A CBS News survey released on Sunday indicated that Haley was a stronger potential challenger to Biden than Trump at this stage of the race. She held an 8-point advantage over the incumbent president in a hypothetical match-up, 53 per cent to 45 per cent, while DeSantis had a 3-point lead over Biden and Trump a 2-point edge.

For public consumption, at least, Democrats stick with the we’ll-beat-anyone, they’re-all-tainted-by-Trump line, and the Democratic National Committee began laying the groundwork by regularly attacking her and other GOP alternatives to Trump since the 2022 midterm elections.

“We’ll be ready for Donald Trump or whatever MAGA extremist stumbles out of this process,” Ammar Moussa, a Biden campaign spokesperson, said on Tuesday.

In private, however, some Democrats agree that Haley would be harder to defeat yet express far less fear about her winning than Trump, who has talked about being a dictator for 24 hours and using his office to exact retribution against his enemies.

“Most Democrats I know are frankly terrified at the prospect of another Trump presidency and that’s why you’ve seen President Biden and his team repeatedly highlight how dangerous a second Trump term would be,” said Lis Smith, a senior adviser to Pete Buttigieg during the 2020 Democratic primary campaign. “Haley might be polling better now, but her numbers would come down to earth when voters learn more about her positions and across-the-board support for the GOP’s most unpopular policies.”

Democrats have tried before to game out which Republican candidates might be easier to beat in the northern autumn; an exercise pitting pragmatism against principle. In 2022, some Democrats promoted far-right allies of Trump in GOP primaries on the assumption that they would be easier to defeat in a general election, even though they had been excoriating just such candidates as dangerous to democracy.

Democrats are not repeating that sort of intervention at the presidential level this year. “If anyone is rooting for Trump, that’s nuts,” said Faiz Shakir, a senior adviser to Senator Bernie Sanders, the democratic socialist from Vermont who ran for president in 2016 and 2020. “Careful what you wish for. He undoubtedly drives enthusiasm in the electorate, which makes concerns about turnout for Biden critical.”

Tim Miller, a former Republican strategist who has become one of his party’s most vocal opponents of Trump, said Democrats should not fool themselves into thinking they will not face him again. “Dem strategists and journalists can play parlour games about the GOP process all they want, but the only meaningful question for the Democrats is how to wage a campaign against the dangerous candidate their opponents are preparing to nominate,” he said.

Unlike in 2016, Democrats can hardly say they did not see Trump coming. “Team Clinton missed the moment to understand that a populist movement from the left or right made up mainly on loose facts, grievances and white nationalism would not be corrected simply at the ballot box,” said Donna Brazile, who headed the Democratic National Committee that year. “But this is different,” she added. The movement has mushroomed “into a big cultural war with only two sides: You are either for Trump or against him. There is no middle ground”.

Biden has acted as if he fully expects to face Trump again and made clear he is motivated by a singular desire to vanquish his 2020 opponent all over again. He recently told reporters that he might not have run for a second term if Trump were not trying to make a comeback.

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But Biden has also taken swipes at Haley, as he did during a speech in her home state of South Carolina last week when he mocked her for initially declining to say that slavery was the cause of the Civil War when asked at one of her campaign town hall meetings.

Mo Elleithee, a former Democratic strategist now serving as executive director of the Georgetown Institute of Politics and Public Service, said it would be folly to try to predict which Republican would be better for Democrats. “The polarisation in our politics means it’s going to be close no matter what,” he said. “Stop trying to game out who you want to campaign against, and start focusing on the guy you’re campaigning for. The stakes will be high no matter what.”