Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley didn’t close the door to joining forces with rival Ron DeSantis in 2024, but said it was her sole mission to defeat the current GOP front-runner, former President Trump.
Asked in an interview if she would consider the Florida governor as a running mate, she said “maybe.”
“I am going to defeat Donald Trump on my own. That’s the goal that we have,” she said in the interview with NBC News and the Des Moines Register. “If he wants to join forces with me, I welcome that.”
“But right now, we’ve got a race that we feel good about,” Haley, the former governor of South Carolina, added. “We’ve got a surge. We’ve got momentum.”
DeSantis, however, has recently jumped on rumors that Trump could be considering Haley to join his ticket. Last month, he urged the former U.N. ambassador to make a decision on whether she would accept such an offer.
The comments come as Haley has jumped into second place in The Hill/Decision Desk HQ’s national average for the GOP primary with 11.3 percent support. She is still far behind the former president, however, as he dominates the field with a 64.1 percent average.
But, she is currently leading DeSantis by 0.3 percent, according to the data.
The Iowa caucuses, which kickstart primary voting season, are set to take place on Jan. 15.
But despite recent gains, Haley is facing backlash for her answer during a town hall in New Hampshire when a voter asked if she knew why the Civil War was fought.
“Well, don’t come with an easy question, right,” she said at the time. “I mean, I think the cause of the Civil War was basically how government was going to run, the freedoms and what people could and couldn’t do.”
The voter then criticized the answer, calling it “astonishing” that in 2023 Haley did not mention slavery.