Minutes after it became clear she had lost this week’s New Hampshire primary to Donald Trump, a beaming Nikki Haley strode on stage as the rock anthem “Eye of the Tiger” blasted over the loudspeakers.
“Now, you have all heard the chatter among the political class. They are falling all over themselves saying this race is over,” Haley told supporters in Concord, the state capital. “Well, I have news for all of them. New Hampshire is first in the nation. It is not the last in the nation.”
Haley, the former South Carolina governor and one-time US ambassador to the UN, lost Tuesday’s Republican primary by 11 points to Trump. A week earlier, she came in third in the Iowa caucuses, pipped to the post by Florida governor Ron DeSantis, who later suspended his campaign, saying he had no “clear path to victory”.
Trump has called Haley an “imposter” and demanded she follow suit. But she has vowed to press on with the next major primary contest in her home state of South Carolina, where opinion polls show her trailing Trump by some 40 points. Haley, who turned 52 last week, says detractors underestimate her at their peril.
“At one point in this campaign, there were 14 of us running, and we were at 2 per cent in the polls,” she said in Concord. “Well, I’m a fighter, and I’m scrappy, and now we’re the last ones standing.”
Katon Dawson, former chair of the South Carolina Republican party, says Haley has the “grit” to keep going — and admits he doubted her political prowess in the past, starting with her first race in 2004, a long-shot bid to oust an incumbent state legislator. “I never thought she would beat him. Never, never, never — and she did,” he says. “Now she tells me . . . ‘I’m going to be president.’ I will take her for her word.”
Nimarata Nikki Randhawa was born and raised in Bamberg, South Carolina, the daughter of Sikh immigrants from Punjab, in northern India. The third of four children, she wrote in her 2012 memoir about the challenges they faced as the only Indian family in a small southern town still grappling with racial segregation.
She and her sister were once disqualified from a children’s pageant that traditionally crowned a black winner and a white winner, with the judges telling the Randhawas: “We don’t have a place for you.” On the 2024 campaign trail, race has proven a thorny subject for Haley, who at one point stumbled over a voter’s question about what caused the civil war, and more recently insisted the US has “never been a racist country”.
Haley skipped the second grade and began doing bookkeeping for the family’s clothing business in middle school. She earned a scholarship to study textile management at Clemson University, but later switched her major to accounting. Her first weekend there, she met her future husband, Bill Haley, whom she calls by his middle name, Michael.
The two married in 1996, with separate Sikh and Christian ceremonies. Haley converted to Christianity. They had two children: a daughter, Rena, and a son, Nalin. Michael, a commissioned officer in the South Carolina Army National Guard, is currently stationed in Africa.
Haley worked for the family business before turning to politics. With virtually no name recognition, she launched a 2004 primary challenge against fellow Republican Larry Koon, a 30-year veteran of the South Carolina statehouse. She beat him by 10 points. Six years later, she launched a long-shot campaign for governor, facing off against three more experienced Republicans.
“Nikki Haley was a mere statehouse representative running against an incumbent lieutenant-governor, an incumbent attorney-general and an incumbent congressman,” recalls Whit Ayres, a veteran Republican pollster. “She not only beat all three of those guys, she stomped them.”
Haley’s time as governor was marked by the 2015 massacre at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church, when a white supremacist gunned down nine black churchgoers. After the shooting, Haley called for the removal of the Confederate flag from the South Carolina state Capitol.
Haley cut short her second term as governor when then President Trump nominated her ambassador to the UN, a role she took up in January 2017. She was a staunch defender of Israel and harsh critic of Iran, Russia and Syria. While she occasionally publicly disagreed with the administration, she resigned in late 2018 on good terms with Trump, who at the time said she had done an “incredible job”.
In 2021, Haley told reporters she would not run for president if Trump ran again. But two years later, she changed tack, and in February 2023, she became the first of more than a dozen Republicans to challenge him for the party’s presidential nomination. Haley’s poll numbers improved gradually, with a series of strong debate performances and the increased interest of Wall Street donors willing to fund her campaign.
Now, as she insists that being vice-president is “off the table”, Haley is the last woman standing — something she seems to relish pointing out. “There were a lot of fellas. All of the fellas are out, except for this one,” Haley said, shortly after DeSantis dropped out.
“When we win the presidency in this country, I will do everything I can to prove to you that you made the right decision,” she added with a smile. “But for now, I will leave you with this: may the best woman win.”
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