Well, that was fun! (Was it?)
Former South Carolina governor and Trump-era U.N. ambassador Nikki Haley started her presidential campaign last February as a second- or third-tier candidate. She was most similar to fellow South Carolinian Tim Scott—both relatively polished, TV-ready Republicans with solid resumés who seemed like they should run for president at some point even if there wasn’t much of a case for why they should be doing it now. Donald Trump was leading the race by a wide margin, and Haley (like Scott, who dropped out in November) made the decision not to attack him directly, hoping that voters would get tired of the “chaos” around Trump on their own.
This didn’t happen—chaos is a good thing, apparently, to voters who are mad enough. But Haley did better than the other non-Trump candidates, finding a niche at primary debates as the one person who would at least attempt to sell Republican policies (on abortion, in particular) to a general audience.
She got a decent poll bump from this, and attracted financial support from conservatives in the business and finance donor community, most notably the Kochs’ Americans for Prosperity organization.
The state she was always set up to do the best in was New Hampshire, which has a local fetish for moderate politicians and rules which allow independent voters to swing on over to whichever primary they feel like voting in. (Centrist Democrats Pete Buttigieg and Amy Klobuchar did well there in 2020, although the contest was still won by a leftist from the adjacent state of Vermont.)
