It's not necessarily to "guarantee a loss".
It's to guarantee a win for the "donor community", in the sense that, if the candidates are Bush and Kerry, or Obama and Romney, from the "donor" perspective, it doesn't matter who wins.
A Haley-Newsom race (which is what they want, and probably will get), leads to victory for the cloud people, however it turns out.
Haley-Newsom? After Newsom making it plain that he wasn’t going to be the Dems’ nominee during the “debate” with DeSantis?