Nikki Haley: Would She Run for President 2024? – Long rumored to be considering a 2024 run, former United States Ambassador Nikki Haley this week distanced herself from former President Donald Trump and firmly sided with former Vice President Mike Pence on the matter of election fraud.
“Mike Pence is a good man. He’s an honest man, I think he did what he thought was right on that day,” Haley told Fox News’s Bret Baier on Monday.
Her comments came after the former vice president, who is also rumored to be considering a 2024 run, said that the former president was wrong about his role in the certification of presidential electors.
“President Trump is wrong. I had no right to overturn the election,” Pence told the audience at a Federalist Society event hosted in Florida.
Nikki Haley Changes Her Tune, Considers Run Against Trump in 2024
In April 2021, former South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley indicated that she would not launch a bid for the GOP presidential nomination if former President Donald Trump announced a third run.“I would not run if President Trump ran, and I would talk to him about it,” Haley told The Associated Press. “That’s something that we’ll have a conversation about at some point if that decision is something that has to be made.”
In October, however, Haley reversed course and said that she will decide whether or not to run independently of whether the former president announces another bid for the presidency.
In an interview with the Wall Street Journal, Haley said that the former president is a “friend” who she would consult before announcing her own bid for the nomination, she doesn’t agree with him on the issue of election fraud.
“There was fraud in the election, but I don’t think that the numbers were so big that it swayed the vote in the wrong direction,” she said.
Nikki Haley: Can She Win?
Right now, no.
The 2024 GOP nomination could be even more competitive than 2016, with polls showing that American voters want a GOP president to replace President Joe Biden. After a year of economic decline and rising inflation, winning in 2024 is already on the cards for any Republican candidate – but Haley barely registers on the polls.
One Reuters/Ipsos poll showed former President Donald Trump with 54% support, and Haley with just 4%. The former South Carolina governor registered had just half the support of Vice President Mike Pence, and barely more than Marco Rubio, Chris Christie, and Greg Abbott.
For Hayley to succeed in 2024, she will either need the support of former President Trump’s large GOP base or for other candidates to make way and allow support to consolidate behind her campaign.
Jack Buckby is a British author, counter-extremism researcher, and journalist based in New York. Reporting on the U.K., Europe, and the U.S., he works to analyze and understand left-wing and right-wing radicalization, and report on Western governments’ approaches to the pressing issues of today. His books and research papers explore these themes and propose pragmatic solutions to our increasingly polarized society.
