In August, Federalist columnist Eddie Scarry mocked former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley as “Hillary Clinton 2.0.”
Talk about a take that aged well. In the fall, the DeSantis campaign even began using prior footage of Haley admiring the former secretary of state to tie the two together. By Iowa caucus month, Haley’s comparison to the first major party female presidential nominee had become a popular meme on platform X.
On Monday, the former diplomat and two-term governor of South Carolina placed third in the Hawkeye state. Florida Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis captured a distant second behind former President Donald Trump, who carried all but a single county in the caucuses without engaging in a single debate.
“Of all the terrible things about Nikki Haley,” Scarry wrote last summer, “her enthusiasm for more foreign war funding, her deference to corporate cultural assault — the cringe-worthy attempts to hype her status as a woman (A mom! A wife!) and Indian (“I’m a minority first!,” “I’m as diverse as it gets!”) are the least offensive. But it’s still really, really bad.”
Scarry has a point. After all, the former South Carolina governor opened her campaign with a message on identity politics. Haley’s launch video began with the candidate practically saying to voters, “Look how diverse I am!” There’s a reason the DeSantis campaign thought branding the two together would be so effective.
On the eve weekend of the first Republican caucuses, The New York Times ran coverage of the campaign, headlining that
