When Nikki Haley, the former governor of South Carolina and U.N. Ambassador, announced her candidacy for president in February 2023, she wasn’t considered the top contender to challenge Donald Trump for the GOP nomination. But things change.
For months it had been Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis — coming off of a sensational reelection victory in November 2022 — who was being hailed as the logical alternative to the former president. Trump is now facing multiple legal challenges in four separate criminal cases though he remains the heavyweight in the race.
Nowadays, Haley is the one showing momentum and positive buzz while DeSantis has struggled to stay in second place as the third Republican presidential debate looms next week in Miami.
For Republicans who are eager for the GOP party to consolidate around a single candidate to challenge Trump going into next year’s primaries and caucuses, the name being mentioned more frequently these days isn’t DeSantis but Haley.
She is the rare field of Republican women who have ever run for the presidency. She’s only the fifth woman in the history of the party to run, joining Carly Fiorina (2016), Michele Bachmann (2012), Elizabeth Dole (2000) and Margaret Chase Smith (1964), according to the Center for American Women and Politics.
Haley has been the only woman on the GOP stage for president this year, making her case in town halls, fairgrounds and diners as well as in the two presidential debates in Wisconsin and California.
Haley, DeSantis and Trump and the other top Republicans still vying for the nomination will be making their cases before Florida Republicans this Saturday in the Orlando area at the Republican Party of Florida’s Sunshine Summit. They’ll follow that up in Miami five days later for the third GOP presidential debate. (Trump won’t attend.)
There hasn’t been a lot of talk about the potential historic candidacy of Haley’s campaign because Republicans eschew so-called identity politics, says Deb Tamargo, the past president of the Florida Federation of Republican Women.
“We don’t vote for identity, we vote for what we believe are the accomplishments that a person has that qualifies them to be that candidate, regardless of what the office is, so in this case, president,” she says. “That they actually have the credentials, the qualifications, the expertise, to be an effective president. Not just to be ‘the first woman,’ or any of that.”
Polls shifting
Haley now leads DeSantis in polls in key early states such as New Hampshire and South Carolina, according to FiveThirtyEight, and is extremely competitive with DeSantis in national polls.
In a Des Moines Register/NBC News/Mediacom Iowa Poll released Monday, Trump leads with 43% of likely GOP caucus voters, but Haley and DeSantis are now tied at 16%, a 10-point jump for Haley from August in the same poll.
That’s a drop of 3 percentage points for DeSantis, who was the first choice of 19% of caucus goers in August. And it’s a 10-point jump for Haley, who was at 6%.
“You just have (Haley) rising. You have DeSantis kind of holding on for second place,” said pollster J. Ann Selzer, president of Selzer & Co., which conducted the Iowa Poll. “But both of them are on ground that you could only describe as shaky compared to the solid ground that Donald Trump stands on. If anything, he’s showing improvement.”
On the New Hampshire analysis at FiveThirtyEight, which involves averages of multiple polls, Haley’s figure is second to Trump and has 14.9% of GOP voters in the state compared to DeSantis’ 10.9%. The information is from Oct. 30, 2023.
In the South Carolina analysis (with continued dominance by Trump) Haley’s figure is also second to Trump and shows 18.5% compared to 11.8% for DeSantis.
As to the Iowa analysis, DeSantis is at 16.8% compared to 10.8% for Haley, according to the Oct. 30 average of polls. DeSantis has been traversing Iowa intensely this fall, attempting to campaign in all 99 counties.
As to Haley in a potential matchup against President Joe Biden, an NBC poll from late September for the 2024 general election showed Haley leading Biden, 46%-41%. As to DeSantis, Biden was up in that direct matchup– 46% to 45%
A Fox News poll from mid-October has Haley leading Biden 49%-45%. DeSantis is also leading Biden by 47% to 45%.
Who is Haley?
Can the only woman in the GOP field— and a woman of color — somehow defy gravity and win the nomination for president?
