Washington, Feb 5
When Nikki Haley conceded her deflating third-place defeat in the Iowa caucuses this month, the first person she thanked was nearly 8,000 miles away.
“I want to say to my husband, who is deployed, who I know may or may not be watching this right now — Michael, I love you,” she said, standing in front of a row of American flags. “What keeps me going at night is that we sleep under the same stars.”
It was an unusually personal and almost saccharine note for a politician known for her tough exterior. But it was hardly out of place.
Even in his absence, Maj. Michael Haley, a National Guard member serving a voluntary, yearlong deployment in Africa, has played an outsize role in his wife’s increasingly lonely attempt to snatch the Republican nomination from former President Donald Trump.
In nearly every stump speech, Nikki Haley describes her husband and his military career as one of her motives for running. She frequently refers to his struggles after returning from a war zone in her promises to improve health care for veterans. She suggests that his work has informed her foreign policy.
Yet, despite this prominence, Michael Haley himself remains something of a blank slate. While other candidates’ spouses — with the notable exception of Melania Trump — logged miles across Iowa and New Hampshire last year trying to humanize their other halves, he has avoided the intense scrutiny, as well as the public speaking, photo ops and interviews, that comes with campaigning.
Those who know him say this is just as he likes it. A former foster child who met his wife when he was 19, Haley has largely orbited her ambitions since.While her career marched upward, his meandered; he worked for her parents and ran a struggling bartering venture before he found the military. More recently, he was involved in a casino deal and currently has an ill-defined role with a small defense company.
Until this year, he has always campaigned at her side, though largely out of the spotlight.
“He’s perfectly content as a rock Nikki leans on in the background,” said Rob Godfrey, who worked as a spokesperson for Nikki Haley during both of her campaigns for South Carolina governor as well as most of her time in that office.
Michael Haley rarely speaks to the news media and declined a request for an interview. When asked about his deployment in June, he told The Associated Press that he “can’t help but to think giving one year, along with my fellow soldiers, as many have done before me, to secure a life of freedom for my family, is well worth all that comes with it.”
Nikki Haley has turned to her husband as “a touchstone on important issues” at key moments in her career, Godfrey said.
In the days after a racist gunman killed nine people at a historically Black church in Charleston, South Carolina, Haley decided to push to remove the Confederate flag from the Statehouse grounds after consulting with her husband, Godfrey said.
“There was no question: Nikki wanted to talk to the person she trusted the most about what to do,” Godfrey said.
Michael Haley’s politics appear to mirror his wife’s; in the past, he has occasionally taken to social media to criticize her political opponents or Democratic officials.
Friends describe him as a golfer, a football fan and an avid hunter who relishes posting pictures of alligators he has bagged. The couple’s son, Nalin, a college senior, described his father in an interview with The New York Times as a prankster and a lover of “the typical dad jokes.”
His father watched every debate from Camp Lemonnier, the sprawling military base in Djibouti where he is deployed, Nalin Haley said, and he has a habit of turning photos of his family or his wife’s staff into memes that he shares online. “Sometimes they are really funny, or they are really bad,” he said. “There is no in between.”
Michael Haley, 53, did not have an easy start in life. His biological father was an alcoholic who had trouble with the law. He spent his earliest years in Ohio, living in a house that often had no electricity or running water, Nikki Haley wrote in her 2012 book, “Can’t Is Not An Option.”
His mother suffered a severe brain injury when he was 3, and he went to a foster home with two of his sisters, while the oldest two siblings were placed in another home.
The next year, he and his younger sister, Lee Anne, were adopted by Bill and Carole Haley. Bill was the manager of a steel mill, and Carole was a schoolteacher. It would be 15 years before Michael tracked down the rest of his brothers and sisters, Haley wrote.
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Michael Haley met his future wife in college, when she was a freshman studying accounting at Clemson University and he was enrolled at Anderson University, a small Christian school nearby.
At the time, he went by the same first name as his adoptive father, Bill. But Nikki Haley recounts in her memoir that soon after they started dating she told him, “You just don’t look like a Bill.” She instead chose to call him by his middle name, Michael, and it stuck, she wrote.
