Nikki Haley: former Trump ally looking to beat him to White House

Nikki Haley, Washington’s former ambassador to the United Nations, is expected to become the first Republican to challenge Donald Trump in the 2024 presidential race.

The 51-year-old said that she had a “big announcement” planned for 15 February and it is “widely expected” that she will declare her intention to run for the presidency, said The Times.

Her communications director told Insider that speculation of a White House bid is “accurate”. Here is what we know about the likely candidate.

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Who is Nikki Haley?

Born Nimrata Nikki Randhawa, Haley is the daughter of Raj Kaur Randhawa and Ajit Singh Randhawa, who emigrated to Bamberg, South Carolina from India’s northwest state of Punjab.

Haley stood out from an early age, according to the South Carolina Post and Courier. “After she had finally adjusted to being the only Indian girl in her first-grade class, she was going to be a 7-year-old taking classes with kids who were pushing 8 and 9,” said the paper.

She wrote in her first book, Can’t Is Not an Option: My American Story, that as a child she was recognising how her religion, her race and even her gender would “be a constant issue”.

Then “she learned a lesson that would change her life forever”, said the Post and Courier. “Your job is not to show them how you’re different,” her mother reportedly told her. “Your job is to show them how you’re similar.”

From the age of 13, she began keeping the books of her family’s gift and clothing business but when she enrolled at Clemson University, she showed little sign of political ambition. “Let me put it this way,” Mikee Johnson, a prominent Republican businessman in South Carolina who was the student body president, told Politico, “if you’d asked me back then, of the 100 people in her class, who might run for office one day, I would have put her in the bottom 10.”

However, from 1998 to 2004, she was a board member of the chambers of commerce in Orangeburg County and Lexington, as well as the president of the National Association of Women Business Owners, noted Insider.

In 2004, she was elected to South Carolina’s House of Representatives, where she served three terms, and in 2011 Haley made history by becoming the state’s first female governor.

In office, she signed a bill that required police to check the immigration status of anyone they suspected of being in the US illegally and passed a state law banning abortions after 20 weeks of pregnancy. She attracted national attention for her response to the racially motivated mass shooting at a Charleston church in 2015, which included a “successful push” to remove the Confederate flag from the grounds of the state capitol in Columbia, said the BBC.

In 2017 the then president Donald Trump nominated Haley to become the US ambassador to the United Nations. However, the two politicians have had a turbulent relationship and she quit unexpectedly in 2018.

Haley has “flip-flopped on Trump multiple times”, said Time, “oscillating from criticizing the 45th President to praising him”.

If she runs against him, it would “set the stage for a more combative phase of the campaign, potentially putting her in the sights of the pugnacious former US president”, said Reuters.

Can she win?

A poll of potential Republican voters released by Morning Consult last month showed her receiving 2% support among a list of possible GOP presidential contenders. A separate study, from a Harvard CAPS-Harris Poll, showed Haley with 3%, way behind Trump, who received 48%.

British bookmakers Bet365 put Haley as the third highest-rated potential Republican nominee, with odds of 12/1 on her winning the primaries to become the party’s 2024 presidential candidate. However, noted Newsweek, this “still puts her considerably behind Trump” on 5/4 and Ron DeSantis on 11/8, though she has shorter odds than former vice-president Mike Pence, who is at 22/1.

Donors and elected officials in South Carolina have been “looking for alternatives to Trump amid concerns about his electability” and they could swing behind Haley, added the magazine.

Trump has already taken to taunting Haley. In a post on his Truth Social platform, he published a video of Haley saying she would support Trump if he ran in 2024 and would not join the race if the former president did so. “Nikki has to follow her heart, not her honor,” he wrote.

In a recent appearance on Fox News, Haley was presented with a list of potential Republican candidates she might have to run against. After Trump, DeSantis, Glenn Youngkin, Mike Pompeo and Ted Cruz were named, Haley retorted: “Most of them are my friends. Let the best woman win.”

While “it was a clever line”, said The Hill’s Douglas MacKinnon, it may also “hint at a calculated strategy that will subtly build the case that male Republican leaders have failed the party – and the nation – in recent election cycles.”