Nikki Haley's 'Rock' follows her campaign from a distance

When Nikki Haley conceded her disappointing 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 – 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 sweet note for a politician known for her tough exterior. But it was hardly out of place.

Even in his absence, Major Michael Haley, a National Guardsman serving a voluntary, yearlong deployment in Africa, has played a major role in his wife's increasingly lonely effort to wrest the Republican nomination from former President Donald J. Trump.

In almost every stump speech, Mrs. Haley describes her husband and his military career as one of her motives for fleeing. She often references his struggles after returning from a war zone in her promises to improve health care for veterans. She suggests his work has informed her foreign policy.

But despite this fame, Major Haley himself remains a blank slate. While other candidates' spouses — with the notable exception of Melania Trump — traveled miles across Iowa and New Hampshire last year in an effort to humanize their significant others, he has avoided the intense scrutiny, as well as the public speaking, photo- ops and interviews, which comes with campaigning.

Those who know him say this is just the way he likes it. Major Haley, a former foster child who met his wife when he was 19, has largely shaped her ambitions ever since.

As her career marched upward, his swayed; he worked for her parents and ran a struggling barter business before finding the army. More recently, he was involved in a casino deal and is currently in an ill-defined role at a small defense company.

Until this year, he has always campaigned alongside her, albeit largely out of the spotlight.

“He is completely content to be a rock that Nikki leans on in the background,” said Rob Godfrey, who worked as a spokesman for Ms. Haley during both of her campaigns for South Carolina governor and spent most of her time in that office.

Major Haley rarely speaks to the news media and has declined an interview request. When asked about his June deployment, he told The Associated Press that he “can't help but think of spending a year, along with my fellow soldiers, as many before me have done, to make a life to secure freedom for my family. is definitely worth everything that comes with it.”

Ms. Haley has turned to her husband at key points in her career as “a touchstone for important issues,” Mr. Godfrey said.

In the days after a racist gunman killed nine people at a historically black church in Charleston, S.C., Ms. Haley, after consulting with Major Haley, decided to push for the removal of the Confederate flag from the Statehouse grounds, Mr. Godfrey said.

“There was no doubt about it: Nikki wanted to talk to the person she trusted most about what she needed to do,” Mr. Godfrey said.

Major Haley's politics seem to mirror those of his wife; in the past, he has occasionally used social media to criticize her political opponents or Democratic officials.

Friends describe him as a golfer, a football fan and an avid hunter who enjoys posting photos of alligators he has caught. The couple's son, Nalin, a college student, 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, Mr. Haley said, and he has a habit of turning photos of his family or his wife's staff into memes that he posts online shares. “Sometimes they're really funny, or they're really bad,” he said. “There is no middle ground.”

Major Haley, 53, did not have an easy start in life. His biological father was an alcoholic who was in trouble with the law. He spent his early years in Ohio, living in a house that often had no electricity or running water, Ms. Haley wrote in her 2012 book, “Can't Is Not An Option.”

His mother suffered a serious brain injury when he was three, and Major Haley went to a foster home with two of his sisters, while the oldest two siblings were placed in another home.

The following 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 siblings, Ms. Haley wrote.

Major 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 college nearby.

At the time, Major Haley had the same first name as his adoptive father, Bill. But Ms. Haley recounts in her memoir that shortly after they started dating, she told him, “You just don't look like a Bill.” Instead, she chose to call him by his middle name, Michael, and it stuck, she wrote.

The couple encountered resistance from Mrs. Haley's parents, Sikh immigrants from India, who wanted their daughter to marry someone of the same religion. But in 1996, two years after he proposed, they married in separate Sikh and Christian ceremonies and eventually settled in Lexington, SC.

Both worked for her parents' clothing company, Exotica International. Major Haley headed the men's clothing department, while Mrs. Haley handled the books. When she entered politics, he invested in the exchange franchise. While raising their two children – Nalin has an older sister, Rena – the family business was struggling and money was tight.

In 2006, when Ms. Haley was a state representative for the first time, Major Haley completed his college education and soon after joined the South Carolina Army National Guard as a 36-year-old second lieutenant, older than most new officers.

