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from https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/05/us/politics/nikki-haley-townhall-cnn.html

Takeaways From Nikki Haley’s Mild CNN Town Hall
The former South Carolina governor, who also served as United Nations ambassador under Donald Trump, emphasized her experience and vision.
Will it be enough for her to stand out?

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Trip Gabriel
By Trip Gabriel
June 5, 2023
Updated 8:55 a.m. ET

Nikki Haley, who was the first prominent Republican to announce a
challenge to former President Donald J. Trump in the 2024 race, has yet
to see her presidential campaign catch fire. On Sunday night, she had a
fresh opportunity to make the case for her candidacy during a 90-minute
CNN town hall in prime time, in an effort to emerge from the low single
digits in polls where she has been mired.

Ms. Haley, the former governor of South Carolina and United Nations
ambassador under Mr. Trump, was well versed on policy issues,
consistently upbeat and evenly tempered. Although she drew contrasts
with Mr. Trump, she dodged opportunities to make him — or even President Biden — into a political punching bag.

At the end of the night, an audience member praised her demeanor as “a
breath of fresh air,” earning applause from the house full of Iowa Republicans. But that also meant that there were few
shoot-out-the-lights moments that could win Ms. Haley headlines and a
new look from primary voters, who now face a growing field of
Republicans who are in — or soon to enter — the race.

On policies both foreign (like Ukraine) and domestic (such as Social
Security), Ms. Haley’s positions were a throwback to typical Republican
Party stances before its populist takeover by Mr. Trump. Her reasoned
manner was also an anomaly in a race where Mr. Trump and Gov. Ron
DeSantis of Florida compete with displays of dominance. Both factors
have made Ms. Haley, the only woman in the Republican race, an also-ran
so far.

Here are some takeaways from the event on Sunday night.

ImageNikki Haley, center, holds a cellphone and takes a selfie with a
voter in Iowa as others look on.
“I think it’s important to be honest with the American people,” Nikki Haley said on Sunday night.Credit...Jordan Gale for The New York Times

It was very different from the Trump town hall.
Compared with CNN’s explosive, much-criticized town-hall-style event
with Mr. Trump last month, this one was a throwback to earlier, less
combative times. There was no audience jeers whipped up from the stage
and no forceful interrogation of the candidate.

Who’s Running for President in 2024?
Card 1 of 8
The race begins. Four years after a historically large number of
candidates ran for president, the field for the 2024 campaign is
starting out small and is likely to be headlined by the same two men who
ran last time: President Biden and Donald Trump. Here’s a look at some
of the contenders who have entered the race so far:

President Biden. The president has cast himself as a protector of
democracy and a stabilizing force after the upheaval of the Trump administration. Biden is running for re-election as the oldest person
ever to hold the presidency, a subject of concern among many Democrats,
though the party has publicly set aside those worries and rallied around
him.

Donald Trump. The former president is running to retake the office he
lost in 2020. Though somewhat diminished in influence within the
Republican Party — and facing several legal investigations — he retains
a large and committed base of supporters, and he could be aided in the
primary by multiple challengers splitting a limited anti-Trump vote.

Ron DeSantis. The combative governor of Florida joined the race on May
24, but his official entry into the 2024 campaign was spoiled by a glitch-filled livestream over Twitter. DeSantis, who has championed conservative causes and thrown a flurry of punches at America’s left, is Trump’s strongest Republican challenger since 2016.

Nikki Haley. The former governor of South Carolina and U.N. ambassador
under Trump has presented herself as a member of “a new generation of leadership” and emphasized her life experience as a daughter of Indian immigrants. She was long seen as a rising G.O.P. star but her allure in
the party has declined amid her on-again, off-again embrace of Trump.

Tim Scott. The South Carolina senator, who joins a growing number of Republicans running as alternatives to Trump, is the first Black
Republican elected to the Senate from the South since Reconstruction and
has been one of his party’s most prominent voices on matters of race.

Asa Hutchinson. The former governor of Arkansas is one of a relatively
small number of Republicans who have been openly critical of Trump.
Hutchinson has denounced the former president’s efforts to overturn the
2020 election and said Trump should drop out of the presidential race.

More candidates. On the Republican side, Vivek Ramaswamy and Larry Elder
are also making a run for the White House, while Marianne Williamson and
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. have launched campaigns for the Democratic
nomination. Read more about the 2024 candidates here.

Jake Tapper, the anchor who moderated, asked Ms. Haley follow-up
questions and added occasional clarifications to her statements, but he
did not veer into fact-checking.

Trump and DeSantis continue to be the focus.
The two big red elephants in the room, Mr. Trump and Mr. DeSantis, were
mostly mentioned indirectly, but those two Republican presidential
contenders were present nonetheless. Ms. Haley repeated her position
that in order to save Social Security and Medicare, it would be
necessary to raise the retirement age for young workers and to limit
benefits for the wealthy. Both Mr. Trump and Mr. DeSantis, who once
supported similar changes, now say they won’t touch the programs.

