(Reuters) – Just one Republican candidate remains to challenge former President Donald Trump for the party’s nomination in the November 2024 U.S. presidential contest to take on President Joe Biden, a Democrat who is running for reelection.
Here is a list of the Republican Party’s two candidates:
DONALD TRUMP
Trump has embraced his indictments in four separate criminal cases – unprecedented for a former American president – and leveraged them to boost his popularity among Republicans and raise funds, helping to make him the Republican frontrunner with 49% in the latest Reuters/Ipsos polling. He won the party’s first nominating contest in Iowa, taking more than half the votes.
Trump, 77, has called the indictments a political witch hunt to thwart his pursuit of a second four-year term, an assertion that the Justice Department has denied. If elected again, Trump has vowed revenge against his perceived enemies and has adopted increasingly authoritarian language, including saying he would not be a dictator except “on day one.”
He has promised other sweeping changes, including gutting the federal civil service to install loyalists and imposing tougher immigration policies such as mass deportations and ending birthright citizenship. He has also promised to eliminate Obamacare health insurance and impose harsher curbs on trade with China.
NIKKI HALEY
A former South Carolina governor and Trump’s ambassador to the United Nations, Haley, 52, has emphasized her relative youth compared to Biden, 81, and Trump, as well as her background as the daughter of Indian immigrants.
Haley has gained a reputation in the Republican Party as a solid conservative who has the ability to address issues of gender and race in a more credible fashion than many of her peers. She has also pitched herself as a stalwart defender of American interests abroad, and has argued Trump’s management style is too chaotic and divisive to be effective.
She earned 12% support among Republicans, according to the Reuters/Ipsos survey and placed third in Iowa behind Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, who dropped out on Sunday.
(Compiled by the Washington newsroom; editing by Susan Heavey and Jonathan Oatis)
