They voted twice for Trump, but demand change for the next US presidential election: supporters of Nikki Haley, the first Republican to challenge the former president, were white-hot on Wednesday for her first campaign rally.
"It was an extremely quick decision": as soon as Paula Blank heard of the "special announcement" promised by the Republican to her supporters in Charleston, in the south-east of the United States, the 50-year-old rushed on a plane ticket.
"I called my friend, I said to her: let's go? ", confides to AFP this professor, blond and jovial, residing very close to New York.
The Republican gave her voice to Donald Trump in 2016 and 2020, but had been waiting for "years" for the candidacy of the one who is nevertheless an outsider in the race for the Republican nomination.
The former ambassador to the UN, "expresses herself clearly and perceives the world as it is", defends Paula Bank.
Nikki Haley had met her supporters on Wednesday in a long hangar in this tourist town surrounded by churches, ice cream parlors and restaurants serving oysters. But this "special announcement" -- his first candidacy for the White House -- was no longer in doubt since Tuesday.
So when the 51-year-old candidate calls on Americans to "send a tough woman to the White House," her supporters gloat. "Nikki! Nikki!" they shout.
It doesn't matter that this raven-haired woman has been the voice of Donald Trump's policy abroad for two years.
Or even that she has pledged in the past not to run if the former president were to enter the race.
Because many of the supporters present at this meeting on Wednesday are fundamentally convinced that Donald Trump has "done a good job". Like Robin Christmas, a 63-year-old accountant, who however finds the former president too rude to give him his support for a third time.
Instead, this little bespectacled woman, originally from South Carolina, decided to get involved for the first time in a presidential campaign, as a volunteer for Nikki Haley.
"She's just awesome," says the sixty-year-old, proudly wearing a blue t-shirt in the name of the one she hopes to see become the first president of the United States.
The polls, which only place the Republican at 4 or 5% of the voting intentions - and therefore still quite a distance from the White House? Adam Caldwell brushes them off with the backhand.
"It's time to move on", pleads under a beautiful sun this tall brunette, cooled by the events of January 6, 2021, when supporters of Donald Trump attacked the seat of the American Congress.
The civil servant, residing in the neighboring state of North Carolina, took the road - on his birthday - to see this child of Indian immigrants, who, according to him, embodies "the American dream".
"Her parents immigrated here, they settled here and now they see their daughter pretending to the supreme function", he lists.
The 30-year-old, a flocked T-shirt with a portrait of former President Reagan on the back, applauds: "It only exists in America."
02/15/2023 19:16:51 - Charleston (United States) (AFP) - © 2023 AFP
