What Is Nikki Haley Even Talking About?
Photographs by Cody O’Loughlin
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ikki Haley was standing a few feet in front of me on a warm December night in New Hampshire. She had just finished a town-hall event at a Manchester ski lodge, from which no snow was visible for miles except the manufactured white stuff coating a sad little hill outside.
Presidential candidates often try to conjure a sense of momentum around their campaign, and Haley’s had been accumulating the key elements: rising poll numbers, crowd sizes, and fundraising sums. Her ascendancy began around Thanksgiving, an unofficial benchmark for when voters supposedly tune in to primary campaigns. Among many of them, the former South Carolina governor and United Nations ambassador had become a source of intrigue: Could she actually win? Or was she merely the latest contender to lead a post–Donald Trump Republican Party that never arrives?
I was in New Hampshire to gauge the extent of this apparent upsurge. Of all the campaign events in the past year—except Trump’s, which occupy their own category—Haley’s have been the most commanding. She has run the best race against Trump out of a motley bunch of Republicans—far better than former Vice President Mike Pence and South Carolina Senator Tim Scott, both long gone; Vivek Ramaswamy, whose yapping provocations gained him early notoriety but grated fast; and especially Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, who squandered his early status as Trump’s main challenger—and massive amounts of cash—by turning out to be a colossal dud of a candidate. (“Like a wounded bird falling from the sky,” Trump said of DeSantis, an overlooked but fascinatingly poetic assessment.)
On this night in Manchester, I watched Haley pound out a stump speech about how, among other things, her main achievement as UN ambassador was to take “the kick-me sign off of our backs.” And how “our kids need to know to love America.” And
