Former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley participates in the first debate of the GOP primary season hosted by FOX News at the Fiserv Forum in Milwaukee, Wis., on Aug. 23, 2023. (Win McNamee/Getty Images)
Republican presidential candidate and former U.N. ambassador Nikki Haley raised over $1 million in less than three days after the first GOP presidential primary debate.
“We’ve had a fantastic response. I think in the first 72 hours we raised a million dollars. We’ve had thousands of people volunteer. We’ve had a lot of people join the campaign. The phones are still ringing,” Ms. Haley told Fox News in an interview just before she held a town hall in South Carolina on Aug. 28.
“We’re grateful. I mean, we’re absolutely grateful,” she added. “But it only keeps us more motivated because we have a country to save.”
In early July, her campaign announced Ms. Haley had raised $34.3 million since launching her White House bid in February. She raised $7.3 million in the second quarter, which amounted to $1 million less than the $8.3 million she raised in the first quarter.
The presidential debate, which was held in Wisconsin on Aug. 23, drew about 13 million viewers, despite the absence of former President Donald Trump.
Debate
Some key debate moments involving Ms. Haley included how she went head-to-head against former Vice President Mike Pence over the issue of a federal abortion ban. Ms. Haley, calling herself “unapologetically pro-life,” called for “consensus” on the issue, and Mr. Pence responded by saying “consensus is the opposite of leadership.”
The former South Carolina governor also got into heated arguments with businessman Vivek Ramaswamy over the Ukraine war. She claimed that her fellow GOP candidate “wants to hand Ukraine to Russia, he wants to let China eat Taiwan.” In response, Mr. Ramaswamy said she was “pushing this lie” about him and suggested that Ms. Haley was working at the behest of defense contractors.
Asked about the “verbal fireworks” between her and other candidates, Ms. Haley told the outlet that debates offer “a great opportunity for the American people to see the candidates and their options.”
“You never know what you’re going to get when you get onto a debate stage. You don’t know which questions are gonna get asked. You don’t know who’s going to attack or not attack. You don’t know. So it’s all instinct and gut,” Ms. Haley said. “And it’s about communicating as much as you can. And that’s what we tried to do.”
She added, “I think we only had eight and a half minutes in two hours. I would have loved, you know, to say more, but you take the most of the time you’re given to really get the substance, solutions, and the policy out there, and that’s what I tried to do.”
Vivek Ramaswamy (L) and former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley participate in the first debate of the GOP primary season hosted by FOX News at the Fiserv Forum in Milwaukee, Wis., on Aug. 23, 2023. (Win McNamee/Getty Images)
According to a poll done by FiveThirtyEight/Washington Post/Ipsos, Ms. Haley saw the largest increase in support among the candidates, jumping 17 percentage points from 29 percent prior to the debate to 46 percent following the event.
Another post-debate poll by Kaplan Strategies, which inquired 844 likely GOP primary voters on Aug. 24, found Ms. Haley with a “substantial surge” in support, bumping up 3 percentage points to 8 percent. The result put her in fourth place, trailing only President Trump (45 percent), Mr. Ramaswamy (13 percent), and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (10 percent).
‘Axis of Evil’
On Monday afternoon, Ms. Haley spoke to a capacity crowd at the CrossRidge Center in Indian Land, South Carolina. According to her press secretary Ken Farnaso, 1,000 people took part in the event.
“That post-debate momentum is REAL! Standing room only here in Indian Land, SC an hour before @NikkiHaley hits the stage!” Mr. Farnaso wrote on X.
According to The Charlotte Observer, Ms. Haley devoted a portion of her speech to Russia and China, calling the latter the “number one security threat” facing the United States.
“China has been planning war with America for years, and that’s not being dramatic,” she said.
The partnership between China and Russia is “an axis of evil,” she added.
Just weeks before Russia invaded Ukraine, Russian President Vladimir Putin traveled to Beijing, and he and Chinese leader Xi Jinping upgraded bilateral ties to a “no limits” partnership. The two leaders further deepened their ties earlier this year, after signing a series of agreements to further their “strategic cooperation.”
Russian President Vladimir Putin meets with Chinese leader Xi Jinping (L) at the Kremlin in Moscow on March 21, 2023. (Sergei Karpukhin/Sputnik/AFP via Getty Images)
Ms. Haley said previous Democratic and Republican presidents wrongly believed “if we were nice to China they’d want to be like us.”
“China’s never wanted to be like us,” she explained. “They want to be communist, and we have to change the way we deal with them.”
In a speech at the American Enterprise Insitute (AEI) in June, Ms. Haley said President Trump didn’t do enough beyond his actions targeting China’s unfair trade practices.
“He did not put us on a stronger military foothold in Asia. He did not stop the flow of American technology and investment into the Chinese military,” Ms. Haley said at the AEI. “Even the trade deal he signed came up short when China predictably failed to live up to its commitments.”
Ms. Haley has also criticized President Joe Biden. In an X post on Aug. 23, she wrote, “When I’m president, we’ll roll back Joe Biden’s green energy handouts and mandates that make America more dependent on China.”
Ms. Haley said the threats posed by Russia and China must be taken seriously.
“China said Taiwan was next. We better believe them. Russia said after Ukraine comes Poland and the Baltics, and that is a world war,” Ms. Haley said.
“We have to always remember a win for Russia is a win for China. And we can never let that axis of evil gather any more momentum.”
Frank Fang is a Taiwan-based journalist. He covers U.S., China, and Taiwan news. He holds a master's degree in materials science from Tsinghua University in Taiwan.
