‘Underestimate me — that’ll be fun’: Nikki Haley’s meteoric rise
The Republican presidential candidate’s rise is capturing the attention of American conservatives who want Joe Biden out but who do not want another Donald Trump presidency.
When Republican presidential contender Nikki Haley visited Iowa State Fair in August, an essential campaign stop where candidates eat corn dogs and flip pork chops, she wore a T-shirt with the words “Underestimate me – that’ll be fun”. At that stage Haley was just one of a large field of Republican aspirants, barely getting traction behind the overwhelming favourite, former president Donald Trump.
Fewer than four months on, no one is underestimating the feisty, charismatic former South Carolina governor.
The 51-year-old, who served in Trump’s cabinet as US ambassador to the UN, is having her moment. Her poll numbers are on the rise, her crowds are growing, big donors are embracing her and she is generating momentum when Trump’s other political rivals have seen their support stagnate.
Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, long considered the main rival to Trump for the Republican nomination, has seen Haley come from nowhere to draw level with him in polls in Iowa and jump ahead of him in New Hampshire, the first two states to vote in the Republican primary race in January.
But what really is making voters on both sides of politics stand up and notice Haley is a recent Marquette Law School poll showing her leading Joe Biden 55 per cent to 45 per cent in a hypothetical match-up, a larger lead than Trump’s notional 52 per cent to 48 per cent over Biden.
This was followed up by a Fox News poll that gave Haley a 11 percentage point lead over Biden, compared with only four percentage points for Trump and five percentage points for DeSantis.
This week, in the fourth Republican presidential debate, Haley’s opponents responded to her rise in the polls by focusing their attacks on her, prompting her at one stage to quip: “I love all the attention, fellas.” Her rise also has gained the attention of Trump, who calls her a “birdbrain”. “MAGA or I will never go for Birdbrain Nikki Haley,” he says. “No loyalty, plenty of lies.”
Democratic Party strategists privately say they do not want Haley to defeat Trump for the Republican nomination because they believe she would pose a bigger threat to Biden than Trump.
“Everyone knows why Joe Biden and the Democrats are attacking Nikki Haley – because they’re terrified of running against her,” says Haley spokeswoman Olivia Perez-Cubas. “The polls show it and Democrats have admitted it. Nikki will not only beat Joe Biden, she’ll help Republicans win up and down the ballot.”
The Democrats may not have to worry. Even though Haley is on a trajectory likely to pass DeSantis and become Trump’s biggest Republican rival, the former president still leads Haley and DeSantis by up to 50 points in polls.
The Republican race is Trump’s to lose and so far his popularity among the 40 per cent of Republicans who love him has not been hurt by the 91 felony counts against him or the other controversies that constantly swirl.
But nothing is certain in US politics, especially at this early stage of the campaign before the first primary vote has been cast.
If Trump performs poorly in Iowa and New Hampshire, or if jail beckons because of his legal issues, or if another controversy emerges, Haley could find herself in a highly competitive race with Trump for the Republican nomination and a genuine shot at becoming the country’s first female president.
“If we can get this down to one-on-one (with Trump), it’s going to be a different story, just you watch,” says Katon Dawson, a former head of the South Carolina Republican Party, the state where Haley was governor. “Underestimating Nikki Haley is every politician’s mistake.”
Haley received an important boost by recently winning the most important endorsement of the Republican race so far when the powerful and wealthy Koch political network backed her. The backing signals that the group, founded by billionaires Charles and David Koch and which has the power to unlock numerous donations and other forms of political support, believes Haley is the most viable alternative to Trump.
Haley’s political star is on the rise for several reasons. Described by some as a pragmatic conservative, Haley has pitched her presidential bid somewhere between the MAGA populism of Trump and DeSantis and the more traditional policies of Reaganite Republicans.
She knows she will never win over the votes of those Trumpian Republicans who are rusted on to Trump, so she is pitching her campaign at the other two Republican voting blocs – those Republicans who like Trumpism but don’t like Trump and those voters who detest Trump and want to see a return to more traditional policies.
Haley is a foreign policy hawk and a strong supporter of America’s international alliances who dismisses the growing isolationist bent of many modern Republicans.
She is a strong supporter of continued US military aid to Ukraine when many in her party oppose it. She is a strident supporter of Israel, a virulent critic of Iran and a hawk on China. She says she views China “as an enemy” and the biggest threat to the US since the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in World War II.
“(The US needs to) make sure that we’re serious about China and they know that we’re serious about them – not going and being nice to them and thinking that they’re going to change,” she says.
During the first Republican presidential debate in August, Haley delivered a withering broadside to the isolationist position of fellow Republican candidate Vivek Ramaswamy saying “he wants to hand Ukraine to Russia, he wants to let China eat Taiwan, he wants to go and stop funding Israel. You don’t do that to friends.”
Yet Haley also has embraced part of the so-called MAGA agenda. She says she would send the US military into Mexico to eliminate drug cartels. She criticises gender and racial diversity initiatives in classrooms and boardrooms, transgender rights and promises to end “gender pronoun classes in the military”.
