I knew that after my Ron DeSantis article, I just had to take this story especially because in semi-recently polls (October 2023), Niki Haley was outranking Ron DeSantis in Republican polls and it’s now officially another election year. First of all, she was the first Republican to come out and officially challenge Donald Trump for the 2024 presidency. Before this, she was known for being the Governor of South Carolina from 2011 to 2017 and a U.N. ambassador for two years. 

While some would argue that since I’m from a blue state this article won’t do anything, it’s important to stay informed and have younger voices in on politics. 

Many people want a younger candidate than either Donald Trump or Joe Biden because of their respective ages being seventy-seven and eighty-one. On the Republican side, the race would be between Niki Haley, who is fifty-one, or Ron DeSantis, who is forty-five. Niki Haley often brings up the age of our members of government, comparing the Senate to a “nursing home” and saying that she does not believe that Joe Biden would live to finish a second term. 

If you’ve read my Ron DeSantis article, you’ll already know of my feelings toward him overall as well as his arguably most infamous act of the “Don’t Say Gay Bill” in Florida. (To read more about the Don’t Say Gay Law check out a story that was previously published titled “What is going on in Florida” by Madeline Beatty or my “Ron DeSantis” opinion article). So you could say that I was surprised by the fact that I was told that Niki Haley is the sanest of the three-headed Republican race (DeSantis, Trump, and Haley), but also she has been on record of saying that DeSantis has “been a good governor” and that she “[doesn’t] think that [the Don’t Say Gay Bill] goes far enough” and suggests to make it a lot stricter than what Ron DeSantis proposed. 

She also gets heat for saying that trans women competing in women’s sports are a “women’s issue of our time”, of which she connected cis girl athletes competing against trans girl athletes to teenage girl suicide rates. Another thing is that as governor, she signed a 20-week abortion ban and later, in a GOP debate, she said she wanted a 15-week abortion ban, of which many anti-abortion people criticized her, saying that she couldn’t stick to an amount of time. 

Even though she was giving DeSantis a run for his money for a minute, I still doubt that she will end up becoming president, purely for the namesake. She hasn’t had the same amount of time on the list as Ron DeSantis or Donald Trump, so we know less about her. While Niki Haley may be younger and a female voice in a male-dominated industry, so far she does not have the name that Trump or even DeSantis have made for themselves.

I need more time to come up with a full opinion I have on her, as I wanted to keep this article relatively short. But this article contains some of what I think are important points to one of our 2024 presidential candidates.