Might a silent majority be ready to move beyond Trump?

But there is a difference between likelihood and inevitability, just as there is a difference between the few Republicans who are firmly anti-Trump and a larger group willing to ponder escorting him off the national stage.

The candidate who has understood these distinctions best is former U.N. ambassador Nikki Haley. This is why she is poised to run second to Trump in Iowa and has a real chance of beating him in New Hampshire. Trump’s campaign clearly sees the threat and has moved from attacking Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis to assailing her.

Republican pollster Kristen Soltis Anderson offered a shrewd and appropriately tentative reading of the party’s electorate: “There’s not an anti-Trump majority,” she told me. “But it might be possible to build a Beyond Trump Majority.”

The decisive GOP group, she said, are voters who “say there are things they like about Trump, and things they don’t like about Trump.” Some, maybe many, will vote for him anyway because they “harbor the hope that they can get good Trump and bad Trump will go away.” But others are persuadable because “bad Trump” still troubles them.

The same polling showing Trump with a strong lead in Iowa also offered glimmers of the ambivalence about him. A December CBS News-YouGov poll found that found that 76 percent of likely caucus-goers were considering voting for Trump for a variety of reasons, including — by big margins — that they felt “things were better under Trump” and that “he represents Iowa values.”

But only 54 percent said their support reflected a desire “to show support for his legal fights,” and just 40 percent said they backed him because they “want payback for 2020.” In other words, about half of Trump’s potential voters rejected two of the core rationales he offers for his candidacy.

Unlike DeSantis, who ran, in the words of Iowa State University political scientist David Peterson, as “diet Trump,” Haley realized there was a market for a Republican candidate who was stylistically different from Trump, could draw more middle-of-the-road voters in November and move the country past the “chaos” of the Trump era.

But unlike former New Jersey governor Chris Christie, whose frontal attacks on Trump endeared him to many Democrats and the relatively small constituency of anti-Trumpers in the party, Haley knew she couldn’t ask Republicans who had voted for Trump twice to admit they were wrong. “She has managed to walk a fine line,” Republican pollster Whit Ayres told me. “She avoided the Chris Christie message that Trump is unfit for office while at the same time making a case that it’s time to move on.”

This is why she has an excellent chance of running second in Iowa and pushing DeSantis into political oblivion.

An Iowa State-Civiqs poll conducted from Jan. 5 to 10 underscored the challenge DeSantis faces. Peterson, who directs the poll, shared internal numbers showing that while 93 percent of Trump’s supporters and 77 percent of Haley’s voters said they made up their minds, only 36 percent of DeSantis’s backers said this. Among Trump’s voters, 79 percent said they were definitely attending the caucuses, as did 56 percent of Haley’s; only 43 percent of DeSantis supporters expressed such certainty.

The respected Des Moines Register/NBC News/Medicom Iowa poll released Saturday night confirmed the move toward Haley. It gave Trump 48 percent, Haley 20 percent, DeSantis 16 percent and Vivek Ramaswamy 8 percent. Haley has gained ground since the December Iowa poll, while Trump and DeSantis were both slightly down.

DeSantis hit two strategic walls. “The attempt to go at Trump from the right missed the powerful hold Trump has on that part of the party,” Anderson said. And DeSantis’s hopes of winning evangelical voters in Iowa, as Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) did in 2016, were foiled by Trump’s hero status among White religious conservatives.

It was a mark of desperation that Bob Vander Plaats, one of DeSantis’s leading evangelical supporters, offered an op-ed in the Des Moines Register last week under the headline, “Caucusing for Ron DeSantis is a good way to be a friend to Donald Trump.” It might have been a political first: An argument that the best way to support your friend is to vote against him.

Beyond Iowa and New Hampshire, the road will get tougher for Haley, including in her home state of South Carolina where Trump is very popular. A bitter Christie was caught before he withdrew on a hot mic predicting Haley is “going to get smoked.”

Maybe Christie is right, given that Haley’s exquisite balancing act can smack of unprincipled opportunism and sometimes leads her into gaffes and incoherence.

But if she does win New Hampshire, with the help of Christie’s former supporters, she will give her party’s quiet doubters elsewhere a chance to voice their qualms about Trump — discreetly, in the voting booths. After all, the idea of a “silent majority” was a Republican invention.