photo by Shealah Craighead, cropped, public domain