It would start from the beginning: Haley, 51, has been a South Carolinian her whole life.
She was born Nimarata Nikki Randhawa to Indian American parents in 1972 and attended Clemson University, where she received a bachelor’s degree in accounting, according to Clemson News in 2021.
According to Haley’s presidential campaign website, in 2004 at the age of 32 she made her initial run for public office. That’s when she won a seat in the South Carolina House of Representatives. After serving six years in the South Carolina Legislature, she ran and was elected South Carolina governor in 2010 and re-elected in 2014.
Haley says on her presidential website that she became the first minority female governor in America when she was elected in 2010. (However, then-New Mexico Gov. Susana Martinez also shares that distinction.)
In 2012, while governor, Haley told The New York Times that she was inspired to run for office after attending a speech given by Hillary Clinton. The Times had asked a question to Haley: Why are there so few women of your generation in high level politics?
Haley answered: “It’s not because the challenge is too hard. It’s simply because women don’t run. The reason I actually ran for office is because of Hillary Clinton. Everybody was telling me why I shouldn’t run: I was too young, I had small children, I should start at the school board level. I went to Birmingham University, and Hillary Clinton was the keynote speaker on a leadership institute, and she said that when it comes to women running for office, there will be everybody that tells you why you shouldn’t but that’s all the reasons why we need you to do it, and I walked out of there thinking ‘That’s it. I’m running for office.’”
Later, Haley resigned as South Carolina governor to become U.S. ambassador to the United Nations in 2017, serving in the Trump administration.
What Haley says
Haley’s poll numbers began shifting upwards following her performance in the first GOP debate in Milwaukee in August, according to a Washington Post/FiveThirtyEight/Ipsos survey. Before the debate, 29 percent of Republican primary voters who watched the debate said they were considering voting for her. After the debate, that number jumped to 46 percent.
That development that didn’t surprise Furman University political science professor Danielle Vinson.
“She thinks quickly, and she communicates in a way that she doesn’t go too deeply into the weeds that the viewers can’t follow it,” Vinson told the Phoenix. “She’s found a really nice balance of showing that she’s competent and that she can think about issues in nuanced ways.”
Vinson says that communication style has been evident in how she’s handled the abortion issue on the campaign issue.
Haley has said that while she supports a federal ban on abortions (though not specifying now many weeks she would allow for), she says that Republicans need to be honest with voters that it’s highly unlikely that they’d be able to get the 60 senators required to move abortion legislation through the Senate’s legislative filibuster and come up with a “consensus” of some sort.
“I think we can all agree on banning late-term abortions. I think we can all agree on encouraging adoptions and making sure those foster kids feel more loved, not less,” Haley has said. “I think we can agree on doctors and nurses who don’t believe in abortions shouldn’t have to perform them. I think we can agree on the fact that contraception should be accessible. And I think we can all come together and say any woman that has an abortion shouldn’t be jailed or given the death penalty.”
As governor of South Carolina, Haley signed legislation in 2016 that banned abortions after 20 weeks. As a state legislator in the South Carolina House, she co-sponsored a measure in 2009 mandating a 24-hour waiting period between a woman’s abortion consultation and the procedures itself. In 2010 while in the state House, she voted to end abortion coverage for victims of rape and incest in the state health plan for employees, according to the Associated Press.
Yet her style and comments on certain issues on the campaign trail this year has led to headlines that Haley is a “moderate” among the GOP candidates. But those who have followed her career in South Carolina insist that she’s anything but.
“She is by no means a moderate,” says Mikel Norris, a political science professor at Coastal Carolina University. “Compared to say Ron DeSantis, she looks moderate. But she’s not. She’s more moderate than [the rest of the GOP field].” Norris adds that he saw as being “very pragmatic” in her approach to governing, which he says, “carries a lot of appeal.”
