I can see why you asked this hypothetical since it would take supernatural intervention for Haley to win a Republican primary.
Uh, citation needed.
She's relatively moderate and a woman of color.
She’s really not “moderate,” and her conservative views make the fact that she’s a “woman of color” irrelevant ... though I know you prefer to believe otherwise.
People perceive her to be moderate, which is the problem.
And yes, of course her being a woman of color matters. The GOP primary base is too racist and sexist to vote for her.
The GOP primary base would have pissed themselves happy to vote for Palin, and plenty of other Tea Partiers and evangelicals in the Republican base (Keyes, Bachmann, Cain, Fiorina, hell even Carson was polling even with Trump at one point) were female/nonwhite
All of those people did poorly in the primaries.
Palin was/is beloved by the Tea party masses. Were Republican voters "too sexist" to vote for her when she was on McCain's ticket?
I don't know why "doing well in the primaries" is the only criterion that matters to you, since all of those people I mention were heavily endorsed by the Tea party faction (which is the most socially right-wing faction of the GOP) and were polling competitively and/or leading the pack at one point or another
Republicans voters care about getting their agenda passed one way or the other, so if Haley is the nominee, yeah, they'd vote for her. If she loses, it's because she's ideologically out of touch with the Republican party (which she is), not because she's a "woman of color"
Yeah IF she won the primary they’d vote for her but she’d never win the primary
They’ll fall in line if they have no other choice but they’ll prefer a conservative white guy
Yet Nikki Haley as an underdog candidate beat 3 highly qualified white conservative males (A state attorney, a US congressman and a lieutenant governor) in the **2010 South Carolina** gubernatorial primary, taking 49% of the initial vote and 65% of the runoff.
Republican voters don't care about the race of their candidate, rather they care about the candidates agenda. Haley won the nomination for governor because she presented herself as a conservative, anti-establishment outsider and received important endorsements (such as Sarah Palin and Mitt Romney) at the height of the Tea Party Movement. Haley's performance in a Republican Primary during the 2020s will again be based on her platform and her standing within the party.
Poll
