Former United Nations Ambassador Nikki Haley is ready to make the 2024 Republican primary a two-person race between former President Donald Trump and herself.

There is one small problem: Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) is still in the race and finished ahead of her in the Iowa caucuses. 

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Candidates have long claimed there are three tickets out of Iowa. Haley’s version is closer to Eddie Money’s “Two Tickets to Paradise.”

Now Haley is unwilling to appear on a debate stage without Trump, despite having failed to finish ahead of DeSantis.

“We’ve had five great debates in this campaign,” Haley said in a statement as she returned to the campaign trail in New Hampshire. “Unfortunately, Donald Trump has ducked all of them. 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.”

The debates were how Haley broke out from the Republican pack. But her sole one-on-one debate with DeSantis received mixed reviews and was followed by her finishing third in Iowa after the polling averages, including the gold standard Des Moines Register survey, showed her overtaking the Florida governor for second place.

Nevertheless, Haley is better positioned than DeSantis in the upcoming contests. She is reliably running second behind Trump while DeSantis is at 6.5% in the RealClearPolitics polling average, trailing former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, who has already dropped out.

If Haley can gain any momentum from New Hampshire, where independents can vote and boost her candidacy, she has over a month to campaign in her home state of South Carolina. Haley is also in second place, but well ahead of DeSantis, there.

Much of this has little to do with DeSantis at all. Haley is trying to bait Trump into debating her, hoping that if the race goes a month with the two of them having split the first nominating contests it will be difficult for him to avoid the stage.

At the same time, Haley likely needs DeSantis to stay in the race at least through New Hampshire. Many of his voters might otherwise go to Trump in a must-win state after the former president presumably picked up some support from entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy. Haley is set to inherit Christie’s backers

That means if all goes according to plan, Haley will only need to live with the contradiction of having been a third-place candidate in a two-person race for about a week before she should have a better showing to tout in making that case.

Haley did quite a bit better in Iowa than John McCain did in 2000. The late Arizona senator won less than 5% of the vote and finished behind evangelical activist Gary Bauer, but went on to beat George W. Bush by 18 points in New Hampshire. McCain improved in Iowa in 2008, though he still won a lower share of the vote than Haley did on Monday night, and had a closer race in New Hampshire against a former Massachusetts governor but that year went on to clinch the nomination.

But all this means Haley is under pressure to win New Hampshire and South Carolina. DeSantis is remaining in the race in the belief she can at best bat .500 and has a ceiling with non-college primary voters that will keep her from winning the nomination. 

“Haley was right about one thing: This is shaping up to be a two-person race soon enough, it may just take a few more weeks to fully get there,” a DeSantis campaign statement contended on Tuesday.

If the Haley-DeSantis race becomes more acrimonious, the conventional wisdom their voters will eventually join forces to stop Trump may prove mistaken.

Consider DeSantis’s response to the Haley debate news.

“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,” he said in a statement. “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.” 

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A common theme among social media wags was that Haley was calling it a two-race race because she planned to be Trump’s running mate, a bit of speculation she sought to tamp down in the lead-up to Iowa and New Hampshire.

Haley may be ready to move on as if DeSantis has already ended his campaign, but at least for now he and his team have other ideas.