“I would not describe her as a moderate,” agrees Charles Bierbauer, a dean emeritus of the University of South Carolina College of Information and Communications and a former CNN reporter. “She wasn’t a moderate as a governor. She wasn’t a moderate as a legislator. She is not a moderate now.”
A union buster
That’s been apparent for those paying close attention during this unusual campaign. When asked in September about the United Auto Workers strike, Haley boasted that she was a “union buster.” She’s called the debate over whether transgender women and girls should be allowed to play on sports teams as the “women’s issue of our time.”
And she doubled down on rejecting Medicaid expansion, telling an audience in New Hampshire earlier this year that “it’s easy and lazy to expand Medicaid, because all you’re doing is giving people money just to buy them time. I wanted more for them. I wanted them to have better.”
Bierbauer describes Haley as “politically very capable, and politically very opportunistic.”
Like a lot of Republicans in 2016, Donald Trump was not Haley’s first candidate of choice for president. She initially backed U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio, and once he dropped out, she then backed Texas U.S. Sen, Ted Cruz.
In the fall of 2016, Trump then picked Haley to serve as his ambassador to the United Nations, a selection that was able to give her the foreign policy gravitas she employs currently on the campaign trail.
Vinson, the Furman University political science professor, touts Haley’s work ethic, describing how her campaign reached out to ask that she be allowed to address Vinson’s class on American government when she was running for governor.
“Her campaign literally called me out of the blue and said, ‘we just want to put her out in front of students and her talk to them about South Carolina issues.’
I was like, ‘I’m literally teaching only one class this semester. It’s got 12 people in it. It starts at 8:30 in the morning,’ and they’re like, ‘We’ll be there!’ And I told them, ‘You do realize that not all of the students that are in the class are from South Carolina? Half of them can’t vote for her. And they were like, ‘we don’t care'” says Vinson.
Taking on Trump
But Vinson and other observers say that Haley, much like DeSantis, have to become much more committed to taking on Trump to have any type of chance of chiseling away on his seemingly impregnable lead.
“If she’s going to overtake Trump, she’s either going to need something to happen like a guilty verdict against him or she or someone has to make the case that he shouldn’t be the nominee,” Vinson says.
“When we see these jabs between Haley and DeSantis, it’s really kind of telling that they’re not willing to run at Trump,” adds John Conway, director of strategy with the Republican Accountability PAC. “They’re really battling for second place and that’s why Trump still has such a strong grip on the electorate right now.”
Conway says the time for any non-Trump Republican is elapsing quickly. “The field isn’t being consolidated around a single Trump alternative, meaning that the voters who are interested in a Trump alternative are defused between five, six, seven candidates right now,” he says.
In a recent editorial endorsing her for president, The Post and Courier of Charleston, South Carolina argued that the other Republicans must back out of the race now to allow Haley to compete one-on-one against Trump. “They need to do so now. While it can still make a difference,” the paper said.
That’s starting to happen, as former Vice President Mike Pence dropped out of the race over the weekend, and others had already dropped out. But if Trump were somehow to leave the race, would Haley be the most likely recipient of his supporters?
Not according to the Des Moines Register poll published on Monday. Of those who name Trump as their first choice for president, 41% say that DeSantis would be their second choice, if for some reason Trump wasn’t on the ballot. Only 16% of Trump voters say that Haley would be their second choice.
Those numbers don’t surprise April Schiff, a Hillsborough County Committeewoman and longtime GOP strategist in Florida. She says it’s obvious why DeSantis is going after Haley.
“That’s because she’s gaining on him and he’s feeling the heat,” she says. “I think you’ll continue to see more of that if she continues to gain the polling numbers.”
“I would guess more likely that a lot of them would go to DeSantis before they go to Haley because she doesn’t go as far out on the right side to appeal to those people like DeSantis has,” she says, adding that it would be a boost to have a woman leading the GOP presidential ticket next year.
“I’d love to see a woman in the president’s office and a Republican one at that,” says Schiff. “That’d make me really happy.”