Nikki Haley starts election race with New Hampshire
2023.02.16 08:17
Nikki Haley starts election race with New Hampshire
By Tiffany Smith
Budrigannews.com – On Thursday, Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley will bring her nascent campaign to New Hampshire, where the former U.N. ambassador hopes to build momentum and raise her national profile.
This week, Haley became the second prominent Republican to announce that she will challenge her former boss, former President Donald Trump, for the party’s nomination for president in 2024. On Wednesday, the 51-year-old Indian immigrant daughter held her first campaign event in Charleston, South Carolina.
She was warmly received in front of a familiar crowd as the state’s former governor from 2011 to 2017, but she will face a new challenge in New Hampshire, which is expected to host the first Republican primary of the 2024 campaign.
Rob Godfrey, a Republican strategist who was Haley’s deputy chief of staff while she was governor, stated, “She was in front of a good, hometown crowd… The question is whether she will be able to carry that momentum into states where she is not as well known, places like Iowa and New Hampshire.” Godfrey was Haley’s deputy chief of staff.
Trump won the primary in New Hampshire in 2016, which set the stage for his successful first campaign. In 2020, he easily won the nomination again, but he lost his bid to be reelected to Democrat Joe Biden.
However, voters in the state have also repeatedly elected Republican Governor Chris Sununu, a much more moderate candidate than Trump, and rejected Don Bolduc, a hard-right Republican candidate for the U.S. Senate, in November.
Haley will give a talk at a town hall event in the evening in Exeter, which is about 70 kilometers (45 miles) north of Boston in southern New Hampshire.
Haley has emphasized the need for generational change in the early days of her campaign. Biden, who is expected to run for reelection but has not officially launched a campaign, is 80 years old, while Trump is 76 years old.
Haley has also cited her time as Trump’s U.N. ambassador from 2017 to 2018 as evidence that she can confront geopolitical adversaries like China and Russia.
She has a lot on her plate. According to a poll conducted by Reuters and Ipsos and released on Tuesday, only 4% of registered Republicans supported the former governor for president.
In the poll that was conducted between the 6th and 13th of February, 43% of registered Republicans indicated that they supported Trump, while 31% indicated that they supported Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, who is expected to launch a campaign but has not yet done so.
The first two events of the U.S. presidential nominating season have traditionally been the Iowa caucus and the New Hampshire primary.
This year, Democrats have decided to start the campaign in South Carolina rather than those two states, which are less diverse than the nation as a whole. Republicans intend to proceed in the same manner.
Haley will make two campaign appearances in Iowa next week.