“I think it’s important to be honest with the American people,” Ms.
Haley said. “We are in this situation. Don’t lie to them and say, ‘Oh,
we don’t have to deal with entitlement reform.’ Yes, we do.”

Ms. Haley also criticized Mr. DeSantis for his attacks on Disney as a “woke” company. She had no beef with the Florida governor’s criticism of Disney’s opposition to what critics call his “Don’t Say Gay” law, and even said she would have gone further than that law to prevent talk of
gender and sexuality in schools. But she called Mr. DeSantis
“hypocritical” for accepting tens of thousands of dollars in political contributions from Disney before turning on the company, and for using
taxpayer dollars to sue it. “Pick up the phone deal with it,” she said. “Settle it the way you should, and I just think he’s being hypocritical.”

Haley sought to find the sweet spot for Republicans on social issues.
On social issues including abortion, gun restrictions and transgender
rights, which animate much of the Republican voting base, Ms. Haley toed
a conservative line. She defended, for example, leading the U.S.
withdrawal from the Paris climate accord while at the United Nations. (President Biden rejoined the accord in 2021.) But she displayed less of
the punitive rhetoric on the issues that Mr. Trump and Mr. DeSantis have
made crucial to their messages.

Ms. Haley deflected on whether she supported a federal six-week abortion
ban such as the one her home state of South Carolina recently passed.
Any national restrictions, she said, would require 60 senators to
approve, which she said was so remote that the question barely merited consideration.

In the most stirring moment of the night, Ms. Haley described persuading reluctant Republican lawmakers in South Carolina to remove the
Confederate battle flag from the State Capitol after the massacre by a
white supremacist of Black worshipers at the Mother Emanuel church in Charleston in 2015.

She agreed with barring transgender girls from school sports and even
seemed to suggest that allowing “biological boys” in girls’ locker rooms was connected with the high rate of teenage girls who have considered
suicide.

At the same time, she acknowledged that “we do need to be humane” about transgender children. In South Carolina schools when she was governor,
Ms. Haley said, principals made private bathroom accommodations for
them. “They were safe, and the majority of the student body didn’t even have to deal with it,” she said.

Haley made a strong contrast with Trump and DeSantis on foreign policy.
Ms. Haley also carved out differences with Mr. Trump and Mr. DeSantis on foreign policy issues, as she has in the past. The former U.N.
ambassador disputed Mr. DeSantis, who has called Russia’s invasion of
Ukraine a “territorial dispute” — a characterization he has since walked back — and she dismissed Mr. Trump’s refusal to say whether Ukraine
should win the war.

She said both positions represented a naïve trust in Russia’s president, Vladimir V. Putin. “If Ukraine pulls out,” Ms. Haley said, “then we’re all looking at a world war.”

Asked by Mr. Tapper about Mr. Trump’s congratulating North Korea’s
leader, Kim Jong-un, for recently ascending to a leadership role in the
World Health Organization, Ms. Haley called Mr. Kim, whose flattering
letters Mr. Trump once praised, a “thug.”

“There is no reason we should ever congratulate the fact that they are
now vice chair of the World Health Organization,” Ms. Haley said.

Trip Gabriel is a national correspondent. He covered the past two
presidential campaigns and has served as the Mid-Atlantic bureau chief
and a national education reporter. He formerly edited the Styles
sections. He joined The Times in 1994. @tripgabriel • Facebook

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37
The Run-Up to the 2024 Election
Ron DeSantis

As he traversed the socially conservative state of Iowa as part of his
2024 presidential campaign, the Florida governor highlighted his state’s six-week ban on abortion. In the more moderate New Hampshire, he shied
away from the subject.

After absorbing months of attacks from former President Donald Trump,
DeSantis is beginning to fire back — but carefully.

Donald Trump

The rapidly ballooning Republican field represents a grave threat to DeSantis’s ability to consolidate the non-Trump vote. But for the former president, the more candidates the better.

Trump used a raucous town hall meeting broadcast live on CNN to sketch
out a provocative vision for what his second term in office would be like.

President Biden

Some Democrats fear that the Biden campaign’s early sluggishness shows a
lack of urgency ahead of a possible rematch against Trump. The
president’s aides say they know what they’re doing.

Mayor Eric Adams of New York City has loudly blamed the president for an
influx of migrants, amplifying concerns many Democrats share but
irritating Biden’s aides and weakening his political position.

The G.O.P. Field

The R.N.C. laid out its criteria for candidates to qualify for the first Republican presidential primary debate, establishing a key fund-raising threshold.

Republican candidates of color like Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina
and Nikki Haley have often denied the existence of systemic racism in
America. But in sharing their experiences with discrimination they are describing situations that sound just like it.

Mayor Francis Suarez of Miami has been mulling a Republican presidential
run built on the premise that his in-vogue city has boomed in difficult
times. But a trial against a city commissioner has exposed some of the
city’s less attractive inner workings.

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