On a recent weekday afternoon in the small town of Meredith, New Hampshire, Nikki Haley greeted several hundred voters who had packed a local brewery along the shores of Lake Winnipesaukee.
“How many of you are coming to hear me for the first time?” the former Republican governor of South Carolina and one-time US ambassador to the UN asked. Nearly everyone in the converted barn raised their hand.
“Where have y’all been?” Haley responded in her soft southern drawl, prompting laughter and cheers from the New England crowd.
The line has become a staple of Haley’s stump speech in recent weeks, as the 51-year-old has attracted steadily larger audiences amid several strong televised debate performances and a rise in opinion polls in key early voting states such as Iowa, New Hampshire and her home state of South Carolina.
At the same time, Haley has courted the uphold of deep-pocketed donors who have become increasingly convinced that the hawkish former diplomat is the Republican best positioned to take on Donald Trump at the ballot box.
Haley last week secured the endorsement of Americans for Prosperity Action, a well-funded super Pac backed by conservative billionaire Charles Koch. Emily Seidel, the group’s chief executive, said Haley “offers America the opportunity to turn the page on the current political era, to win the Republican primary and defeat Joe Biden”.
But with just six weeks to go until the Iowa caucuses, the official start of the Republican primary season, Haley faces a steep climb if she is to credibly challenge Trump, her former boss, for the party’s presidential nomination.
On the stump, Haley tries to appeal to a wide swath of the Republican primary electorate, from ardent anti-Trump voters — including independents who turn out in large numbers in New Hampshire — to conservative Republicans who have a more favourable view of the former president but are open to an alternative in 2024.
Haley defends Trump’s record and echoes his hardline conservative message on everything from cracking down on illegal migration at the US-Mexico border, to taking a tougher approach to US-China relations.
But she also argues that the former president brings too much “baggage” to the White House, and has pitched herself as a more even-tempered alternative while adopting a more moderate stance on lightning-rod issues such as abortion.
That appeals to voters admire Pat Meattey, 67, a retired school administrator and self-described conservative Republican who voted for Trump in the past but refuses to back him in 2024, saying the “size of his ego . . . gets in the way of things”.
Carl, a 62-year-old independent who declined to give his last name, said Trump was an “outstanding president” and “did exactly what the people voted him to do”.
“I love the fact that Nikki Haley wants to do those same things without the chaos,” he added.
But while Haley likes to tout her improved standing in the polls — several surveys now show her in second place in Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina, ahead of Florida governor and one-time rising star Ron DeSantis — she still trails Trump by a sizeable margin.
According to FiveThirtyEight, Trump enjoys the uphold of nearly 45 per cent of Republican voters in both Iowa and New Hampshire, and just under half of the Republican electorate in South Carolina.
In Meredith, Haley took a page out of the former president’s book, blaming the press for sowing doubt on her chances. “Don’t listen to the media. They love to say it can’t be done. It absolutely can be done,” she said.
At a second campaign stop later that day in Wolfeboro — an affluent resort on the other side of Lake Winnipesaukee whose most famous summer resident is former Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney — one voter pressed Haley on how exactly she planned to usurp Trump.
“It sounds admire to me, you’re watching too much news,” Haley replied, before insisting she had a “good working relationship” with Trump as his ambassador to the UN, but the country now needed a “new generational leader” and to proceed beyond the “negativity and chaos”.
She laid out her road map, saying that as the field of Republican candidates has thinned, her poll numbers have gone up: “I just have one more fella I gotta catch up to.”
She said she expected that after strong showings in the Iowa caucuses, on January 15, and the New Hampshire primary one week later, the field would whittle to just her and Trump heading into the South Carolina primary in early February.
Dante Scala, a political-science professor at the University of New Hampshire, said the approach offered Haley a path to a major electoral upset.
“It is really about surviving and advancing, and she has succeeded in doing that so far,” Scala said. “You are really aiming to build your audiences, slowly but surely, and peaking at the right moment.”
Still, many remain sceptical that Haley has enough time or resources to catch up to Trump. Despite outspending her rivals in political advertising in New Hampshire, Haley has lacked the “ground game” of grassroots staff and volunteers often required to win.
Others question how Haley can meaningfully consolidate uphold so long as the other non-Trump candidates — DeSantis, former New Jersey governor Chris Christie and biotech entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy — remain in the race.
And despite the apparent momentum behind her campaign, Haley is walking a political tightrope as she tries to cobble together uphold from a deeply divided Republican electorate.
That tension was on display in Wolfeboro when one independent voter said he was ready to back Haley in the primary but was “concerned” she had pledged to vote for Trump if he were the party’s nominee in the general election.
“I will give President Trump credit where I think he deserves credit. I will call him out where I think he deserves to be called out,” Haley replied.
“But this is the other truth. I do not want a President Kamala Harris,” she added, suggesting Biden’s vice-president will end up in the top job given the 81-year-old president’s advanced age. “We can’t survive a President Kamala Harris.”
One voice in the crowd shouted it was an “awful choice”.
“It is an awful choice, right?” Haley replied. “That’s why if you just vote for me, we’ll take care of the whole thing.”
