Does Nikki Haley have what it takes to be the next US president?

Next year’s race for the White House finally got underway this week. We now know for certain what we have long expected: there will be a contest for the Republican nomination. Two candidates have declared that they are running to the next Republican President of the United States: Donald J. Trump and Nikki Haley, who served him at cabinet rank as US ambassador to the United Nations.

Last week on St Valentine’s Day Nikki Haley made her announcement – “I’m Nikki Haley and I’m running for President” simultaneously, live on stage in Charleston in her home state of South Carolina, and in an online video. Aged 51, she called for “generational change”. Both Trump and Biden will be over 80 in office, if elected. She also warned her party that it needs to broaden its appeal because “Republicans have lost the popular vote in seven out of eight of the last presidential elections. That has to change.”

To an outsider Haley looks like a fascinating and attractive candidate. That is not the same as saying she has the qualities and background to secure the endorsement of her party through 2024’s gruelling run of primaries and caucuses, let alone that she could win the general election. Were she to get as far as the nomination against Joe Biden, or another Democrat, it is unlikely she will still be complaining about the quirks in the electoral college which favour Republicans in defiance of the popular vote.

Does she have it in her to be the United States’ first female president? Or is she just a distraction while the other possibles – all mostly middle-aged white men – ponder whether to enter the fray?

Trump and Haley are likely to be on their own in the open for some months to come while Biden and other wannabes make up their minds. She needs all the publicity she can get. In the latest Quinnepac poll 54% said they didn’t know enough to rate her favourability. That figure was half, 26%, for Ron DeSantis, the Governor of California, currently tipped for the nomination if Trump fails.

Until now Haley has lived an American Dream.

She was born Nimrata Nikki Randhawa in Bamberg Hospital, South Carolina, to parents who immigrated from Punjab in India. She is no stranger to firsts. She was the first woman and first person of colour to be elected Governor of the state of South Carolina. At just 38 she was also the youngest governor of any state at that time. She was quickly spotted as a political talent, and was given a speaker’s slot at the 2012 Republican National Convention and on television to give the official response to President Obama’s 2016 State of the Union address.

Haley’s parents ran a dress shop and she worked there and as an accountant before taking up full time politics. At the 2020 Republican convention she talked about experiencing racism: “My father wore a turban. My mother wore a sari. I was a brown girl in a black and white world. We faced discrimination and hardship” but she declared “America is not a racist country”.

This week the Times of India put the headline “Brown Girl in The Ring” above its piece about her candidacy. She is however unlikely to be the only person of colour in this race. Vice President Kamala Harris will almost certainly run with Biden, and she has already been the subject of jibes from Haley, while on Fox News, the so-called “CEO of Anti-Woke”, tech almost-billionaire Vivek Ramaswamy, is being feted by Tucker Carlson.

Haley converted to Christianity from the Sikh faith when she married her husband William Michael Haley. The couple have two children – Rena, a daughter and Nalin, a son.

In her two terms as governor, she largely followed the conservative playbook. She signed an abortion ban with no exceptions for rape or incest. She backed stop and search for suspected illegal immigrants. She endorsed curbs on both Medicare and Medicaid, the US government backed health insurance schemes for the elderly and the poor, respectively.

Her most liberal gesture followed the massacre of worshippers at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston by a man pictured on social media with the Confederate flag. She ordered that “Stars and Bars” should no longer fly above the state capitol. “We are not going to allow this symbol to divide us any longer”, she said then while conceding that what to many was “a deeply offensive symbol of a brutally oppressive past” for others “a symbol of respect, integrity and duty” and “a way to honour ancestors”.

As her comments on that flag demonstrate, Haley is inclined to be a flip-flopper. She likes to give comfort to both sides of an argument and in the process appeals to neither of them.

Her flip-flopping is most spectacular in her cautiously ambiguous relationship with Trump, the Republican party’s big wounded beast.

During the 2016 race for the nomination she endorsed Marco Rubio and attacked Trump as a racist: “I will not stop until we fight a man that chose not to disavow the KKK [Ku Klux Klan]… That is not who we want as President”. “Donald Trump”, she said, “is everything I want my children not to be in kindergarten.” She called on Trump to release his tax returns, he branded her “an embarrassment”. She tweeted back “Bless your heart’.

Then she agreed to serve President Trump at the UN. In spite of a rare exchange of niceties when she left – he claimed she had called him “the best President of my lifetime” and told her to “follow her heart and do what she wants to do” – her departure after just two years was taken by some as a tacit reproof to Trump’s style. Yet in her 2019 book “With All Due Respect” she repeatedly speaks of Trump favourably, and insists he was not one of “the angriest voices” she called out in her State of the Union reply.

Immediately after the 6 January insurrection at the US Capitol she said Trump had “lost any sort of political viability” and that “his actions since Election Day will be judged harshly by history”. Days later she opposed impeachment: “I mean at some point, give the man a break”. Next, she declared “I don’t want to go back to the days before Trump” and told reporters she “would not run if President Trump ran” in 2024. Now she is running against him.

By most reckonings Trump’s best chances of securing the Republican nomination will come if there is a wide field of candidates. This may explain why he has not nicknamed Haley nor had his usual apoplectic outburst at her lese majestie. He left it to one of his fundraising groups, MAGA Inc., to comment: “She says she represents a ‘new generation’. Nikki is just more of the same, a career politician whose only commitment is to herself.”

Haley’s contortions over Trump are shared by many potential republican sympathisers. Some strategists believe she is an attractive candidate who appeals to independent voters. That could turn out to be her problem. The heart of the Republican party seems more aligned to hardliners like the born-again former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who burnished his credentials this week arguing that Israel has a biblical claim to Palestine. Those who fall into the Never Trump category, meanwhile, are likely to have the option of backing the stalwart Liz Cheney.

If Nikki Haley can flip-flop her way to a credible showing in the primary season without making too many enemies the best guess is that she might make a balancing vice-presidential running-mate slot on the Republican ticket. If so, the US will have confirmed once again that it is not yet ready for its first female President, but Nikki Haley would still have a future ahead of her. 

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