It was a common story among the “Women for Nikki” group. Jamie Finch, its state cochair, who had phonebanked for Haley in South Carolina, said Donald Trump voters would regularly call her a “cunt” and a “whore” on the phone. “I couldn’t believe it,” she told me.
If these kinds of attacks were predictable—especially after Trump declared that anyone who donated to Haley’s campaign would be “barred, permanently,” from MAGA-land—they underscored the conundrum of being Nikki Haley. In the last throes of her run, under continual pressure to cede the nomination, she had morphed into a self-styled Joan of Arc of the GOP. As her campaign sank, she fired off Taylor Swift–flavored texts and emails celebrating little girls who had given Haley friendship bracelets, which the candidate began wearing on the trail, and invoking “Iron Lady” Margaret Thatcher, the conservative prime minister of Britain. “We are blessed to live in a country where our girls can grow up and do anything they want to do,” Haley said.
If the likeness to Hillary Clinton and her 18 million cracks in the glass ceiling wasn’t clear enough, Haley’s campaign manager, Betsy Ankney, told me Haley was now “iconic,” a “historic” figure. “Nikki Haley is the single most successful female Republican politician in history, period,” she told me during a rally in Massachusetts. “That cannot be denied.”
In that sense, Haley’s political career had come full circle. She was inspired to run for Congress in South Carolina in 2004 after hearing Clinton speak at a leadership conference for women. “The reason I actually ran for office is because of Hillary Clinton,” Haley said in 2012. “I walked out of there thinking, That’s it. I’m running for office.”
Naturally, both Trump and Ron DeSantis hammered Haley with Clinton comparisons during the primaries, an easy layup for GOP voters. Nevertheless, she persisted—though very, very carefully. “This is not about identity politics,” Haley assured Republican voters from the stump, trying to immunize herself against charges of wokeness. “I don’t believe in that, and I don’t believe in glass ceilings either.”