To her critics, Haley is a political weathervane who is pitching her presidential policies towards what will get her elected rather than what she believes. For example, on the issue of abortion, she declares herself “unapologetically pro-life”, in part because her husband was adopted and she struggled to have her two children. Yet Haley has also shown flexibility on the issue.
“As much as I am pro-life, don’t judge anyone for being pro-choice,” she says, adding it is “a personal issue for every woman and every man”.
This pragmatism is a response to the fact Republicans have experienced an electoral backlash over the issue of abortion since the US Supreme Court overturned Roe v Wade in June last year.
But at the same time, while speaking to a Christian audience in Iowa last month, she said she would have signed a ban on abortion after six weeks if she had still been governor of South Carolina.
The Biden campaign pounced on her contrasting comments, with Biden spokesman Ammar Moussa saying: “Nikki Haley is no moderate – she’s an anti-abortion MAGA extremist who wants to rip away women’s freedoms just like she did when she was South Carolina governor.”
Haley also has moved to the right on immigration, refugees and border security. She once called Trump’s border wall “a gimmick” but has since criticised Biden’s record on border security and has pledged to finish building the border wall and reimpose some of the tough Trump-era immigration and asylum policies.
This comes despite the fact Haley is the daughter of immigrant Sikh parents from India’s Punjab. She worked in her family’s clothing business before moving into politics, and was elected to the South Carolina parliament in 2004, styling herself as an independent outsider beholden to no one.
She spoke of how she overcame racism in her youth and she advocated a pro-business agenda of lower taxes, and economic growth. In 2010, aged just 38, she became that state’s first female and minority governor.
She gained media attention and praise in 2015 when she authorised the removal of the Confederate flag from state capitol grounds following the murder of nine people at an African-American church in Charleston. But Haley became a national figure in early 2017 when Trump appointed her as the US ambassador to the UN. Haley was a firebrand; adopting Trump’s “America First” mantra, she declared herself to be “the new sheriff in town” and proceeded to shake up the world body. She wasted no time calling out some of the long-running hypocrisies of the UN.
These included the rampant anti-Israeli bias that pervades it, the absurdity of electing rogue nations to sit on the UN Human Rights Council and the suffocating inefficiencies that come with the bloated UN bureaucracy.
Haley’s agenda was not so much to undermine the UN, which is almost one-quarter funded by the US, but rather to ask questions of it.
“I wear heels, it’s not for a fashion statement, it’s because if I see something wrong we’re gonna kick ’em every time,” she said.
When Haley abruptly quit the job in 2018, she had already built up the political capital – as a twice-elected governor and a cabinet member – for an eventual tilt at the presidency. Her relationship with Trump has gone through numerous hot and cold phases. The two were close during Haley’s time as ambassador to the UN with Trump saying on her resignation: “She has been very special to me. She’s done a fantastic job and we’ve done a fantastic job together.” Since then the relationship has slowly soured although Haley has distanced herself from Trump in a careful way, recognising his unique power to destroy his opponents.
Of the five main Republican presidential candidates left in the race – Trump, DeSantis, former New Jersey governor Chris Christie, entrepreneur Ramaswamy and Haley, only Haley and Christie have openly criticised Trump.
Even so, Haley has been relatively measured. She has said of the January 6, 2021, invasion of congress that it was a “terrible day” and that Trump’s disputing the 2020 election result “will be judged harshly by history”.
But she initially said she would not run for president in 2024 if Trump decided to run again. Haley then changed her mind and since entering the race in February she has gradually upped her criticism of him, saying recently that he was “thin-skinned and easily distracted” and that he was a force of “drama and chaos” the country could not afford. She says Trump was the right president at the right time but he is not the right president for now. “Eight years ago, it was good to have a leader who broke things,” she says. “But right now we need to have a leader who also knows how to put things back together.
“I think we need a younger generation to come in to step up and really start fixing things.”
Haley has been the best performer in the four Republican presidential debates so far, showing herself to be fast on her feet, feisty and decisive. In one exchange she even described the fast-talking Ramaswamy as “scum” after he went after Haley about her daughter’s use of Tiktok given security concerns over the parent company’s ties to China.
With the first Republican primary caucus in Iowa just over a month away on January 15, momentum is increasingly important. DeSantis has invested much more time campaigning in Iowa than Haley, yet she is level with him there in the polls.
DeSantis needs a strong showing in Iowa to revitalise a campaign that began with so much promise – as he sold himself as “Trump without the baggage” – but has since stalled with lacklustre debate and campaign performances.
If Haley performs better than expected in Iowa and New Hampshire, the fourth primary (after Nevada) will be in her home state of South Carolina. If Haley or DeSantis is to seriously challenge Trump one needs the other to depart the race early to allow a one-on-one contest, unlike in 2016 when numerous Republican contenders split the vote, allowing Trump to romp home for the nomination.
It is still early days, but Haley’s rise is capturing the attention of American conservatives who want Biden out but who do not want another Trump presidency.
The coming months will show whether the moment is just a flash-in-the-pan or the start of a serious challenge to the dominance of Trump in the Republican Party.
