Presidential Sweepstakes: Nikki Haley Gains Momentum in New Hampshire Moving to Second Place With 19% Support

Indian American presidential candidate Nikki Haley seems to be riding high after her strong performance in the two GOP primary debates. Although former president Trump is far ahead of his rivals in national polls, his recent actions have made it clear to Haley that he is cognizant of her rise. Two days after the Sept. 27 debate he attacked her as “birdbrain” on his social media site Truth Social. To prove that point, over the weekend, his campaign sent a birdcage and seed to her hotel. Speaking to Axios, Haley’s campaign manager Betsy Ankney called the behavior “weird, creepy and desperate,” and said it is “more proof that it’s time to leave the drama behind.”

The New York Times described “the bitter exchanges” between Haley and Trump as “the latest twist in the long relationship” between the two. A new Suffolk University/Boston Globe/USA TODAY survey released today shows Trump leading his “Republican rivals with 49 percent support— putting him 30 percentage points above Haley, his closest rival. She notched 19 percent support in this survey, while DeSantis was placed third with 10 percent. However, Axios reported that “no one else cracked double digits in the poll of 500 likely GOP primary voters that was conducted after the second debate and has a margin of error of plus-or-minus 4.4 percentage points.” 

Meanwhile, in her home state of South Carolina, the Indian American trails Trump with 17 percent of Republicans saying they support her nomination, according to the latest Winthrop poll. Director Scott Huffmon told Greenville news that while “a distant second, support for Nikki Haley has grown,” they “continue to see Trump’s dominance for the nomination in South Carolina” He noted that “Haley’s rise coincides with the continued slide of Ron DeSantis with his drop in national polls being mirrored in the state.” Her spokesman Ken Farnaso told the publication that Haley “takes nothing for granted, but is confident she’ll do very well” in the state. He said, “South Carolinians know how hard Nikki fought for taxpayers and jobs, and how she took on the establishment and won when she was governor.”

Before this, Trump had been mostly silent on Haley since she began her campaign in February. In a Feb. 3 interview with radio talk show host Hugh Hewitt, he said Haley was “overly ambitious.”

Haley has always “walked a fine line between praise and criticism of her former boss,” The Times noted in its report. She has commended him for his work for rural Americans and his handling of the U.S.-Mexico border compared to President Biden but has criticized his administration’s spending. She has said that unlike Trump, she believes that Jan. 6, 2021, the day the U.S. Capitol was violently ransacked by a pro-Trump mob intent on disrupting the formalization of Mr. Biden’s election win, was “a terrible day.”

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Last month, a CNN/SSRS poll named her as the only GOP presidential candidate who would beat Biden in a hypothetical 2024 match-up with a six percentage-point lead over Biden (49 percent to 43 percent). “It was the widest lead in any of any head-to-head pairs between Biden and a Republican presidential candidate,” Newsweek noted. “Even larger than the one of former President Donald Trump, who is the frontrunner in the GOP race.” She did “particularly well among white non-college graduates, who backed her by 62 percent and Biden by 28 percent,” the report added. “She also benefited from the support of male voters and voters aged 50 to 64,” while Biden “saw bigger gains among people of color and younger voters aged 18 to 34.”

After the first debate, conservative commentator Alyssa Farah Griffin said Haley “seems like a smart bet” for “a GOP donor looking for a Trump alternative.”A Washington Post/FiveThirtyEight/Ipsos tracker found that Haley showed the most improvement during the event, with support from GOP primary voters growing from 29 percent pre-debate to 46 percent after the debate. Her campaign also said that it received the highest number of grassroots donations in a single day in the 24 hours after the debate.

(Top photos, Nikki Haley for President, Facebook)