Throughout her campaign, Nikki Haley has sought to tread a fine line in talking about her gender. She emphasizes elements of her life and career that inherently set her apart in an otherwise all-male field, but avoids leaning into identity politics in ways that might repel the largely white and graying base of conservative voters she needs to court in order to win the nomination.
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Former President Donald J. Trump paved a path to the presidency in 2016 by calling for a “big, beautiful wall” along the United States border with Mexico.
His 2024 rivals in the Republican primary election, scrapping for every advantage against him, looked north.
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The first-in-the-nation primary could be the last stand for the anti-Trump Republican.
Since 2016, a shrinking band of Republican strategists, retired lawmakers and donors has tried to oust Donald J. Trump from his commanding position in the party. And again and again, through one Capitol riot, two impeachments, three presidential elections and four criminal indictments, they have failed to gain traction with its voters.
Now, after years of legal, cultural and political crises that upended American norms and expectations, what could be the final battle of the anti-Trump Republicans won’t be waged in Congress or the courts, but in the packed ski lodges and snowy town halls of a state of 1.4 million residents.
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Once distant rivals in the 2024 presidential race, Ron DeSantis and Nikki Haley are now locked in a heated battle to become the most viable Republican alternative to former President Donald J. Trump, seizing on the Israel-Hamas conflict to hurl broadsides at each other.
In a flurry of mailers, online posts and media appearances this week, Mr. DeSantis, the governor of Florida, and Ms. Haley, the former governor of South Carolina and a United Nations ambassador under Mr. Trump, have feuded over their positions on U.S. humanitarian aid and accepting refugees as Israel prepares to invade Gaza.
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Crime in American cities. The national opioid crisis. Election integrity. And now a terror attack considered the deadliest day for Jews in Israel’s 75-year history.
Not long after Hamas terrorists killed and kidnapped hundreds of Israelis this month, a wave of Republicans — on the presidential campaign trail, in state and congressional races and in the far-right corners of conservative media — reached for a familiar playbook: tying the issue to the nation’s southern border.
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Nikki Haley on Friday knocked two of her Republican presidential rivals, Donald J. Trump and Vivek Ramaswamy, over their recent comments on Israel, underscoring the deepening divide within the party around the “America First” anti-interventionist stance that Mr. Trump made a core part of his first campaign.
Mr. Trump, Ms. Haley suggested, lacks moral clarity and has not left “the baggage and negativity” of the past behind, an apparent reference to Mr. Trump’s still-simmering animosity toward Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, over events that include his congratulating President Biden on winning the 2020 election. Mr. Ramaswamy, meanwhile, sounds more like a liberal Democrat than a Republican, Ms. Haley said.
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State Highway 86 stretches west from Tucson, Ariz., past saguaros and desert peaks into Tohono O’odham Nation, the second largest reservation in the state. It is a road that tribal members say no Senate candidate in recent memory has ventured down.
But on a sweltering afternoon, Representative Ruben Gallego, a progressive Democrat from Phoenix, spent several hours with Tohono O’odham leaders and community members, fielding questions in a series of small round table meetings, touring an affordable housing project and making the pitch for his 2024 Senate run.
“The reason why we’re here is because a lot of times the only time you see a politician come down is the last week of the elections,” Mr. Gallego told a handful of attendees during an evening meet-and-greet in Sells, Ariz., the tribal capital, on Friday.
The stop was part of Mr. Gallego’s push to visit all of the 22 federally recognized tribes in Arizona before Election Day next year. It is a feat, he says, that few, if any, contenders in a statewide race have ever attempted — and one he believes will help pave his path to victory in what is likely to be one of the most competitive Senate races in the country.
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Republicans are growing anxious that their chances of capturing a Senate seat in Arizona would be diminished in a potential three-way race that included Kyrsten Sinema, the independent incumbent.
While Ms. Sinema hasn’t announced whether she will run for re-election, the race already includes Representative Ruben Gallego, a Democrat, and Kari Lake, a Republican scheduled to host her first campaign rally on Tuesday.
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Arizona’s high-profile Senate race has not yet begun in earnest, but on Thursday, the Republican Kari Lake and Representative Ruben Gallego, a Democrat, were already trading barbs — in midair.
Ms. Lake, the former news anchor who refused to concede her loss in the state’s governor’s race last year, and Mr. Gallego, a progressive congressman from the state’s capital, ended up on the same flight from Washington, D.C., to Phoenix, where they began wrangling over the border wall.
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Until recently, former President Donald J. Trump mostly ignored Nikki Haley, a former governor of South Carolina and his onetime United Nations ambassador turned rival in the 2024 presidential race. No longer.
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The Republican Party has been on a quest to make inroads with Hispanic voters, and the second presidential debate was tailored to delivering that message: The setting was California, where Latinos now make up the largest racial or ethnic demographic. The Spanish-language network Univision broadcast the event in Spanish, and Ilia Calderón, the first Afro-Latina to anchor a weekday prime-time newscast on a major network in the United States, was a moderator.
But questions directly on Latino and immigrant communities tended to be overtaken by bickering and candidates taking swipes at one another on unrelated subjects. Only three candidates — former Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey, former Vice President Mike Pence and Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina — referred directly to Latinos or Hispanics at all. And only Mr. Pence pitched his economic message specifically toward Hispanic voters.
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Suresh Reddy, a centrist Democrat and city councilman, is watching the Republican presidential primary with a mix of pride and disappointment.
When Mr. Reddy and his wife, Chandra Gangareddy, immigrants from southern India, settled in the Des Moines suburbs in September 2004, they could count the number of Indian American families on one hand. Only one Indian American had ever served in Congress at the time, and none had dared to mount a bid for the White House.
