Nikki Haley Preps Announcement For Republican Presidential Nomination Run

Former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley is hinting strongly at a presidential run which could come any day now.

“It’s time for a new generation to lead,” she tweeted, implicitly referring to President Joe Biden, 80,  and her former boss, Donald Trump, 76. “The survival of America matters, and it’s bigger than one person,” she said in an embedded clip of her recent exclusive Fox News interview.

Haley, 51, made a name for herself as the first Indian-American to serve in the South Carolina House of Representatives in 2004.

Since then, she has only moved up in the Republican Party, serving as the governor of South Carolina from 2011 to 2017 before becoming Trump’s ambassador to the United Nations.

While Haley previously indicated in a 2021 interview that she would not challenge Trump for the Republican nomination in 2024, she has publicly reconsidered in recent weeks.

In the same Fox News interview, she said that her comments were “before we surrendered to Afghanistan, it was before we saw this high inflation and high crime, it was before we saw drugs infesting all of our states, it was before we saw our foreign policy in disarray, so a lot has changed.”

Haley, in many ways, is a typical conservative Republican politician. She has long been a proponent of “school choice” and charter schools. She has made cutting taxes a large part of her platform, both as a state representative and the governor of South Carolina.

As governor, she signed a strict immigration law in 2011 that has been the subject of Justice Department lawsuits.

In 2016, she signed a controversial abortion law banning abortion after twenty weeks, many years before the reversal of Roe vs. Wade in 2022.

Haley has also marketed herself as a strong supporter of Israel by being the first governor to sign anti-Boycott Divest Sanction (BDS) legislation; a move that prevents the state of South Carolina from doing any business with entities that support pro-Palestinian rights organizations. The law has been criticized by many free-speech and Palestinian activists as illegal under the First Amendment.  

Despite Haley’s repositioning efforts, she has made few gains in the current 2024 Republican primary polling.

According to Morning Consult data as of January 24, Trump, who has formally announced his candidacy already, remains the clear favorite winning almost fifty percent of total Republican primary voters. Haley, getting only three percent, is currently ranked fourth behind Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and former Vice President Mike Pence, who are polling with thirty percent and seven percent respectively.

Article by Jakob Mieszkowski-Lapping