Former Republican presidential hopeful Nikki Haley said former President Donald Trump is losing women voters by discussing issues “that don’t matter” in the 2024 election.
In a Fox News appearance on Thursday, Haley, who served as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations under Trump’s administration, said that the former president “needs” to start addressing issues that are important to suburban women and independents, saying that both voting blocs fall into the “5 percent of people who are going to decide” the election.
“The best thing he [Trump] can do is let them feel secure on what he’s going to do with the economy, what he’s going to do with the border, what he’s going to do in terms of wars in the Middle East,” Haley told Fox News host John Roberts.
“And if you’re talking about things over here that don’t matter—if you’re talking about whether Kamala is dumb, if you’re talking about, you know, Haitians eating cats—you’re losing them,” she added.
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Newsweek reached out to Trump’s campaign via email for comment on Thursday.
Haley, like other Republicans, has previously raised concerns about the Trump campaign’s rhetoric straying women voters come November. The former president is well behind his Democratic opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris, among women voters in preliminary polling, in part due to issues like reproductive rights.
The former South Carolina governor last month told CBS News that remarks made by Trump’s running mate, Ohio Senator JD Vance, about women were “not helpful” to the campaign.
“[N]o, it is not helpful to talk about whether women have children or whether they don’t,” Haley said in the interview. “It’s not helpful to say any of those things that are personality-driven or anything else. I have said that, and I will continue to say to Republicans, stop it. That’s not helpful. If you want to talk about things, stick with policy.”
Vance was under fire shortly after being announced as the GOP vice presidential nominee after a 2021 interview resurfaced of him saying that the “country via the Democrats” is run by “a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable too.” He has also suggested that Harris, who is a stepmother, does not have a “direct stake” in the country because she does not have biological children.
In a survey released on Thursday by Emerson College Polling, Harris led Trump among likely women voters by just over 12 points (58.2 percent to 46.1 percent). In a Quinnipiac University poll released September 24, Harris was also up by 12 points (53 percent to 41 percent).
At a rally in Pennsylvania last month, Trump promised to “protect” women if he gets elected to the White House for a second term, telling supporters, “I always thought women liked me. I never thought I had a problem.”
He later said that women “will be happy, healthy, confident and free” under his administration, adding, “You will no longer be thinking about abortion.”