She might be a more complex candidate than we give her credit for.
Nikki Haley has been rising, very slowly, all year in the Republican primary. She's in second place in New Hampshire, and duking it out with Ron DeSantis for second in Iowa. They're both still far behind Donald Trump. |
Last week, I went to New Hampshire and caught two events of hers, to see what kind of campaign she is running. When she announced her candidacy last winter, there was an idea that maybe she was really running to be Trump's next vice president. That seems to be a misunderstanding of what this campaign is — even if she can't ultimately win the nomination, she is definitely trying to. In my latest essay for Times Opinion, I draw on what I saw to lay out what might need to happen for Haley's campaign to succeed, and the kind of brutal primary that might entail. I also look back at her early career and the ways it might be instructive about this particular campaign's strategy (and misunderstandings about her). |
I've seen a lot of candidate events this year: Trump, Tim Scott and Vivek Ramaswamy in Iowa, and DeSantis in Iowa and New Hampshire. Haley's last week had a different feel to it. That's in part because the others hewed much more tightly to practical, kitchen-table type issues, while Haley presented technocratic or business-oriented solutions. Voters in Nashua, N.H., asked questions about mental health crises, climate change and abortion policy. She talked about incentives for training more mental health counselors, signaled an openness to corporations making an electric vehicle transition, and mentioned the importance of access to contraceptives. |
She joined that up with a hardened conservatism about the border and migration, and an approach to government spending and waste that you might remember from the early 2010s. This included an intense, reactionary riff about how "it only takes one" person coming across the border to commit terrorism. |
She also spent a lot of time talking about foreign policy, from the importance of supporting Ukraine to her view of China as a threat. |
The general effect is to see Haley in person and think she's both much more a Trump-era Republican than one might think, and a realist, practical Republican at the same time — and that makes her pretty distinct in this field. |
It's unclear if that will work with enough voters, or if all the things that need to happen for her can or will. But the question of whether someone will beat Trump, and how, remains relevant. |
Here's what we're focusing on today: |
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