The former South Carolina governor finds momentum in a GOP primary that remains Trump’s to lose
BY PHILIP ELLIOTT
NIKKI HALEY HAD HEARD WORSE THAN THE snipes from one of the three men standing to her left onstage. As a candidate for governor of South Carolina in 2010, she was attacked with anti-Indian-American slurs. Three years later, the state Democratic Party chairman said she should go “back to wherever the hell she came from,” ignoring that she was born in South Carolina’s Bamberg County Hospital. When she was the U.S. ambassador to the U.N., the Secretary of State allegedly deployed sexist words that begin with a Band a C.To her face.
But in Miami on Nov. 8, when the presidential candidate found her daughter’s social media usage a topic at the third debate of second-tier GOP contenders, Haley stood on the verge of boiling over. “Leave my daughter out of your voice,” Haley told tech bro Vivek Ramaswamy, who had just brought up Rena Haley’s TikTok. “You’re just scum,” she added later; her daughter watched from the room.
With her eyes cast toward the stage lights, you could see Haley push reset and perhaps remind herself that for female candidates, combativeness is way too easily seen as rage. That clear-eyed ownership of her space in the current Republican campaign has served her well to this point and may be what fires her into the final push before voters finally get to start having their say. Haley is the only candidate on the rise in national polls, early state surveys, and standing among donors. Although ex-President Donald Trump remains laps ahead of her—and every other candidate—Haley is quickly becoming a plausible chief rival and the best shot for Republicans to find an off-ramp to his third nomination.
“We can’t win the fights of the 21st century with politicians from the 20th century. We have to move forward,” Haley said, distilling her campaign thesis that hinges on an appetite among Republican voters for a former state executive and high-stakes diplomat over a familiar former candidate. But ask Jon Huntsman, a former Utah governor and ex-ambassador to China and Singapore, about the two delegates he earned during his 2012 campaign for the White House with similar qualifications.
Haley understands the rules. She has a hawkish instinct on national security, giving her a leg up in an environment where crises in Ukraine and Israel dominate, not to mention
