Presidential candidate Nikki Haley: "Take it from me, America is not a racist country."

Nikki Haley formally launched her campaign for President.

Nikki Haley made her bid for President official with her formal announcement in Charleston, South Carolina in front of hundreds of her cheering supporters.

Leaning into her Indian American heritage, she said, "Take it from me, America is not a racist country," a statement with which other Indian Americans and members of other ethnic groups disagree.

"I know America is better than all the division and distractions that we have today," Haley said trying to bridge the partisan divides that characterizes this era's politics.

Placing such an emphasis on her ethnicity could backfire on Haley.

1. Republicans who are closet white supremacists, or outspoken racists, who have flocked to the GOP in recent years would never support a person of color.

2. Her apparent blindness towards racial issues could turn off a lot of AANHPI voters, who overwhelmingly voted for Democrats in 2020 and 2022.

Of the ethnic groups falling under the AANHPI umbrella, Indian Americans are the strongest in voting for Democratic candidates and progressive issues. They are for gun control and reproductive rights, issues the GOP has railed against.

Haley doesn’t represent the community, Varun Nikore, executive director of the AAPI Victory Alliance, told NBC. “There’s a multitude of issues where she specifically and the Republican Party are diametrically opposed to where AAPIs are.”

Milan Vaishnav, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, who surveyed Indian American voting attitudes in 2020 compared Haley's campaign to the former Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal's unsuccessful run for President in 2016.

"They have sought to kind of play it up when they thought it was convenient to appeal to a certain kind of narrative,” Vaishnav told Politico, “but at the same time, have stood with the Republican Party when Republican officials, including Donald Trump, (have) engaged in kind of racist tropes or racist activity.”

Haley was born in Bamberg, South Carolina in 1972. Her Sikh parents Ajit Singh Randhawa and Raj Kaur Randhawa, who had emigrated from Punjab to Canada and then to the US in the 1960s, named their daughter Nimrata Nikki Randhawa.

Although raised in a Sikh family, she converted to Christianity when she married Michael Haley in 1996.

She served two terms as South Carolina's governor. Even though she didn't endorse Trump as the Republican nominee, Trump appointed her as the US ambassador to the United Nations.

"We're ready — ready to move past the stale ideas and faded names of the past, and we are more than ready for a new generation to lead us into the future," said the 51-year old Haley.

"When America is distracted, the world is less safe... And today, our enemies think the American era has passed. They’re wrong. America is not past our prime. It’s just that our politicians are past theirs!," indicating that she will make he age of opponents (Trump is 76, Biden is 80) an issue in her campaign. 

"We won’t win the fight for the 21st Century if we keep trusting politicians from the 20th Century. And so, I have an announcement to make. I stand before you as the daughter of immigrants – as a proud wife of a combat veteran – and as the mom of two amazing children," she said.

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