Jonathan Bernstein, Columnist

What Kind of Republican Is Nikki Haley?

The most important aspect of the presidential nomination process is how the party uses it to redefine itself.

February 2, 2023 at 12:30 PM UTC

Jonathan Bernstein is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering politics. A former professor of political science at the University of Texas at San Antonio, he wrote A Plain Blog About Politics.

And now there are two (Republican presidential candidates).
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There are now two Republicans running for president: Nikki Haley, the former governor of South Carolina and ambassador to the UN under President Donald Trump, will make her formal announcement on Feb. 15, joining her former boss as an official candidate. The question isn’t so much whether she can win, but whether and how her campaign can change the party.

As a former governor with some foreign policy experience, Haley is only the second woman with conventional qualifications to run for the Republican nomination, and the first since Senator Margaret Chase Smith of Maine entered a few primaries in 1964.1Since then, the only Republican women to announce they were running for president are Elizabeth Dole in 2000, who at that point had held two minor cabinet posts; Representative Michele Bachmann in 2012; and business executive Carly Fiorina in 2016.