Haley’s expected campaign launch will highlight a political persona with considerable appeal as Republicans wonder how to broaden their coalition after their general election loss in 2020. Haley has an advantage as the former governor of a southern state that could be one of the most decisive primary battlegrounds, and her career has long been on a trajectory to a presidential race.
Her candidacy would bring the historic potential of the first woman in the Oval Office and her South Asian heritage could help the GOP win back women and more moderate voters. She added some foreign policy experience to her resume with a spell as the US ambassador to the United Nations under Trump.
Unlike many of his Cabinet members, she engineered a smooth exit from the Trump administration on her own terms. Her photo-op departure meeting with Trump in the Oval Office even then looked like potential footage for a future Republican primary campaign.
Haley is not being subtle about her pitch – one that could allow her to gently argue that it’s time to move on from the ex-president and President Joe Biden without directly repudiating the Trump presidency and his fans.
“It is time for a new generation. It is time for more leadership. … We have to remember, too, we have lost the last seven out of eight popular votes for president,” Haley said in a Fox News interview last month. “It is time we get a Republican in there that can lead and that can win a general election.”
She added: “I don’t think you need to be 80 years old to be a leader in DC.”
Yet the most fundamental question that Haley will face is whether the Republican base, which has rewarded culture warriors, extreme “Make America Great Again” rhetoric and election denialists, has any interest at all in what she plans to sell.
Her credentials look formidable in isolation but less so when considering the values of the party whose nomination she is seeking.
For example, is there really a market in the GOP for a more unifying, multicultural, less strident delivery vehicle for Trump’s “America First” creed? After all, the ex-president’s bombast, occasional profanity and laceration of liberal government and media elites create more of an emotional rather than a directly ideological connection with his biggest fans.
For sure, Haley might have advantages in a general election that would elude Trump, but she’s got to get past him first.
Flip flopping on Trump
Haley’s struggles to reconcile her past links with Trump and his wilder, anti-democratic outbursts, suggest she is vulnerable to counter-attacks from the former president focusing on her ambition and perceived shifting loyalties.
For instance, after leaving the administration on good terms, she rebuked her party for following Trump down a “path he shouldn’t have” taken with his election denialism that led to the January 6, 2021, insurrection. But with Trump still a powerful figure in the GOP, she repositioned herself in October 2021.
“We need him in the Republican Party. I don’t want us to go back to the days before Trump,” Haley said in an interview with the Wall Street Journal.
Trump, having said over the weekend that he’d told her to “do it” when she called him, is already homing in on Haley’s reversals. He put out a video on his Truth Social network Wednesday of Haley saying in 2021 that she wouldn’t run for president if he did.
And the former South Carolina governor’s casting around for the GOP sweet spot has some observers wondering exactly how she will build a sufficiently wide support base to take her to the nomination.
“I think there is just room for three candidates in this race. The more anti-Trumper – not a never Trumper, the Trump lite, which is where Ron DeSantis is, (and) Nikki Haley, and then Trump himself,” said former Illinois Republican Rep. Adam Kinzinger, who is now a senior CNN political commentator. “Nikki Haley’s struggle is going to be: she’s been pro-Trump, anti-Trump, she said she isn’t going to run if he runs, now he is going to run. She doesn’t really have a natural constituency yet. She’s a smart lady, so we will see how she goes.”
Pompeo eyeing a campaign
Haley isn’t the only Republican sending signals that they are ready to challenge Trump. Pompeo is delivering broad hints of a potential 2024 campaign.
“I’ve spent time in Iowa and New Hampshire. This is not random,” he said at a forum in Washington, DC, on Wednesday. “We’re just trying to figure our way through this. It is an unbelievably momentous decision to say you believe you should be the leader of the United States of America,” he added.
Pompeo appears to have an even more acute positioning issue than Haley, since he was the ex-president’s effective enforcer at the State Department and while director of the CIA, and shared many of the populist, nationalist foreign policy instincts of his former boss.
Almost everything that a GOP primary voter could get from Pompeo, they might be able to get from Trump, although the West Point graduate and former Kansas congressman would no doubt argue that he boasts a calmer temperament.
But Pompeo – like Haley, Scott, ex-Vice President Mike Pence, more marginal candidates and even DeSantis, if he gets in the race – all face the same problem. They might not fear Trump, but that doesn’t mean they can beat him.
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