With her announcement Tuesday, Republican Nikki Haley hopes to become the nation’s first female president.
During her political career, Haley, 51, has made a number of firsts.
She was the first woman governor of South Carolina, the first minority governor of South Carolina, and the first woman minority combi governor in the United States.
Haley was also the youngest governor in the country for a time.
When her husband, Michael Haley, was deployed to Afghanistan in 2013, she became the first female governor in U.S. history to deploy a spouse.
Growing up, Haley came from the first Indian-American family in their tiny South Carolina town.
Nikki Haley and (from left) her son Nalin, daughter Rena and husband Michael
Nikki Haley celebrates her father Ajit’s birthday (left). Her parents immigrated to the United States in 1969 after her father became an associate professor of biology at Voorhes College
Nikki Haley (center left) and her husband Michael Haley (center right) during a visit to India while she was serving as South Carolina’s governor in 2014
Nikki Haley (left) and her children and husband Michael (right) in a vintage snap shared to Instagram
Haley was born Nimrata Nikki Randhawa on January 20, 1972 – which happens to be the date on which presidents are sworn in – to Raj and Ajit Randhawa, Indian immigrants from Punjab who worked as teachers and ran a successful overseas merchandise business called Exotica International Inc .
Her mother Raj lost her father at a young age but came from a wealthy family. She met Ajit in a mountain resort area near Dharamsala, India and found him “a handsome man” and her parents decided they could marry.
Haley’s father, Ajit, earned his PhD from the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada – making it his first time living in North America.
“He left India for the New World with eight dollars in his pocket,” recalled Haley in her 2012 book Can’t Is Not An Option.
Ajit got a job as an associate professor of biology at Voorhes College, a historically black college in Denmark, South Carolina.
He and Raj arrived in Columbia, South Carolina in 1969, and in her book Haley recounted the struggle they had to find housing.
“When it came time for my parents to find a home, nobody would rent to them,” Haley said. “Word quickly got around that my father worked in the “black school” and that my mother was obviously a foreigner himself.”
They eventually had to buy a home in the tiny town of Bamberg, South Carolina, a town of 2,500 between Columbia and Charleston.
“When they finally found a house, they had to buy it, not rent it. And they were told there were conditions: they couldn’t put black people in it. They were not allowed to contain alcohol. And they had to sell it back to the man they bought it from,” she wrote.
Nikki Haley posted several pictures of her son Nalin for National Sunday in September 2022
And she posted pictures of daughter Rena for National Daughters Day in September 2022
Haley was born and raised in Bamberg.
‘The railroad tracks divided the city by race. I was the proud daughter of Indian immigrants – not black, not white – I was different,” she recalled in her campaign announcement video released on Tuesday. “But my mother always said that your job is not to focus on the differences but on the similarities and my parents reminded me and my siblings every day of how blessed we are to live in America.”
In Can’t Is Not An Option, Haley suggested that being the only Native American in a small southern town wasn’t easy.
She recalled being cast as Pocahontus in the Thanksgiving play in kindergarten.
“To this day, I’m not sure what my teachers thought. Have you noticed that I’m not that Indian?’ She wrote.
In another instance, Haley recalls being disqualified from a beauty pageant — and given a beach ball as a consolation prize — because the judges didn’t know if she fit into the white or black category and didn’t want to upset either race.’
Haley had early memories of her parents, devout Sikhs who were urged by Bamberg’s residents to convert to Christianity – something Haley did later in life herself.
She also recalled being the smartest kid in the class — so much so that her school moved her to second grade at the end of first grade so she could start third grade in the fall.
Nikki Haley posted this photo for her 26th wedding anniversary with husband Michael. The Haleys dated for seven years during college and after, and Michael eventually got Haley’s Indian parents to accept his proposal
Haley attended the premier Clemson University, majoring in Textile Management and later Accounting. In her book, she explained that politics is not talked about at home and she never considered taking a political science course.
She met the man she would marry, William Michael “Bill” Haley, during her freshman week of college. Bill, as he was called back then, had a roommate from Bamberg, that’s how they were introduced.
The couple didn’t immediately date, but eventually did for five years before Michael proposed.
In Can’t Is Not An Option, Haley recalled that upon announcing their engagement, Haley’s parents said that even though Michael isn’t Indian, the marriage could go on if he gets a job, buys a house, buys a car and everyone Breaks off contact with her daughter for a year.
