Opinion | Nikki Haley and the W-Word

Back in 2012, long before Nikki Haley hit the presidential campaign trail — and years before Hillary Clinton faced off against Donald Trump — Ms. Haley, then the governor of South Carolina, told this newspaper, “The reason I actually ran for office is because of Hillary Clinton.”

“Everybody was telling me why I shouldn’t run,” she elaborated. “I was too young, I had small children, I should start at the school board level. I went to Birmingham University, and Hillary Clinton was the keynote speaker on a leadership institute, and she said that when it comes to women running for office, there will be everybody that tells you why you shouldn’t, but that’s all the reasons why we need you to do it, and I walked out of there thinking, ‘That’s it. I’m running for office.’”

Ms. Haley hasn’t been keen on sharing her political origin story of late: Just this month she denied ever saying that Mrs. Clinton was an inspiration, as her male primary opponents were trying to weaponize her words against her. But there is a fresh poignancy to her anecdote and her experience these days as her candidacy has struggled to catch fire, especially in light of what I saw and heard at her events in the closing days of the New Hampshire primary this week.

At every stop, Haley supporters expressed their longing for a younger, fresher face in the White House. Several of them specifically noted how great it would be to have the first woman president come from the Republican Party. (These folks really, really hated the idea of Kamala Harris claiming the honor of being the first female president.) At the same time, there was often an equivocal or even embarrassed tinge to any talk of Ms. Haley breaking that glass ceiling — an ambivalence about emphasizing gender that the candidate herself seems to share.

This is why, coming out of New Hampshire, the conversation that stuck in my head was with Lee Dunn, who had come up from the Virginia suburbs of Washington, D.C., to volunteer for Team Haley. Waiting for a rally to begin on the eve of the primary, I asked Ms. Dunn why she had committed to Pick Nikki!, as the campaign swag implores. She didn’t hit the darker notes I had been hearing so often: The panicked, Trump is a disaster. Or the disgusted, I cannot bear a November rematch between two old geezers. Instead, she gushed about how amazing it was to see an impressive, accomplished woman in this position — someone she saw herself in. Sure, Mrs. Clinton had walked this path before, but Ms. Haley is younger, she noted, and more relatable. (And, of course, more conservative.)

“She’s the kind of person you can see driving car pool. She seems like one of your mom friends who, if you were sick, would show up at your house with food,” said Ms. Dunn, an attorney and mother of three.