Over half of Americans say they would not support Donald Trump if he were to win the 2024 Republican nomination, a new report from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research says. The American people, including Republicans, want change; they do not want a Trump versus Biden re-run in the 2024 elections. In order to stop this from happening, the U.S. needs a Republican candidate who can truly stand up against Trump and former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley proved she is that candidate during the August Republican debate and solidified that position during the September debate.
Although Haley only had two percent of Republicans’ support before the August debate, she saw the largest increase in support among Republican candidates, going from two percent to seven percent after the debates, according to a survey from Emerson College polling. This is because only she has the ability to forcibly shut down the show the Republican party is currently putting on, which she reaffirmed during the September debate and maintained her high approval ratings.
During the Sept. 27 debate, she once again showed her intentions to stop playing games when she called out Trump’s presidential failures, and highlighted the need for transparent healthcare. New York Times opinion columnist David Brooks says it best, “Haley seemed to look at the Trump/Ramaswamy wing and implicitly say: You children need to stop preening and deal with reality. She showed total impatience for the kind of bravado that the fragile male ego manufactures by the boatload.”
Trump approaches politics as a form of entertainment, butHaley is here to shut that down. She is a slap in the face to the Republican party, telling them they need to wake up from the dream they’ve been in and truly deal with the issues of the U.S. She even called out Trump on mistakes made during presidency, saying he “added 8 trillion to our [America’s] debt.”
Haley promotes herself as a more “moderate” Republican, even exposing the U.S.’s need to fix “our broken immigration system,” while still opposing open borders in an effort to promote “legal immigration.” This is a clear sign of her mission to appeal to both the hard-core conservatives, more moderate Republican voters, Democrats and Independents.
She approaches the issues of foreign policy in a way that the other candidates don’t: realistically. During the debates, Haley was unafraid to call Vivek Ramaswamy out on his lack of knowledge on foreign policy, and his quickness in abandoning U.S. allies, such as Taiwan and Ukraine, to our enemies, which the U.S. wouldn’t do as a “friend.”
Furthermore, Haley is the only candidate who even addressed abortion as an issue of national interest. The others chose to make it about themselves, while she weighed the complexity of the issue and acknowledged the people all over the country that it affects. She stressed the idea of reaching a consensus on late-term abortion bans and making contraception widely available.
While she has had some strong moments that make her the best alternative to Trump, she has also had some startling mishaps. She calls herself a “pro-life” advocate, but in 2013, she blocked the expansion of Medicaid, something that would have saved the lives of many poor South Carolinians. This goes against her self-proclaimed position on saving lives, but solidified her stance in the Republican Party.
Nikki Haley is the best out of the potential GOP nominees, but that doesn’t mean she is perfect, far from it, actually due to her blockage of Medicaid and other hypocritical decisions. Despite this, she has shown that she is ready to treat our government seriously and fix the most prevalent issues in our society.
