For Nikki Haley

In the Republican primary

There will be a lot of endorsement editorials this year pushing a candidate for president, because the alternative is so much worse. That’s where we are in politics today. All the polls show Americans don’t want a rematch of the 2020 presidential election. And that Americans are going to give themselves a rematch of the 2020 presidential election.

Today, instead of explaining how both those grumpy old men ought not return to the job, let’s talk about why one person ought to get the chance.

First, for many conservatives, is that she might actually have the better shot at taking back the White House for the Republican Party. But beyond the horse race, who is Nikki Haley?

At this point in the campaign, she’s more qualified than the presidential winners in 2000, 2008, and 2016. For she’s been an executive—as governor of South Carolina—and has foreign policy experience as the successful U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. We’re not sure which is more impressive, her time as South Carolina’s governor or her time in New York at the UN.

As governor of South Carolina, she pushed through the deadwood to bring ethics reform to the legislature there. Including—get this—a requirement that made lawmakers put their votes on the record. Arkansans would have trouble believing that there was a state that didn’t already require that. But you have to think that such a change would upset the entrenched powers-that-be in that kind of system. (How many lawmakers in Arkansas, and not just in Arkansas, would like their votes to be behind a wall so few can see?)

Nikki Haley got that job done. As hard as it must’ve been.

South Carolina’s population is burgeoning. Its unemployment rate is even lower than Arkansas’. National columnist George Will credits Nikki Haley with making her state an “economic dynamo,” and the nation’s fastest-growing state by percentage when she left office. All her work is still paying off there, because South Carolina keeps adding people every year.

As for foreign policy, her experience counts. Unlike some of those who were once in this Republican primary (Ron DeSantis, Vivek Ramaswamy), she wouldn’t leave our allies in the lurch. She unequivocally supports helping both Israel and Ukraine in their efforts to defend themselves.

Maybe she understands better than most that America’s national interest calls for stopping Vladimir Putin right where he is—before he can get to NATO country. Maybe she understands that better than most because her husband—and this doesn’t make the press much—is deployed overseas right now in the military. He was deployed when she was governor of South Carolina, too, and some say that might have been the first time a sitting governor had a spouse in a war zone (Afghanistan in 2013).

Maybe one of the biggest problems facing the country today is the Great Divide that we find ourselves in. MAGA vs. The Squad. Red vs. Blue. Fox vs. CNN. Right-leaning conspiracies vs. left-leaning conspiracies. The country needs somebody besides the two front-runners to be president. Can you imagine a Donald Trump or Joe Biden healing the country?

We can imagine Nikki Haley doing such a thing. Because she’s done it.

She was governor when that 21-year-old white kid walked into the Bible study at a church in Charleston in 2015 and killed nine Black people—at the time called the deadliest mass shooting at a place of worship ever in the United States. Read the press in South Carolina, and Nikki Haley was the leader who stitched the place back together again. As difficult as anything like that can be.

We the People might be beginning to sense all this. After Donald Trump won New Hampshire, and began threatening her donors, the number of people giving to her campaign actually increased. Somebody told Fox News Nikki Haley was the Republicans’ only chance to get a normal leader.

And that might be the biggest recommendation of all. The other day George Will wrote that Donald Trump tweeted 26,237 times during his presidency—or about 18 times a day. Aren’t we tired of that by now? Do we really want another four years of that kind of made-up drama?

And all the polls show that we’re certainly tired of the current occupant of the White House. The other day Rasmussen reported that 61 percent of the American people think the country’s heading in the wrong direction.

Let’s put ourselves on a new course. It can start on March 5—Super Tuesday.

Vote for Nikki Haley.