Who Is Nikki Haley For?

On Wednesday evening, seven Republicans will take the stage for the second GOP primary debate, vying, it seems, for second place. (The front-runner, Donald Trump, will not attend.) And as in the first debate, there will only be one woman on stage: former South Carolina Gov. and former Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley.

Haley has carved out a space for herself as the reasonable, honest, experienced candidate in a field of MAGA acolytes, religious ideologues, interchangeable nonentities, and narcissistic loudmouths. The question is whether Republican primary voters want even the veneer of restraint, reasonableness, and authority—especially coming from a woman.

That’s partly because the Republican Party has a reasonableness problem, and partly because it has a woman problem. The stark 1-out-of-7 underrepresentation we’ll see on the debate stage Wednesday isn’t aberrational for the GOP, even in 2023: Just 8 percent of members of Congress across the House and Senate are Republican women. There are nearly as many Democratic congresswomen as congressmen, but just 1 in 5 House Republicans is female.

Perhaps unsurprisingly for a party that has spent so much time taking away women’s rights, the party also has problems with female voters. Across nearly every racial, educational, and socioeconomic demographic, female voters are more likely than male voters to support Democrats. And women may be even more likely to vote for Democrats in 2024, given that the last Republican president appointed Supreme Court justices who overturned Roe v. Wade and set into motion a series of abortion bans that have left women across conservative states with very few legal options to end unwanted pregnancies—and left some women badly injured or nearly dead after experiencing serious pregnancy complications and being refused standard and necessary medical care.

This has not been good—for the women, obviously, but also for Republicans’ electoral prospects, a reality with which the GOP struggles to reckon. And as more and more stories come out about sympathetic white women who are trying to become mothers only to have their pregnancies go tragically wrong and wind up trapped in Handmaid’s Tale–style dystopian nightmares, we may see a further shift among voters who say abortion should always be illegal (it’s already a minority position). Once people see the reality of abortion bans, those bans become harder to stomach, and harder to defend. That, coupled with the leftward lurch of younger voters, has at least some Republicans understandably worried about how the party’s extremism on abortion might hurt them.

Not that they are doing much about it. Some Republican candidates still take the long-held conservative position: Ban abortion with few exceptions. Some try not to talk about it much. Others, including Trump, flip-flop, trying to locate an impossible position that the anti-abortion right will support while not alienating the majority of American voters.

And then there’s Nikki Haley. The only woman in the race has pieced together a platform on abortion that she seems to believe can actually appease everyone. Here’s how she does it: Haley says she’s personally “strongly pro-life.” She says she wants to criminalize many abortions, and would sign a federal ban of some kind if it came across her desk. But she also says consensus building is a better route than taking principled but impossible-to-carry-out positions, and that she’s being honest with voters when she tells them that a total federal ban is unlikely to happen—unless Republicans have a surprise sweep in Congress.

But as a politician, Haley has not been an abortion moderate. While in the South Carolina House, she was enthusiastically anti-abortion, voting to ban state employee health insurance plan funding of the procedure for rape and incest victims; as governor, she signed a conservative anti-abortion bill that largely banned abortion after 20 weeks of pregnancy. Her position seems savvy in the sense that she is advocating for consensus building not because she actually wants moderation, but because she thinks it’s a wiser strategy—and a more effective way to ban as many abortions as possible, as quickly as possible.

But it’s not clear it will be effective. It won’t land with the extremists, and there don’t seem to be enough Republicans who are moderate on abortion and are voting primarily based on that position on abortion.

Further, Haley has to walk a fine line with a voter base that is generally misogynistic and more hostile to women in power than the left. If she gains any more traction against Trump—and right now she doesn’t have much beyond being in second place in New Hampshire—she’s likely to risk his ire, and it’s clear that he has a particular kind of derision for women who challenge his authority, an unvarnished misogyny that Republican voters tend to reward. So Haley is going to have to deal with both her gender and the misogyny it brings. And on that, she’s been unsteady. She shies away from mentioning gender on the campaign trail. But in the first debate, she interrupted a squabble between Chris Christie and Vivek Ramaswamy to quip, “This is exactly why Margaret Thatcher said, ‘If you want something said, ask a man; if you want something done, ask a woman.’ ”

For all of Haley’s miming of Thatcheresque (and, in style if certainly not politics, one might say Clintonesque) female power, though, the GOP electorate remains loyal to Trump—a man who is the antithesis of the kind of reasonableness, steadiness, and compromise in the pursuit of outcome Haley is trying to perform. Which leaves Haley threading a very slender needle, both embracing the anti-woke Republican rhetoric that says identity doesn’t matter (and that identity is dangerously weaponized against white men), and emphasizing her identity as a mom, a wife, and “a badass woman.”

“Do I happen to be a woman? Yes. Do I happen to be Indian? Yes. Do I happen to be a military spouse? Yes. Do I happen to be a mom? Yes. All those things are great,” she told Politico this August. “I think that when I become the first female president, it won’t be because I’m a woman. It’ll be because … I’m the right person for the job.”

It’s a clever ploy, and the same have-it-both-ways thing she’s doing on abortion. Haley gets to join voters in rejecting the idea that identity matters or that women bring anything unique to the table—while also letting them feel good about voting for a woman. Haley gets to gesture at the idea that what the people want on abortion is what should happen—while making it clear that she would sign extreme anti-abortion legislation if it came across her desk. Nikki Haley keeps contorting herself into positions that might allow her to attract the extreme wings of the GOP while also holding on to some of the more moderate types. Unfortunately, she doesn’t seem to be attracting enough of either.