Nikki Haley, the only Republican candidate left in the race against Donald Trump for the party’s nomination, said in an interview that the United States would have a “female president in 2024”, and that it would be either she herself or the current Vice-President Kamala Harris, both of Indian origin.
After wins on Thursday in Nevada and the US Virgin Islands, former president Trump remains undefeated in the primary race. Trump did not participate in the Nevada primary, but took part in the party-run state caucuses and scored a strong win.
Haley said that she would stay in the race for the White House even after the embarrassment in Nevada — she was outvoted by the ‘None of these candidates’ option — and with polling showing her trailing badly in her home state of South Carolina, which holds the next Republican primary on February 24.
“This is about the fact that we are going to have a female president of the United States, and either it will be me or it will be Kamala Harris,” the 52-year-old Indian-American Republican politician told Fox News.
About her chief rival, Haley said that she voted for Trump twice and was “proud” to serve in his administration as the UN ambassador. “But chaos follows him… we can’t be a country in disarray and a world on fire and go through four more years of chaos. We won’t survive it,” she said.
Trump cannot win a general election. That’s a fact. We lost in 2018. We lost in 2020. We lost in 2022… he’s got a year’s worth of court cases yet… Everything he touches is chaos, and we continue to lose.
Nikki Haley, Republican candidate for US presidential nomination
Trump, 77, won Nevada’s Republican presidential caucuses on Thursday after he was the only major candidate to compete. Haley skipped the caucuses, calling it an “unfair process favouring Trump”. She said, “We knew that it was rigged from the start.”
In separate interviews, Haley emphasised that “we knew months ago that we weren’t going to spend a day or a dollar in Nevada, because it wasn’t worth it. And so we didn’t even count Nevada. That wasn’t anything we were looking at.”
All eyes on the next major contest: South Carolina
Haley reiterated that her focus was on the next major contest in the Republican nominating calendar — the primary in her home state of South Carolina on February 24 — as well as on Super Tuesday.
Michigan holds its primary on February 27, three days after the South Carolina Republican primary. As many as 15 states, including California and Texas, hold their contests a week later, on Super Tuesday.
Haley was born Nimarata Nikki Randhawa in South Carolina to immigrant Sikh parents from Amritsar, Punjab.
Kamala Harris, 59, scripted history by becoming the first woman, as well as the first African-American and Asian-American, to be elected US Vice-President, and assumed office on January 20, 2021. She was born in Oakland, California, to a Jamaican American father and a Tamil Indian mother.