Nikki Haley is having a moment. Polling in the key primary state of New Hampshire suggests that the sole female Republican presidential candidate has surged ahead of the charisma-challenged Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, who has tried to position himself as the alternative to Donald Trump.
More significantly, this week Haley received the backing of the political network founded by the Koch brothers, the right-wing businessmen whose vast wealth made them such mighty powerbrokers on the American right.
Might she become the first “Madam President”? The then US ambassador to the UN, Nikki Haley, meets Donald Trump in the White House in 2018. Now, she is his Republican rival.Credit: AP
Let us put to one side how the influence of elderly billionaires shows that US politics is not just a gerontocracy but also a plutocracy. David Koch died in 2019, aged 79, while 88-year-old Charles is still active.
More germane is that Haley is solidifying her status as Trump’s main rival.
The former president, of course, remains the presumptive nominee. With the ongoing backing of the MAGA faithful, his cult-like base, he remains way ahead of his rivals. Not even 91 felony counts have damaged his prospects of remaining the party’s figurehead.
Instead, he can portray himself as a MAGA martyr, and arouse among supporters the same sense of shared victimhood which in 2016 helped explain how a New York property tycoon became a working-class hero in the Rust Belt.
Winning the presidency, however, is a wholly different undertaking than securing the Republican presidential nomination because of the need for broader electoral appeal. And this, in essence, is Nikki Haley’s pitch.
One poll last month suggested that she posed significantly more of a threat to Joe Biden than Trump. In a hypothetical match-up, Haley trounced Biden by 10 points, 55 per cent to 45 per cent. If the Republican Party was rational, which, in its Trumpian period, it most definitely is not, then she would not only stand a strong chance of becoming its first female presidential nominee but also America’s first Madam President.
The 51-year-old Haley has an impressive resumé. In deeply conservative South Carolina, where the first shots rang out in the American Civil War, she became the state’s first female governor. What made this all the more remarkable is that she is an Indian American whose name at birth was Nimrata Nikki Randhawa.
Haley was governor in 2015, when Dylann Roof, a white supremacist who had draped himself in the Confederate flag, massacred nine African-American parishioners at a Black church in Charleston. Bravely, Haley called for the removal of the Confederate flag from the grounds of the State House, where it had been hoisted in the early 1960s as a rebuke to the civil rights movement.
I was there the day when the flag came down, a ceremony that felt like the final surrender of the Civil War. Little did we know that what we were actually witnessing that summer was the beginning of the white nationalist counter-offensive headed by Trump. In a strange quirk of history, he launched his presidential bid the very day before the Charleston massacre.
During the Trump presidency, Haley served as America’s United Nations ambassador, and drew praise from her boss for bringing “glamour” to that role. Though a foreign policy neophyte, she quickly established herself as a formidable diplomat.
From her seat at the Security Council’s famed horseshoe table, she excoriated the Russians, a bold move since Trump was so smitten with Vladimir Putin. At a time when UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres privately expressed fears that the US president could destroy the global body with a single tweet, Haley helped protect it from the “America First” wrecking ball.
After the Capitol Hill attack of January 6, 2021, she said Trump would be “judged harshly by history”, although she quickly backtracked when it became clear that many Republicans supported his attempt to overturn the 2020 election. Haley’s campaign launch video also spoke of her political timidity in the face of the MAGA mob. Footage of her most courageous act, the lowering of those Confederate colours, was banished from view.
More recently, she’s become the cut-through star of the Republican televised debates, which, in the absence of a boycotting Donald Trump, have felt like watching Gladiator without the thunderous presence of Russell Crowe’s Maximus Decimus Meridius.
Let’s play fantasy punditry for a moment, and imagine an improbable scenario in which Trump either withdraws or somehow gets beaten by Haley. Having overcome Trump, would she then be able to defy history and break one of the world’s most impregnable glass ceilings?
Misogyny in American politics runs deep. It was the founding fathers who produced the US Constitution, and when the country’s second first lady, Abigail Adams, told her husband, John, that women should get the vote, he witheringly responded that America should not succumb to “the despotism of the petticoat”.
The 19th amendment, guaranteeing women the right to vote, was not ratified until 1920, 18 years after nationwide female suffrage in Australia. Even though female politicians started winning election to the US Senate in the 1930s, as recently as the 1970s there were times when not a single seat was occupied by a woman. At the beginning of the 1990s, there were just two female senators.
For all that, the glass will surely be shattered. Indeed, were it not for the vagaries of the Electoral College, one of the founding fathers’ more problematic inventions, America would already have had a female president. In 2016, Hillary Clinton received nearly 3 million more votes than Donald Trump. It was just that they weren’t distributed in the right states.
Hillary Clinton in the hours after her defeat and Donald Trump’s election in 2016 as the 45th president of the United States. Credit: Bloomberg/Andrew Harrer
Today, there are a record number of female US senators (although still only 25 out of 100) and an unprecedented number of female state governors (12 out of 50). America also has its first Madam Vice President, Kamala Harris.
Few Democrats, however, think Harris should replace Biden as the nominee, partly because of fears of misogynoir – the combination of racism and sexism – and partly because she was a lacklustre candidate in the past.
Assumptions about the electability of women have long been a bar to female advancement. Furthermore, as well as contending with male chauvinism, Hillary Clinton struggled in 2016 to mobilise a sisterhood. Even after he was heard boasting about sexually molesting women in the Access Hollywood tape, Trump won more white, female voters than she did.
Yet, at a time when American conservative politics has become such a dumpster inferno, the mere fact that Haley is getting so much buzz and Koch network money is a shaft of light. When it comes to women’s leadership, moreover, it is worth bearing in mind that if Biden wins re-election with Harris at his side, she’ll remain an old man’s heartbeat away from the presidency.
Nick Bryant is the author of When America Stopped Being Great: A History of the Present.
Get a weekly wrap of views that will challenge, champion and inform your own. Sign up for our Opinion newsletter.