Ms. Haley has attracted the interest of non-Republicans who say they’ll caucus for her, as rivals attack her for an insufficiently conservative message.
With temperatures threatening to dip below zero in Iowa on Monday, some of the voters preparing to caucus for Nikki Haley have already overcome a different hurdle: a long history of voting for Democrats.
At recent campaign events across Iowa, a number of Democrats and left-leaning independents said they saw Ms. Haley, the former governor of South Carolina, as a reasonable Republican who could move the country away from bitter partisanship and restore civility in national discourse. Many were drawn to her pledges to unite the country, and to work across the aisle on thorny issues such as abortion. Others are simply motivated by a fear of former President Donald J. Trump’s candidacy and the possibility that he will beat President Biden and regain the White House.
Joseph E. Brown Sr., who served two terms as an Iowa state senator in the 1970s and ’80s, said he was a registered Democrat for 50 years until he switched parties last month so that he could caucus for Ms. Haley.
“Now that I have my Republican card, I have to go visit my father’s gravesite here in town and apologize,” said Mr. Brown, who lives in Clinton, Iowa. He added that his father, a staunch Democrat and World War II veteran, always voted a straight party ticket.
Mr. Brown’s one complaint about Ms. Haley is that she tends to echo misleading claims from Republican lawmakers on the number of agents from the Internal Revenue Service auditing middle-class families. But he said he appreciated her stalwart support for aiding both Ukraine and Israel, and her promises to lower the national debt and make the federal government more efficient. He praised her measured approach toward Mr. Trump — calling out the “chaos” that trails him without attacking him on specifics — and even agreed with her support for pardoning the former president if he is found guilty of crimes.
“I’m not opposed to Joe Biden,” he said. “But out of all the Republican candidates, she is the one that strikes me as someone who can rebuild the office of the presidency.”
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Source: Elections - nytimes.com
