President Haley?

My thoughts on Nikki Haley in 2024.

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November 2020

In November 2020, I stepped up to the voting machine in Georgia and faced two names at the top of the ballot: Joseph Biden and Donald Trump (I think there was a libertarian too but who cares). I followed the road not traveled and went with the “write-in” option. Once I was done, my ballot was printed, and right there at the top of the paper ballot was my write-in choice: Nikki Haley.

As you can imagine, I was particularly interested in the news that Haley is going to announce her presidential run in the middle of February. One would think that I would be over the moon that my 2020 write-in vote is deciding to run for president in 2024, but I am… unsure.

So, why did I vote for Haley in 2020 and what has happened to make me less sure? I’ll start with the first question.

Nikki Haley’s Record

Nikki Haley’s story is relatively well-known (and is about to become even more familiar), but it’s worth recapping as it is a remarkable story. Haley’s parents, both very well-educated, moved from Punjab, India to the United States before Haley was born. She was born and raised in South Carolina, attending Clemson University where she studied accounting. After graduating, she worked as an accountant until 2004 when she decided to run for South Carolina’s House of Representatives where she served until 2010.

In 2010, Haley ran for governor of South Carolina and won. As governor of South Carolina, she was responsible for removing the Confederate flag from the South Carolina capitol grounds (more on that later) and appointed Tim Scott to fill South Carolina’s vacated Senate seat. In 2016, Haley resigned as governor to join the Trump administration as the United States ambassador to the United Nations. She served in the United Nations for two years before resigning to pursue other endeavors (read paid speeches and prepare for a presidential run in 2024).

There were a couple of things about Haley’s record that were specifically appealing to me in 2020 when I voted for her. First, Haley was a governor of a state. It is one of my strongest held beliefs that someone who has been a governor of a state is a better candidate for president than a legislator.

Senators and Representatives (especially on the Federal level) can grandstand around for years without actually doing anything except argue because of the nature of their job. This is fine for legislators, but governors don’t have that same luxury. They have to keep a state running and deal with emergencies/situations as they happen. They are forced to make hard calls, delegate power, appoint competent people to positions of power, and appeal to a wider array of people. Haley’s successful governorship of South Carolina demonstrated her ability to do all this, and more, well.

Haley’s fight to remove the Confederate flag from the statehouse grounds in South Carolina was also impressive to me. The issue was forced after the Charleston church shooting occurred in which a white supremacist killed nine African-American church members. While there were certainly calls from both sides to remove the Confederate flag, Haley reportedly had to fight many in South Carolina’s legislature to get them to pass the necessary bill to remove the flag. In fact, the state GOP chairman at the time, Matt Moore, has since said that he believed the vote was going to fail until Haley gave a speech to the legislators.

Haley chose to pick the fight when she could have simply placated the calls for removal with words while blaming the legislature for refusing to do anything, leaving her “hands tied.” As someone who has a deep antipathy toward anything Confederate, I thought this was an example of choosing to do the right thing simply because it is the right thing to do.

Finally, Haley’s experience as the U. S. ambassador to the United Nations was another notch on her belt that made me vote for her in 2020. As ambassador, Haley gave one of my absolute favorite speeches ever given by a politician. When the Trump administration decided to move the U. S. embassy in Israel to Jerusalem, the United Nations General Embassy voted to condemn the decision. Before the vote, Haley gave this speech:

Essentially, Haley told the U.N. that the U.S. was taking names and would reconsider its support for the U.N. and any country in the U.N. that decided to condemn its decision. I despise faux international organizations like the U.N. so to finally see a U.S. ambassador eviscerate the U.N. and defend the U.S. for simply acting as a sovereign nation was a true delight and made me want to see it from her as president.

Nikki Haley Post-2020

So, what has made me more hesitant this time around? To be clear, I am not opposed to Nikki Haley, and depending on whether Brian Kemp runs (there has been no reporting that he is going to and I would be shocked if he did but #Kemp2024 nonetheless), I will probably vote for Haley again. I do have more reservations this time around than in 2020 though.

To be blunt, Haley has a Trump problem. This is surprising considering Haley was one of the few Republicans to join the Trump administration and leave it with a pretty much stellar reputation from all segments of the party. Never-Trumpers admired her for not defending Trump when he said indefensible things, along with her job as an ambassador. At the same time, she received heaps of praise from Trump himself upon her resignation putting her in the good graces of that wing of the Republican Party.

Haley has attempted to keep it this way, but she has been unable to largely due to the actions of Trump himself. After the 2020 election, Haley basically refused to condemn Trump for claiming the election was stolen. Then, she came out against Trump following the January 6th riot saying that it was time to acknowledge that Trump “let us down” only to come back to Trump’s support a few weeks later promising not to run in 2024 if he did. Now, she’s gone against that and is backtracking again.

This flip-flopping from Haley is the exact opposite of what brought her to this point. She has been lauded for her principled stances and her unwillingness to waver from those principles all while still working to get things done. However, it’s very clear that now she is just trying to guess which way the Republican winds are blowing so that she can catch them and ride them to the White House.

It would be one thing if Haley had gone the Brian Kemp route of keeping her head down, running on her record, and ignoring Trump at all costs. I would rather Republicans come out against Trump, but I understand why they can’t do that and expect to win any election again. Ignoring Trump is at least a principled stance that I can respect. I can’t respect Haley’s backtracking because she said what she believed to be true and received backlash for it. Either be disciplined enough to say nothing or stand by what you say.

As Tim Alberta wrote in a piece for Politico back in 2021:

First, Nikki Haley is going to run for president in 2024. Second, she doesn’t know which Nikki Haley will be on the ballot. Will it be the Haley who has proven so adaptive and so canny that she might accommodate herself to the dark realities of a Trump-dominated party? Will it be the Haley who is combative and confrontational and had a history of giving no quarter to xenophobes? Or will it be the Haley who refuses to choose between these characters, believing she can be everything to everyone?

Now that Haley is running for president, she is going to have to decide. Only time and Nikki Haley will tell which route she takes, but my decision in 2024 will be greatly influenced by which decision she makes.

God Bless,

Hunter Burnett