Now, for the first time in the nation’s history, two Indian Americans — Nikki Haley and Vivek Ramaswamy — are serious presidential contenders who regularly invoke their parents’ immigrant roots. But their deeply conservative views, on display as they seek the Republican nomination, make it difficult for Mr. Reddy to fully celebrate the moment, he said.
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At a campaign event at a scenic country club in Portsmouth, N.H, on Thursday, James Peterson, a businessman, thrilled an audience when he stunned Nikki Haley with a question she said she had never heard before, and which cut straight to the point: 100 years from now, how do you think history will remember Donald Trump?
“I always say, ‘I’ve done over 80 town halls in New Hampshire and Iowa — that’s all the debate prep I need,’ but you take it to a whole new level,” Ms. Haley said to a roar of laughter from roughly 100 Rotary Club members and their guests.
She then took a quick beat before diving into a measured, yet sharpened, critique of Mr. Trump and his administration — the good, the bad, and with some subtlety, the ugly.
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Nikki Haley was polling in the low digits, fighting for oxygen among better-known and better-funded rivals in a contest clouded by scandal and involving the man whose job they all sought.
This was 2009, and Ms. Haley was the underdog candidate for governor of South Carolina. At the state Republican Party’s convention that year, she was the last contender to speak. Before she took the podium, Katon Dawson, then the state party’s chairman, handed her a rust-coated nail from a jar collected from an old building in Orangeburg.
“‘Honey, this is a tenpenny, rusty nail,’” Mr. Dawson recalled he told Ms. Haley. “‘You’re going to need to be meaner and tougher than that to get through this.’”
In Mr. Dawson’s telling, Ms. Haley was unfazed, responding: “‘No problem, I’m going to be governor.’”
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Breaking from her usual stump speech at a South Carolina town hall event on Monday, Nikki Haley paused to condemn a deadly weekend rampage in Jacksonville, Fla., that the authorities were investigating as a hate crime.
“I am not going to lie to you, it takes me back to a dark place,” Ms. Haley told an audience of roughly 1,000 people gathered in a corporate campus auditorium in Indian Land. “There is no place for hate in America.”
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Less than 30 minutes into the first Republican presidential debate, the men onstage were bickering — just as Nikki Haley predicted.
“I think this is exactly why Margaret Thatcher said, ‘If you want something said, ask a man,’” quipped Ms. Haley, the former governor of South Carolina and former ambassador to the United Nations. “If you want something done, ask a woman.”
The response was the beginning of a standout performance for Ms. Haley, who already cut a distinct figure: the lone woman in the Republican field, standing in a white and light blue suit-style dress among a stretch of men in nearly men in nearly identical red ties red ties.
Her Thatcher line — a favorite on the stump and the inspiration for the title of one of her books — captured the balance she has sought to strike between testing her party’s attitudes and not leaning too far into her gender. But Ms. Haley, who has struggled to gain traction in primary polls dominated by Donald J. Trump, did not always stay above the fray.
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Former Vice President Mike Pence sought once more on Wednesday to define himself as the staunchest opponent of abortion in the Republican field, citing his faith and taking a swipe at the former United Nations ambassador Nikki Haley, who has tried to pull off a difficult balancing act on the issue.
“To be honest with you, Nikki — you’re my friend, but consensus is the opposite of leadership,” Mr. Pence said, criticizing Ms. Haley for saying there needed to be congressional consensus between Republicans and Democrats before the federal government could play a role in restricting abortion. “It’s not a states-only issue. It’s a moral issue.”
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Less than an hour after a grand jury in Atlanta returned indictments in the 2020 election interference case in Georgia, Hillary Clinton on Monday called the developments “a terrible moment for our country.”
The indictment, released late on Monday evening, charges former President Donald J. Trump in a sprawling case. Before the charges were made public, Mrs. Clinton gave a previously scheduled late-night interview on MSNBC. She said that she felt “great profound sadness” that the former president had already been indicted on so many other charges that “went right to the heart of whether or not our democracy would survive.”
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Candidate after candidate at an Iowa Republican dinner on Friday avoided so much as mentioning the dominant front-runner in the race, former President Donald J. Trump.
But when Mr. Trump took the stage after more than two hours of speeches by his lower-polling rivals, it took him less than three minutes to unleash his first direct attack of the night on his leading challenger, Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida.
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Nikki Haley is campaigning at a grueling pace as she fights to stay competitive in the Republican presidential contest, crisscrossing Iowa and New Hampshire to find a clear lane forward in a race dominated by Donald J. Trump and his mountain of legal problems.
So far, that path is elusive.
By many measures, Ms. Haley is running a healthy campaign poised to capitalize on rivals’ mistakes. She has built a robust fund-raising operation and her team has cash to spare: A super PAC backing her this week announced a $13 million advertising effort in Iowa and New Hampshire. And at events, voters often like what she has to say.
“She is not pounding the pulpit,” Eric Ray, 42, a Republican legal defense consultant in Iowa, said after watching her speak at a barbecue restaurant last weekend in Iowa City, adding that she had his vote. “She is not jumping up and down. She is not screaming the word ‘woke.’ She is making reasonable arguments for reasonable people.”
Yet as Ms. Haley tries to occupy a lonely realm between the moderate and far-right wings of her party, her attempts to gain national traction — talking openly about her positions on abortion, taking a hard stance against transgender girls playing in girls’ sports, attacking Vice President Kamala Harris — appear to be falling flat with the Republican base at large.
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