Conservative columnist George Will thinks South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley would make a very “promising” vice presidential candidate if Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, wins the party’s nomination.
“No Republican has ever won the White House without carrying Ohio,” Will said in an interview with talk radio host Hugh Hewitt Wednesday. “You have to carry Ohio and Florida. Because there is a ‘gender gap’ as they used to call it in the Republican Party about approaching women. It is really narrower than that — Mitt Romney carried married women.”
His remarks came as Hewitt floated a list of “obvious” choices for Cruz’s VP shortlist, including Haley, Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, Arkansas Sen. Tom Cotton and Iowa Sen. Joni Ernst.
From that list, Will picked the South Carolina governor as the most “promising” choice.
“Haley is a promising candidate for two reasons. One thing you don’t want in a candidate for a vice presidential nomination is surprises. You want them to be surefooted and not make news and not disrupt the momentum of the campaign. She has demonstrated a tremendous surefootedness,” he said.
Will then referenced the governor’s handling of a mass shooting in June 2015, when a white man shot and killed nine black churchgoers in Charleston.
“Going through the traumatic reaction after the horrible shooting in Charleston, and also the difficulty of bringing down the Confederate flag from the state capitol grounds in Columbia,” he said. “Second, she does as a governor, she is presiding over a state transformed more and more for the better … It just continues to boom, with Boeing and all the rest down there.”
All of this, of course, depends on whether Cruz can best the current GOP front-runner, Donald Trump.
Should the senator fail, and the billionaire businessman clinch the party’s nomination, it’s unclear whether Haley would be welcome on his campaign.
She came into his crosshairs once in January after she delivered an address where she none-too-subtly rebuked the casino tycoon’s campaign rhetoric.
“Some people think that you have to be the loudest voice in the room to make a difference,” Haley said in January during her State of Union rebuttal speech. “That is just not true. Often, the best thing we can do is turn down the volume.”
She confirmed later that she was definitely talking about Trump.
“Mr. Trump has definitely contributed to what I think is just irresponsible talk,” she said in an interview on NBC.
