Nikki Haley Takes on Trump in GOP 2024 Whitehouse Bid

CHARLESTON, S.C. – Former South Carolina governor and United Nations ambassador Nikki Haley officially entered the race for president on Tuesday, a move that is likely to leave her the lone major Republican challenger to former President Donald J. Trump for many weeks, if not months, as other potential 2024 rivals bide their time. 

Watch her announcement video here. 

By announcing early, Haley, 51, who called for “generational change” in her party, seized an opportunity for a head start on fund-raising and to command a closer look from potential Republican primary voters, whose support she needs if she is to rise from low single digits in early polls of the Republican field.

She made the announcement in a video, vowing to take on adversaries both foreign and domestic. Haley’s campaign has drawn encouragement from many polls showing that in a hypothetical multicandidate field, Mr. Trump wins less than 50 percent of Republican voters. Her entry into the race underscores how the former president has failed to scare off rivals in his third presidential campaign.

 Haley plans to lean into cultural issues, denouncing Democrats for pushing “socialism” in government and “wokeism” in schools, while citing her own biography as the daughter of Indian immigrants who rose to be South Carolina’s first female governor, and first nonwhite governor, as a rebuke of leftist claims that America harbors “systemic racism.”