First it was Nikki Haley, now Kristi Noem. Possible 2024 Republican presidential contenders are learning quickly that former President Donald Trump will be a tough act to follow.

Noem, the governor of South Dakota, has emerged as a conservative darling. But her veto of a controversial bill to keep transgender athletes from competing with biological females in girls sports, and subsequent pushback against her erstwhile allies, may already be draining the reservoir of goodwill on which a GOP presidential bid would depend.

After Noem sent the bill back to the Republican-controlled Legislature with suggested substantive revisions, citing conservative legal experts who she said advised her the state would be unlikely to prevail against inevitable lawsuits, she was widely criticized on the Right for a “failure in leadership.”

“Conservative voters will not forget that when given the choice between standing up for the principles of fairness and equality for girl athletes or caving to the left, she chose the latter,” Terry Schilling, president of the conservative American Principles Project, said in a statement about Noem. “This is a failure in leadership that will define her moving forward.”

A Noem spokesman poured fuel on the fire with an equally strongly worded statement decrying her intraparty critics as practitioners of “conservative cancel culture” who are “eating their own.” The response struck some Republican operatives as thin-skinned and counterproductive.

“I really like Gov. Noem, but this dust-up showed she either is getting really terrible advice from consultants or that she’s not yet ready for prime time,” said conservative strategist Chris Barron. “Everyone can make a mistake, but Gov. Noem’s decision to double and then triple down on the mistake, and to claim she was somehow the victim of conservative cancel culture, is perplexing and destructive.”

“Governor Noem is very used to fighting off criticism from the left,” her communications director Ian Fury said. “After all in the past year, she was the only governor in the entire nation to never order a single business or church in her state to close.”

“But if any number of conservative pundits are to be believed, that same governor who refused to cave is now caving to the NCAA and Amazon on the issue of fairness in women’s sports. What?” Fury continued. “Apparently, uninformed cancel culture is fine when the right is eating their own.” Noem had proposed excluding collegiate sports from the legislation.

Haley, a former governor of South Carolina and U.S. ambassador to the United Nations under Trump, tried to distance herself from the 45th president’s actions during the deadly Jan. 6 Capitol riot. “We need to acknowledge that he let us down,” she said in an interview with Politico earlier this year. “He went down a path he shouldn’t have, and we shouldn’t have followed him, and we shouldn’t have listened to him. And we can’t let that ever happen again.”

Soon afterward, Haley was praising Trump’s “strong speech” at the Conservative Political Action Conference and the “winning policies of his administration.” “The liberal media wants a GOP civil war,” she added on Twitter. “Not gonna happen.” She also tried to clarify her views in the pages of the Wall Street Journal but was still reportedly denied a meeting with Trump at Mar-A-Lago.

Both Noem and Haley are relatively young (49), women, and possess state-level executive experience and connections to Trump while smoothing over his rough edges. But they do not appear to have the same unyielding loyalty from the base. Trump managed to remain strong with the grassroots even as top conservative opinion leaders rallied against him in the 2016 Republican primaries.

“There’s a lot of sharp elbows out there in the race to replace President Trump,” said Republican strategist John Feehery. “Elements of the base like to assert [themselves] during this period because it’s good press for them and because they are trying to test highlight issues that are important to them. But we are a long way to the nomination, and it’s hard to predict what issues will be most important to Republican voters and donors when things really start heating up in 2023.”

Candidates for the Republican presidential nomination have frequently clashed over their conservative credentials, especially when trying to occupy the right lane opposite the establishment favorite: Pat Buchanan versus Phil Gramm in 1996, Steve Forbes and Alan Keyes in 2000, Mitt Romney versus Fred Thompson in 2008, Ted Cruz and Ben Carson among others in 2016.

Sometimes hitting back at conservative detractors can hurt a Republican contender, such as when John McCain denounced prominent Christian Right leaders as “agents of intolerance” during the 2000 campaign. Evangelicals helped sink him against George W. Bush in the South Carolina primary — an outcome that could be a warning for Noem.

“The America First base is a pretty easy crowd to read, and we haven’t been shy about where we stand on the issue of protecting women’s sports, so I am really not sure how Gov. Noem couldn’t see the damage she was doing to her political future by ending up on the wrong side of this issue,” Barron said. “Truly a head-scratcher.”

Then, there is the added dimension of loyalty to Trump, who still may yet be a candidate for the 2024 GOP nomination himself. President Joe Biden downplayed the possibility of a rematch in his first formal press conference on Thursday. “My predecessor,” Biden said. “Oh, God, I miss him.”

Trump said earlier this week that the GOP bench is “stacked,” naming Noem in addition to Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, Sens. Josh Hawley of Missouri, Ted Cruz of Texas, and Rand Paul of Kentucky, and his former press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders, who is following in her father’s footsteps by running for governor of Arkansas. Haley went unmentioned.

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the associated press file Former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley distanced herself from former President Trump in remarks last week.

the associated press file