Nikki Haley is capturing hearts and minds in the presidential match-up polling, and this warrants attention.

Per Haley’s campaign, in the most recent quarter, 40,000 new donors were added and $11 million was raised.

Former Texas Rep. Will Hurd, who withdrew from the presidential race, endorsed Haley in a column in The Wall Street Journal. “Our nation deserves a leader who can unite us and navigate the complex challenges we face, particularly on national security. Ms. Haley is the best person in this race to do that,” per Hurd.

The following day, Washington Post columnist George Will wrote that Tim Scott should withdraw from the race and that the party should unite behind Nikki Haley as its candidate.

In Will’s view, Haley has established her policies, both foreign and domestic, as preeminent among the field of Republican candidates.

Haley’s warning that the recent horrible aggression by terrorist savages in Israel should raise concerns in our country about our vulnerability to the same from our southern border was recently echoed by Pastor Franklin Graham.

Per Will, Haley has been “the most forthright against the amalgam of nihilism, isolationism and opportunism” that defines the views of too many elected Republicans regarding how our country should relate to the rest of the world.

Outrageous and absurd accusations by Vivek Ramaswamy that Haley’s support of Israel and our nation’s common interests with the only democracy in the Middle East is somehow driven by financial interest on her part is enough, in my view, for him to terminate his cartoon candidacy.

Will also notes Haley’s courage in being willing to take on the very hard but huge issues of Social Security, Medicare and the exploding national debt.

Haley has been out front even before the attack in Israel, when she was U.N. ambassador and the need to stand behind Israel.

It is also clear our fiscal realities at home cannot go on as they are.

Social Security and Medicare, systems designed 50-90 years ago, are no longer functional. These systems consume some two-thirds of our budget expenditures and must be reformed. We need new approaches.

At this very difficult time, we need a leader who is motivated by one thing — a selfless love of our country and a willingness to work without compromise for what needs to change.

Writer Herman Wouk once observed that “Heroes are not supermen; they are good men who embody — by the cast of destiny — the virtue of their whole people in a great hour.”

This is a great hour. We need a hero.

Our country has dangerously drifted from its roots and the truths that informed its founding as a free nation under God.

We hear voices of darkness across the nation reminiscent of the voices in the 1930s that suggested that Hitler’s aggression across Europe was not relevant to the United States, even some praising that satanic figure.

We need leadership today in the spirit of what Herman Wouk described.

Increasingly, it appears that Nikki Haley has these characteristics.