Nikki Haley, the one candidate who could still make the GOP primary kinda interesting, explained

Contributing sentiments towards policy:

87% : One poll released this week was very encouraging for Haley, showing Trump at 39 percent and Haley at 32 percent.
75% : Trump remains the overwhelming favorite to win, with large leads in every early state and positively gigantic leads in national polls.
64% : There's been reporting that Trump wants a female running mate, with Haley often mentioned as an option.
61% : Some past primary frontrunners have seen their national leads suddenly evaporate based on early state results; a Haley victory in New Hampshire would surely give the race a jolt and could puncture the belief that Trump is inevitable.
53% : Instead, Trump won.
53% : Like most in the GOP, Haley had accommodated herself to his rise and endorsed him, but it was still somewhat surprising when Trump picked her as ambassador to the United Nations, especially since she lacked any foreign policy experience.
47% : If Haley falls short in the presidential contest, attention will quickly turn to whether Trump will pick her as his running mate.
42% : But unlike DeSantis, who unsuccessfully tried to outflank Trump from the right, Haley pursued a different strategy based on appealing to more traditional Republican voters.
42% : She says she'll cut a lot of taxes and slash government spending, and bragged about being a "union buster."
41% : Recent polls are mixed on just how close she's come to Trump -- one shows her trailing the former president by just 7 points, while another shows her down 20 points.
41% : Haley isn't even currently favored to win South Carolina -- she's trailing Trump by about 30 points there in polls.
40% : She's opposed the prosecutions of Trump and said she'd pardon him if he's convicted.
39% : Persistent rumors claimed that Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump recommended Trump drop Mike Pence from the 2020 ticket in favor of Haley to appeal to suburban women.
36% : New Hampshire still lies ahead, and that will determine whether Haley really will make this race somewhat interesting, or whether she will sputter out like all the other challengers to Trump before her.
32% : (Trump stood out among Republicans in 2016 for pledging not to touch Social Security or Medicare, but toward the end of his term he said he'd look at changing the programs "at the right time.")
32% : Another poll was less encouraging -- it showed Trump at 46 percent and Haley at 26 percent.
29% : Haley harks back to the era of Paul Ryan in arguing that cuts to Social Security and Medicare are urgently necessary, though she stresses such changes should only affect younger people and not current beneficiaries.
28% : Trump is leading national polls by 50 points, and no one with such a lead at this point has ever lost a presidential primary.
28% : Whatever Trump decides, 2028 would seemingly be an election in which Haley could run again without the big guy on the ballot -- but let's not get ahead of ourselves.
27% : But it's still very hard to imagine how she could actually defeat Trump.
18% : The purported next state for Republicans is Nevada in early February, but there's a weird situation in that state where Trump and Haley are competing in separate contests on different days (long story).
17% : Donald Trump leads polls overwhelmingly, Ron DeSantis has gone down in flames, and various other candidates never got off the ground.
14% : Trump has mused about pulling the US out of NATO, wants to withdraw more troops currently deployed in countries like South Korea, and has refused to commit to aiding Ukraine in its war against Russia.
13% : It still seems much more difficult to envision her actually beating Donald Trump in 2024.
11% : A national Haley surge relies on the idea that Trump's support will suddenly collapse, when the closest thing to an iron law of Republican politics in the past decade has been the GOP base's refusal to ditch Trump.
10% : She followed a typical mainstream Republican path by criticizing Trump in the days just after the January 6 attack but pivoting within weeks to oppose Trump's impeachment trial.
9% : The press deemed her a rising star; she criticized Trump during the 2016 primary and endorsed Sen. Marco Rubio (some speculated about a Rubio-Haley ticket).

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