Paul Scarpellini Los Angeles
Updated Wednesday, January 24, 2024 – 18:36
The polling stations in New Hampshire had been open for a few minutes when his team rushed to send a statement. “We’re not going anywhere,” he wrote. Betsy Ankneyhis campaign manager, summoning voters for the next big season in these atypical Republican Party primaries: South Carolina. Shortly after, the same candidate, Nikki Haley, endorsed the message. “This is a marathon, not a sprint,” she told a group of journalists.
It is clear that the former United States ambassador to the UN has no intention of throwing in the towel, no matter how dark the path that the polls predict for her may be compared to the undisputed favorite in the race: Donald Trump. And in that determination and courage may lie the final amount of her loot.
Haley, in some ways, has already won. It doesn’t matter that the abyss seems unavoidable after what was seen in Iowa and New Hampshire. A few weeks ago she was one of a cloud of aspiring to overthrow the former president’s populism, and today she is the leader of the resistance against inveterate Trumpism, “The last one standing”, as she herself emphasized. Her face and her name sound with increasing force in the corners where the elections are decided and His speech is beginning to resonate with moderate conservatives. and those nostalgic for the old order of the party. “I’m neither extreme right nor extreme left. She (Haley) is a little to the right, but much closer to the center than any of the other options,” one of the voters told the AP agency on the outskirts of a community center in New Hampshire.
If not now, another opportunity to find a way to the White House may arise. He has time. His 52 years are an asset that he has successfully wielded repeatedly in the campaign, calling into question the capacity of “two octogenarians” –Joe Biden He is 81 years old and Trump will turn 80 during his second term – to lead the country. Three days ago he questioned the mental health of his Republican rival after confusing her with Nancy Pelosi.
He also boasts of having broken a few molds, an almost essential factor in these times to move away from the old political establishment. At only 32 years old he managed to defeat the veteran Larry Koon in the elections to the state House of Representatives, a politician who had clung to his position for more than 30 years. Six years later he managed to make history in the gubernatorial elections. The daughter of the only Indian immigrant family in the town where she was born, Bamberg, she took office, the first minority governor to do so and the youngest in the United States at the time.
Curiously, Trump was the man who nominated her for the position of US ambassador to the UN in 2016 and member of the Security Council. He now perceives it as a danger to the country and a disappointment to his party colleagues, guilty of having instigated the assault on the Capitol in January 2021. “We cannot let that happen again,” he said then. Also interesting is that her name would be mentioned as a potential candidate for vice president in 2016 as a running mate of the man she is now trying to defeat at the polls.
Haley, a mother of two, considers herself a patriot, “blessed to be able to live in America.” She is married to a war veteran who served in Afghanistan in 2013, Michael Haley, and fits with a part of the traditional Republican ideology. She is against abortion, defends the right to keep and bear arms and is in favor of immigrants carrying documentation to verify their legal status at all times. At the same time, she admits that she believes in climate change – even though she was in favor of abandoning the Paris climate accords under President Trump – and that she was a Democrat who inspired her to launch a political career. : Hillary Clinton.
His number two in the governorship of the State was another Democrat, Yancey McGill, and in the summer of 2015 he signed a law to remove the controversial Confederate flag from the offices of the South Carolina Capitol after the massacre committed in 2015 by a white supremacist in an African Methodist church in Charleston. He said no one has the right to feel pain when passing a flag.
Here, on this particular American planet, Haley is perceived as a center-right option, a formula with which she still hopes to avoid the second part of a duel that no one wants to repeat: Biden vs Trump.
