ROCK HILL, S.C. \u2014 Nine-year-old Joely Scherwitz bounced with excitement, hand outstretched and clutching a yellow beaded friendship bracelet reading \u201cFEARLESS,\u201d as she waited for Nikki Haley after a rally at a wedding venue here Sunday.<\/p>\n
Bracelets like Scherwitz\u2019s, adorned with the name of Taylor Swift\u2019s sophomore album, have had a resurgence in the past year and have even made their way to the presidential campaign trail, where Scherwitz attracted the attention of Haley, who knelt to accept the bracelet.<\/p>\n
\u201cI love that it says fearless,\u201d Haley said. \u201cBecause that\u2019s what we have to be, right?\u201d Haley promised to wear the bracelet, then posed for a photo with Scherwitz, her 11-year-old sister and 10-year-old friend, who all squealed.<\/p>\n
Haley, a disciplined candidate who rarely departs from her stump speech, is often at her most animated while talking to the young girls who make up an unusually large segment of the crowds at her rallies. At dozens of campaign stops across multiple states, Haley beelined to talk to the girls, frequently offering them an extra touch of attention, such as adding a bonus message or hand-drawn heart to her autograph, or urging them to be \u201cstrong girls.\u201d<\/p>\n
The interactions may prove to be something of a legacy for the Haley campaign, which has netted few electoral accomplishments. She trails former president Donald Trump by nearly 30 points in polls ahead of Saturday\u2019s primary in her home state of South Carolina but insists she will remain in the race.<\/p>\n
Haley has walked a fine line on gender in her campaign, seeking to highlight her differences from her opponents as a woman of color but insisting that she does not believe in identity politics, or that there are \u201cglass ceilings\u201d limiting women. Her critics have accused her of diminishing barriers women face and selectively using her identity \u2014 and they\u2019ve noted her opposition to abortion rights, an animating issue for many female voters.<\/p>\n
She\u2019s also deployed her rallying cry for \u201cstrong girls\u201d politically \u2014 to oppose trans athletes playing on girls sports teams, a debate she has called the \u201cwomen\u2019s issue of our time.\u201d One of her biggest applause lines on the campaign trail is: \u201cStrong girls become strong women, strong women become strong leaders, and none of that happens if you have biological boys playing in girls sports.\u201d<\/p>\n
Still, her approach is an obvious contrast from Trump, who has a history of publicly denigrating women and was found liable for sexual abuse in a civil trial last year. And it\u2019s a reminder of the ways that Republicans continue to struggle to appeal to women, as the party consolidates behind Trump rather than backing a candidate who could be the nation\u2019s historic first female president and who has preformed better with suburban female voters, many of whom left the party because of Trump.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhen these girls see me, what it is they\u2019re seeing is they just want to see what they can be,\u201d Haley said in an interview this week aboard her campaign bus before a stop in Clemson, S.C., noting she never saw women or \u201cany brown people\u201d in leadership positions as a child. \u201cThey just want to see someone that looks like them.\u201d<\/p>\n
She compared men who \u201cjump first and think after\u201d to women who \u201cthink and think and think and think, and you have to almost push them to jump.\u201d That difference, she said, is why she encourages women and the girls who attend her events \u201cto push through the fear.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cIf I wouldn\u2019t have pushed through the fear, I certainly wouldn\u2019t be doing this,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
Some of the girls\u2019 excitement about Haley has helped win over voting-age relatives, like Jessica, a New Hampshire woman who attended a Haley meet-and-greet last month with her 5-year-old daughter, Cora, who brought a drawing of Haley that the candidate autographed. Cora, her mom said, became a fan of Haley after responding to seeing a woman running on TV and on the political mailers the family received.<\/p>\n
\u201cCora\u2019s been with her since day one,\u201d said Jessica, who asked that only her first name be used to protect her daughter\u2019s privacy. While she originally supported former Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson, she decided to support Haley after he suspended his campaign, in part due to Cora\u2019s enthusiasm for her. Haley had her best showing in New Hampshire, securing 43 percent of the vote, but lost to Trump.<\/p>\n
