January 16, 2024

If President Joe Biden wins re-election this November, he will be 82 years old when he assumes office in January 2024.

“I’ll just say it: Biden’s too old,” Nikki Haley says in an advertisement for the Republican presidential primary contest.

Haley, 51, sees this year’s Presidential contest as being against Vice President and fellow Indian American Kamala Harris. “Anybody is better than a President Kamala Harris,” Haley said, calling Harris a “socialist” from California.  

Yesterday, Haley finished third in Iowa state's Republican Presidential primary, securing 19% of votes, compared to 51% for Donald Trump.

Haley has taken moderate policy stances, compared to her opponents in the primary. She is trying to win over college educated Republicans – and independents - especially women. For instance, in August 2023, during a Republican primary debate, Haley said that contraception should be available to every woman and climate change is real, but that the U.S. needs to make China and India lower their emissions.

Haley is a former Governor of South Carolina (2011-2017) and a former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, under President Trump (2017-2018).

Born in Bamberg, South Carolina, Nimrata (Nikki) Randhawa is one of four children of Ajit and Raj Randhawa, immigrants from India. Haley's first job was keeping the books for her family’s clothing store, starting at age 13. She earned a B.S. in Accounting from Clemson University, 1994.

Haley’s husband Michael Haley served as a Captain in the Army National Guard and was a combat veteran deployed to Afghanistan. They have two children, Rena and Nalin.

In 2018, while serving at the U.N., ​the Haleys had $65,000 in credit card debt, two home mortgage debts totaling about $1.5 million, and a line of credit bank debt of between $250,000 and $500,000, according to a financial disclosure form​, The Washington Post reported.

Haley was earning less than $200,000 as U.N. ambassador, and her husband was making no more than $100,000 from his company, Ikor Systems, according to the ​Post. 

In 2019, after she left the U.N., Haley earned more than $250,000 in fees and stock awards as a member of the board of directors at Boeing. In 2022 and 2023, she earned more than $700,000 advising Prism Global Management, a venture fund, and, more than $2 million delivering a dozen speeches, including at banks, health care, industrial and aerospace companies, The Post reported.  

Haley has been critical of Trump. For instance, last year during a Republican primary debate, she said that then Vice President Mike Pence was right not to help Trump overturn the 2020 election. She added that Trump is “the most disliked politician in America. We can’t win a general election that way.”

Last week, Trump re-posted on Truth Social, a Gateway Pundit article stating that Haley is disqualified to run for President or Vice President, according to the U.S. constitution, since “her parents were not U.S. citizens at the time of her birth in 1972.”

Haley’s father became a U.S. citizen in 1978 and her mother in 2003, after her birth in the U.S. Eight of Haley’s Republican opponents, including Trump, raised the issue of her citizenship during her unsuccessful run in the 2016 presidential primary.

In the 2020 election, Democrat Kamala Harris’s eligibility for vice-president was also questioned on the same grounds of citizenship.

​In 2020, over 500 black Democratic leaders lobbied hard for Biden to select Harris ​as his vice presidential nominee.​ In 2016, Harris was elected to the U.S. Senate from California. Earlier she was twice elected as the state’s attorney general. 

Before one ​Senate election​, Harris asked Shobha Warrier, her aunt in Chennai, India, to pray and break coconuts for her victory at a Ganesha temple, Warrier wrote in Rediff.Com.

​​Kamala Devi Harris, 59, is half Indian and half black.​ Her mother, Shyamala Gopalan, an immigrant from India and Warrier’s sister, was a breast cancer researcher. Gopalan studied for a Ph.D. in endocrinology at the University of California, Berkeley. Harris’​s father Donald Harris, who emigrated from Jamaica, taught economics at Stanford University. Her parents divorced when she was seven and she and her sister were brought up by her mother, partly in Canada.

Harris studied political science at Howard University in Washington DC and got a law degree from the University of California, Hastings College. In 2014, she married Douglas Emhoff, a lawyer, who has two children from an earlier marriage. They lived in a multi-million-dollar home near Hollywood in Los Angeles.

Trump​, who won the Iowa primary by a record 30% margin over Ron DeSantis, is expected to be the 2024 Republican ​Presidential nominee. Presidential polls show a quarter of ​all voters, ​mainly blue-collar​ Republicans, support Trump as well as believe in conspiratorial theories​.​ ​As ​a Trump supporter told CNN, they believe​ that Trump won in 2020 and that the January 6, 2021, riots in Washington DC​ were not caused by his supporters but by Federal government agents.   

Typically, about 66% of voters participate in Presidential elections. So, Trump needs only about 5% more votes - not 8% - to win in November​. This is because the ​winner is decided by a majority of the state electoral college​ votes, ​not a majority of the popular votes.  

​To get the additional five percent of votes, Trump needs the support of college educated Republicans and independent voters.

A recent New York Times story points out​ that a majority of Republican college graduates are now backing Trump. They back him because they oppose ​Democratic policies on immigration​, crime, and, perhaps most important​, forgiving ​college student loans. Most middle-and-upper class white families use their savings to pay for the college education of their children or grandchildren or have paid off or are continuing to pay off college loans.  

This November, as in recent U.S. presidential elections, the outcome will depend on who wins the swing states, especially in the Midwest, namely Pennsylvania (with 20 electoral votes), Michigan (16) and Wisconsin (10).

In 2016, Trump won the Presidency by securing only 78,000 more votes than Hilary Clinton in these states. So, even though a total of 137 million votes were cast nationwide, a razor thin victory in three swing states is all that mattered.

In the 2020 election, Joe Biden won the three swing states by a total of more than 211,000 votes. This was largely due to support from independent voters, especially college educated whites and suburban women.  

The 2024 U.S. presidential election will likely again be decided by whether Trump or Biden can motivate 100,000 to 200,000 additional independents to vote for them in Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin.

Haley is popular among college educated white Republican voters as well as independent voters. In fact, according to a CBS News poll released this week, Haley holds a bigger lead over President Biden – 53% to 46% - than Trump’s 50% to 48% lead.

​​So far, Haley has said she is not interested in being Trump’s vice-presidential nominee. “I’m not interested in being vice president. I’m running to be president and I’m running to win and we will,” she told CBS News this weekend.

But, irrespective of their public statements, politicians are known to make deals with their opponents and those they dislike, driven by the urge to win or retain power.

Will Trump choose Haley as his running mate to try and gain more votes from independents and college educated Republicans, especially women, in the swing states? Will Haley agree, especially since it may give her a big advantage in the contest for the presidency in 2028?

Americans who ignore Trump’s disregard for the rule of law will be “sleepwalking towards a dictatorship” if their apathy gets him re-elected, Liz Cheney told CBS News last month. She was on the show to discuss her book Oath and Honor: A Memoir and a Warning, which has been a New York Times best seller for the past five weeks. A Republican, who lost her Congressional seat in Wyoming because of Trump’s opposition, she is the daughter of former Republican Vice President Dick Cheney.

Will fears of a dictatorship convince enough independents in the swing states to vote for Biden and Harris and ensure their re-election?  

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