Meet Nikki Haley: The Sole Female Candidate Competing for the Republican Presidential Nomination
Nikki Haley has never lost an election. When she was elected governor of South Carolina in 2010, she was the state’s first woman in the role and the youngest governor in the US. She was also only the second person of Indian descent to serve as a state governor.
She became the first Republican to challenge Donald Trump for the nomination when she announced her run in February.
The pair are far from strangers. From being a sharp critic during Mr Trump’s 2016 campaign, she went on to serve in his presidential cabinet as the US ambassador to the United Nations. The 51-year-old has gained a reputation in the Republican Party as a solid conservative, able to address issues of gender and race in a more credible fashion than her opponents.
Ms Haley has also pitched herself as strong on foreign policy, proclaiming in a promotional video that China and Russia were “on the march”, adding: “You should know this about me: I don’t put up with bullies. “And when you kick back, it hurts them more if you’re wearing heels.”
Ms Haley was born Nimarata Nikki Randhawa in 1972 in South Carolina, to Indian Sikh parents.
She has received criticism for not going by her first name – some accused her of denying her heritage and “whitewashing” herself.
She addressed this in a post on X, formerly Twitter, in 2021: “Nikki is a Punjabi word that means little one. It’s my middle name on my birth certificate.”
She has not used her maiden name since she was 24, when she married Michael Haley. They had both Sikh and Methodist ceremonies and a year later she converted to Christianity. The couple have two children.
Ms Haley began working at her mother’s clothing boutique as a teenager, doing the accounts from the age of 13.
Ms Haley has talked about the discrimination she faced growing up in the only Indian family in the small South Carolina town of Bamberg.
Hillary Clinton was the reason Ms Haley first ran for office, she told the New York Times.
Ms Haley was elected governor of South Carolina in 2010.
In the wake of a white supremacist murdering nine black churchgoers in Charleston in 2015, she passed a law removing the Confederate flag from the South Carolina state capitol.
Ms Haley started as a critic of Mr Trump during his 2016 campaign, saying he was “everything a governor doesn’t want in a president”.