Penny Cannon, 71, brought her three granddaughters to a bus tour stop in Greenwood, S.C., this month. As the girls \u2014 9, 6 and 4 \u2014 watched from coordinated small pink folding chairs with Minnie Mouse on them, Cannon said she is a Democrat but planning to vote for Haley.<\/p>\n
\u201cI want them to know that a woman can be president one day,\u201d said Cannon, of Ninety Six, S.C. She said she was supporting Haley in part because she thinks she would be \u201ca great role model for our girls.\u201d<\/p>\n
Some of the parents and grandparents at Haley\u2019s events expressed a desire for their daughters and granddaughters to see Haley\u2019s example of how to stand up to sexism, noting her aggressive rejoinders to her primary opponents\u2019 gender-based attacks.<\/p>\n
Haley said she is aware girls viewed her responses as instructive. \u201cThey want to know that they can fight back, that it doesn\u2019t make you bad for fighting back,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
Her young supporters have brought signs to her event proclaiming themselves \u201cin our Nikki Haley era,\u201d another reference to Swift, and \u2014 when she wore a hot pink blazer on the trail \u2014 compared her to Barbie. (Haley said her favorite Swift song is \u201cAnti-Hero,\u201d \u201cthe one that, like, where she talks about her daughter-in-law killing her for the money.\u201d)<\/p>\n
\u201cIn history class you hear about all these famous men and people, but they\u2019re all men. There\u2019s no women,\u201d said Mary Claire Griffith, 12, who attended a Haley event in Greenwood, S.C., this month with her grandmother. \u201cAnd I\u2019m really excited to see what she\u2019s going to do and what she can do for America.\u201d<\/p>\n
Added her 8-year-old sister, Carolina: \u201cThese boys over here, they think they got everything. They can just do whatever. And they try to [do] what they want to do, and they don\u2019t care about what we think.\u201d<\/p>\n
After Haley signed an autograph for the sisters, Mary Claire said she told them \u201cthat we needed to be strong girls because America needs girls.\u201d<\/p>\n
On her bus, as Haley sorted through a pile of the friendship bracelets she has received from girls on the trail, she described the tokens as \u201ctheir way of speaking without saying anything.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cI just try and make them feel like they\u2019re the most important person in the room,\u201d said Haley, who has worn some of the bracelets on key dates, like the New Hampshire primary or for a speech Tuesday during which she promised to continue her campaign.<\/p>\n
Haley\u2019s interactions with young girls are reminiscent of Sen. Elizabeth Warren\u2019s (D-Mass.) pinkie promises with girls during her 2020 bid for the White House, asking them to pledge to remember that running for president is \u201cwhat girls do.\u201d<\/p>\n
Reflecting last year on those exchanges, Warren distinguished them from the work of challenging gender disparities. \u201cEveryone, men and women, progressive and conservative, can all say they support girls,\u201d she said at the time. \u201cThat feels non-threatening to all the boys in the room.\u201d<\/p>\n
Asked about Warren\u2019s perspective on the difference between campaigning on supporting girls versus broader gender inequalities, Haley downplayed such challenges for female candidates.<\/p>\n
\u201cObviously women and male candidates have different experiences,\u201d she said. \u201cI don\u2019t think one has it harder than the other. I just think that the experiences are different, and so I\u2019ve never focused on the challenges of it.\u201d<\/p>\n
Haley said she wants her campaign to build girls\u2019 confidence in speaking their minds and still being respected.<\/p>\n
\u201cI hope that they\u2019re just taking a little bit from the pains I\u2019ve taken along the way,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
ROCK HILL, S.C. \u2014 Nine-year-old Joely Scherwitz bounced with excitement, hand outstretched and clutching a yellow beaded friendship bracelet reading \u201cFEARLESS,\u201d as she waited for Nikki Haley after a rally at a wedding venue here Sunday. Bracelets like Scherwitz\u2019s, adorned with the name of Taylor Swift\u2019s sophomore album, have had a resurgence in the past […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":1442,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1441","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1441","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1441"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1441\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1442"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1441"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1441"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1441"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}