The army gave him a steady purpose and a modest income. In 2007, he took a full-time job as a federal military technician, where he worked in the human resources department on policies to promote diversity within the Guard and protect against discrimination based on race, gender or disability.

Major Haley remained in office when he became South Carolina's first gentleman — the state's first — in 2010 after an ugly campaign in which Mrs. Haley was forced to deny allegations of marital infidelity. He used his role to advocate for issues close to home – changes in adoption laws and veterans care – but kept his focus largely on his family.

“He's not a retail politician,” said Ted Pitts, a friend and fellow Guardian who is also a former state representative. “He is devoted to family and puts a lot of time and effort into making sure the family is taken care of.”

In 2012, the third deadliest year for U.S. troops during the war in Afghanistan, Major Haley raised his hand for a mission aimed at teaching the country's farmers how to grow and sell crops other than opium. While many National Guard deployments are mandatory, they were strictly voluntary, said Dwight Bradham, a retired major who helped oversee the agribusiness team's work.

(When news of his deployment broke, Ms. Haley took to Facebook: post song lyrics after the 1988 ballad by the hair-metal band Poison, “Every Rose Has a Thorn.”)

Major Haley, then a captain, deployed to Helmand Province in January 2013. Although he was not in a combat unit, he did encounter roadside bombs a few times. “People there had brain injuries from the explosions,” said Lt. Col. Scott Ward, who is now retired but served as commanding officer of the agriculture mission.

Everyone knew who he was, but he “didn't sit back and try to get special treatment because of who his wife is,” Major Bradham said. “He's a soldier.”

Mrs. Haley often describes her husband's return as difficult. “When Michael returned from Afghanistan, he was startled by the loud noises,” Ms. Haley said in an ad published in December. 'He couldn't be in the crowd. The transition was difficult.”

Friends describe Major Haley, who earned a Bronze Star in Afghanistan, slipping into his next role with no apparent signs of stress. When Ms. Haley became ambassador to the United Nations in 2017, he accompanied his wife to diplomatic events and dinners, as well as on official trips abroad.

Since the couple's return to South Carolina in late 2018, Major Haley has maintained a lower profile. Friends say he is deeply involved in the care of Ms. Haley's parents. Financial disclosures show he runs a company that manages income from his wife's speeches and book sales, as well as a family investment portfolio.

In 2022, The Wall Street Journal reported that he was among politically connected figures with stakes in a company that received a share of slot machine winnings from a tribal casino in North Carolina. Others with interests included John B. Clyburn, a brother of Representative James Clyburn, Democrat of South Carolina, and Patti Solis Doyle, a Democratic political operative.

Wallace Cheves, a developer who led the project, said Major Haley got his stake in exchange for cybersecurity services.

“He was an advisor to an advisor who worked with the tribe,” Mr. Cheves said in response to questions.

Financial disclosures show he also has a stake worth as much as $500,000 in Allied Defense, a company registered with the federal government as a “military armored vehicles, tanks and tank parts manufacturing company” owned by veterans. But it appears there are no federal contracts.

The Haley campaign declined to comment on Major Haley's cybersecurity background or release information about his involvement with the defense company.

Major Haley deployed again last June, this time to Djibouti, a base for counter-terrorism operations in Africa. He joined the 218th Maneuver Enhancement Brigade as the mission planning officer. Because he did not belong to the unit, it was an assignment he should have requested, according to several former Guardsmen.

The deployment has caused him to miss much of his wife's campaign: her weeks of joy, her standout debate performances, her poor performance in Iowa, her loss in New Hampshire and now the intense pressure from fellow Republicans to quit.

“There's never a good time for a deployment,” says Ms. Haley posted on social media after seeing her husband, along with several hundred other soldiers, at a ceremony at the Citadel, a military college in Charleston, in June.

“How blessed are we to live in a country where men and women are willing to sacrifice and serve to defend our freedoms?” she wrote.

Jasmine Ulloa And Sharon LaFraniere reporting contributed. Kitty Bennett research contributed.