Nikki Haley Boasts About Her Surge in Polls Ahead of Iowa, Says, “I Defeat Biden”

Former U.N. ambassador and Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley had many noteworthy moments during her participation at a CNN-hosted town hall in Iowa on Thursday. Haley, the former governor of South Carolina, responded by pointing out that several polls suggest she would win a one-on-one contest with President Joe Biden when asked how she intended to surpass Donald Trump, who has a commanding lead in the polls despite her recent rise in support in New Hampshire and Iowa.

As reported by The Hill , Haley said during the debate, “I defeat Biden by 17 points.” She added, “I think that what you’re seeing is we’ve got momentum. We’ve got momentum in Iowa, we’ve got momentum in New Hampshire, you’re gonna continue to see us be strong in South Carolina.” Later, Haley said that polls indicated that she would do better against Biden than either Trump or Florida Governor Ron DeSantis .

She said, “That’s what we’ll get. Look at any of the polls head-to-head against Joe Biden. Ron doesn’t beat Biden. Trump head-to-head—on a good day he might be up by two. The Wall Street Journal had him up by four. I’m in every one of those same polls. I defeat Biden by 17 points. Seventeen points. That makes it bigger than the presidency. That’s governorships. That’s House. That’s Senate.”

Haley was alluding to a Wall Street Journal survey that was done in late November and early December, in which it was shown that, in a hypothetical two-way race, Haley would defeat Biden by 17 points. Haley criticized Biden’s administration for trying to thwart Republican Texas Governor Greg Abbott’s efforts to protect his state from the hordes of migrants trying to cross the Rio Grande and called his handling of the escalating crisis at the southern border “truly a dereliction of duty” when questioned about it. To make sure that companies weren’t employing illegal immigrants, Haley said, a Haley government would “catch and deport” instead of “catch and release,” defund sanctuary cities “once and for all,” and restore Trump’s stay in Mexico policy.

Haley was repairing the damage on Thursday after making comments at a gathering in New Hampshire a week earlier that excluded slavery as a factor in the Civil War and drew harsh criticism. She mentioned how she grew up in a tiny, rural, segregated community as the sole member of an Indian family, and she said that racism was a topic of conversation more often than slavery.

As reported by the Washington Post , she highlighted, “If you grow up in South Carolina, literally in second and third grade, you learn about slavery. You grow up, and you have, you know, I had Black friends growing up. It is a very talked-about thing. We have a big history in South Carolina when it comes to, you know, slavery, when it comes to all the things that happened with the Civil War, all of that. I was thinking past slavery, and talking about the lesson that we would learn going forward. I shouldn’t have done that.”