The couple waited two more years, with Haley saying they “ignored my father’s ultimatum that we wouldn’t see each other for a year,” eventually receiving her family’s blessing to begin planning a wedding.
Their Hilton Head wedding was canceled due to Hurricane Fran, so the couple finally married in September 1996 in Columbia, South Carolina.
The couple have two children, Rena and Nalin, and two dogs, Bentley and Rio.
After school, Haley worked at a recycling company in Charlotte before returning to Bamberg to work for her parents’ company.
She joined the Chamber of Commerce and the National Association of Women Business Owners.
It was at NAWBO that she met the woman who could become her political mentor, Eleanor Kitzman, who first goaded Haley about which political party she might belong to.
“Oh, you’re clearly a Republican,” Haley recalled as Kitzman told her after describing herself as a woman who wanted the government to let business alone and the government to stay within its means.
Haley launched her first campaign for the State House seat in the 87th District in 2004 under the impression that incumbent Republican Assemblyman Larry Koon was about to retire.
He didn’t retire, so Haley challenged the longest-serving legislator in South Carolina’s statehouse.
She defeated Koon in a GOP primary sample.
Haley recalled how Koon, who called her “little lady,” never called her to relent — and never spoke to her again.
Nikki Haley speaks at a runoff party in June 2010 for the runoff in which she defeated Rep. Gresham Barrett and later won the South Carolina governor’s mansion
A crowd cheers as the Confederate flag is lowered for the final time outside of the South Carolina capital, a decision made by then-Governor Nikki Haley
Then South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley holds up a photo of the Rev. DePayne Middleton-Doctor during a memorial service commemorating the victims of the mass shooting at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in June 2016, a year after the shooting
Five years later, Haley was running for governor.
She had the support of Republican Gov. Mark Sanford, 2012 GOP nominee and now Senator Mitt Romney, and South Carolina First Lady Jenny Sanford.
In her book, she recalls being briefly involved in Sanford’s sex scandal — the then-governor disappeared for several days in 2009 to spend time with his lovers in Argentina.
At the time, Haley — a candidate for governor — was in Washington, but her car was parked at the airport next to Sanford.
“You would not put a male candidate in the humiliating position of having to explain why his car happened to be parked next to the governor’s at the airport,” Haley wrote.
Haley survived another GOP primary sample to win the 2010 nomination and then general election, and made history as the state’s first female and Indian-American governor.
One of her most memorable challenges as South Carolina governor was whether the Confederate flag should continue to be flown outside of the state capital.
She signed legislation to have it torn down in July 2015 — a month after the heinous, racially motivated Charleston church shooting — and later said it was kidnapped by gunman Dylann Roof, while noting that some Southerners don’t see the flag as a symbol of racism but of “service and sacrifice and heritage.”
During the 2016 campaign, Haley was originally linked with Florida Senator Marco Rubio’s presidential campaign, which only lasted until mid-March as he was eliminated after a heavy loss to Trump in the Florida primary.
She then endorsed Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, who also lost to Trump.
Despite this, Trump chose Haley as his ambassador to the United Nations, making the announcement just three weeks after winning the 2016 election.
Haley remained in the position through the last day of 2018, nearly halfway through Trump’s only term.
There were times when she let daylight between herself and the President, including when he imposed a so-called “Muslim ban” and when he was accused of sexual assault.
Haley officially jumped into the presidential race Tuesday with a video announcement ahead of her first scheduled outing, a speech in downtown Charleston on Wednesday.
Nikki Haley shared a picture in the Oval Office with President Donald Trump on President Joe Biden’s inauguration day, despite Trump’s protests that he had won the 2020 election
“I’ve never lost a race,” she told Fox in January. ‘I will not lose now.’
While she once planned never to face Trump, she is now his first major challenger.
“I would not run if President Trump were running and I would talk to him about it. That’s something we’ll talk about at some point when that decision has to be made,” Haley said in 2021.
She agrees with Trump on a few important points.
She is anti-abortion, hard on immigration, and agrees with most members of her party that transgender women should not be included in women’s sports.
Republicans have made trans athletes a hot topic in recent years.
However, her record on the Confederate flag contrasts with Trump, who championed the preservation of Confederate monuments as a backlash for Black Lives Matter activists during his 2020 presidential campaign.
Haley also criticized Trump’s role in the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, saying he “let us down.”
“He walked a path he shouldn’t have walked and we shouldn’t have followed him and we shouldn’t have listened to him. And we can’t let that happen again,” she said in an interview with Politico.