On paper, Nikki Haley should be a top-tier contender in the 2024 Republican primary. She’s a successful former governor from an important, early primary state. She has an impressive personal backstory, solid foreign policy chops, and great candidate skills, too. This used to be an extremely attractive package for GOP primary voters.
Used to be.
But not anymore.
While many Republican voters may be moving off Trump the man, the forces that he unleashed within the party—economic populism, isolationist foreign policy, election denialism, and above all, an unapologetic and vulgar focus on fighting culture war issues—remain incredibly popular with GOP voters
While other old-school Republicans such as Jeff Flake, Ben Sasse, and Liz Cheney were exorcised from the party, Haley tried her best to hold on. Since 2016, she has not so much threaded the Trump needle as vacillated between being a staunch Trump supporter and a wobbly-kneed critic.
So how will she win constituencies from either new MAGA-friendly voters or old-guard establishment types? Haley isn’t like another potential fusion candidate, Georgia Governor Brian Kemp, who has a strong record of conservative policies that better fit the current iteration of the Republican party while also breaking from Trump over his election fraud claims.
And she certainly isn’t a Ron DeSantis-style, four-star general in the culture wars.