Like many politicians, former U.N. Ambassador and South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley began her career in business before running for office. Among the many overlaps between the two fields, both require selling the public on a given product. Exactly what that product is depends on the politician, their party affiliation and the potential buyers they wish to reach.
In running for president, Haley is on one level pitching herself, as we saw in her CNN town hall in Iowa on Sunday evening. She wishes to be seen as a viable candidate, one that donors should invest in, that volunteers should endorse to their neighbors, and that Republican primary voters should support at the ballot box. As a Republican, Haley is also selling herself as a representative of those primary voters — which means showing that she knows her audience.
Case in point: When CNN moderator Jake Tapper asked her to define “woke” — a buzzword on the right that even Trump has tired of defending — she decided to focus on the issue of “biological boys playing in girl sports.” She went on to call it the “women’s issue of our time” and pondered, “Are we supposed to get our girls used to the fact that biological boys are in their locker rooms? And then we wonder why a third of our teenage girls seriously contemplated suicide last year.”
It’s an abhorrent line of thinking. There are myriad reasons to be concerned about the teen suicide rate. But to link an upswing in ideation to cis girls supposedly being forced to share locker rooms with trans girls is ghoulish, and without evidence.
What makes the current primary season so troubling is how the Republican Party has rebranded itself in recent years to center grievance to the exclusion of other offerings.
It’s also sadly entirely in line with the arc of the modern GOP. That Republicans love peddling grievances is not a new development. When Sen. Mitt Romney, R-Utah, ran for president, his pitch to voters was centered on competence, in…
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