Is this Nikki Haley's moment?

Opportunity knocks.

(Nikki Haley)

Three new polls out Wednesday paint a clear picture: Nikki Haley is having a moment.

In a new CNN/University of New Hampshire poll, she is up 7% from a July poll in the state — now tied, statistically, with Vivek Ramaswamy and several others for second place (way) behind Donald Trump.

Fox Business polls conducted in Iowa and South Carolina show similar results. In Iowa, Haley has doubled her support and is now solidly in third place behind Trump and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis. In South Carolina, Haley is at 18% — good for second place (way) behind Trump.

This slew of numbers come even as Haley prepares for the second presidential debate next week, another debate where Trump will take a pass — ceding the spotlight to the candidates trying to make up ground on him.

And it follows a star turn for her at the first debate last month, which has goosed Haley’s fundraising and crowds in early states.

This moment, however, puts Haley in a bit of an odd situation. She may be emerging as the queen of the also-rans. But she’s nowhere near Trump, who, more than ever before, looks to be running away with the nomination.

As Dave Weigel put it in a piece headlined “Nikki Haley is riding a charming, focused, and consistent campaign to third place”:

No other candidate in this race has executed an underdog strategy so effectively, with so little deviation from her original plan. Haley has managed to nail her core message — that she’s a fresher, more electable, less erratic alternative to Trump.

At the same time, she appears to have topped out in the high single-digits among Republican voters nationally and in Iowa, and it’s not clear how much more of a constituency is left for her approach.

At the heart of Haley’s recent rise then is a hard-to-answer question: What does she do now?

There are, broadly speaking, three answers to that question.

1. Try to win. In any normal race for president, Haley would turn up the heat on the frontrunner. She would savage him on the campaign trail. Run ads bashing Trump. Go all out to make the case to Republican primary voters that the race’s frontrunner is not the conservative he makes himself out to be. Try to beat him in an early state. All that stuff.

2. Run for vice president. Haley and her team could well make the calculation that Trump is uncatchable in the race. And that launching an all-out assault on him, therefore, would be pointless. Trump has openly speculated — as recently as this past weekend — that picking a female vice presidential nominee intrigues him and, if Haley is seen as the runner up to him in this race, it makes all the sense in the world that he would pick her.

3. Wait for Trump to collapse. This strategy looks a lot like running for vice president. Haley waits in the wings, solidifying her second place status and hopes that Trump’s legal problems badly hamstring his ability to run for president over the next six months. If he falls, she is right there to pick up the pieces.

Judging from how she’s approached the race to date, I think Haley is probably going to choose option 2 (although she would love for option 3 to happen!).

Haley has offered only light criticism of Trump so far in the race — careful not to draw Trump’s ire or attention. In fact, late last month, she said she would still vote for him for president even if he was convicted of a felony! That’s not exactly a sign that Haley is ramping up her criticism of the former president.

The debate will be an interesting test case of where Haley goes from here. While Trump won’t be there, it’s worth watching whether she goes after him in absentia or focuses instead on herself and the other candidates on the stage.

In the first debate, she was slightly more aggressive toward Trump than she had been on the campaign trail. “We have to face the fact that Trump is the most disliked politician in America,” she told the audience. “We can’t win an election that way.”

The problem with that line of attack — if Haley continues it — is that Republican voters don’t agree. In a June Monmouth University poll, 7 in 10 Republicans said Trump was their strongest potential nominee against President Joe Biden.

I think Haley and her team are likely to wind up adopting the long view here. At the moment, she has to be considered the favorite to be Trump’s VP pick. (Although, since this is Trump we are talking about, it’s always tough to predict what he will do.) And, even if she is passed over for that role, Haley — based on the race she has run to date — would have to be considered one of the frontrunners for the 2028 Republican nomination when she will still only be in her mid 50s.

Launching an all-out assault on Trump now would badly jeopardize all of that because neither Trump nor his loyal party base would ever forgive her. And, given Trump’s lead in the Republican field, there’s a very slim chance that even if Haley did take that route that it would work.

So, this is a moment for Haley. But is also one fraught with peril. To reach her ultimate goal, she would have to take a massive swing at Trump, with no certainty of success. And that seems to me a risk bigger than she is willing to take.