• In August, Nikki Haley said the age of retirement in the US is “way too low.”

• At a town hall hosted by Fox News, she denied ever saying it until presented with evidence.

• Both Democratic and Republican presidential campaigns are using the gaffe against her.

Republican presidential candidate and former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley initially denied having said the US age of retirement is “way too low” despite video evidence proving otherwise.

Fox News hosted Haley on Monday night for a town hall where she answered a series of questions from the outlet’s hosts and members of the audience.

After she answered an audience question about what changes she’d make to Social Security, Fox News Host Bret Baier brought up recent attacks against her by fellow candidate and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who said she had claimed “the retirement age is way, way too low.”

In response, Haley quickly turned to the audience to clear the air.

“I have never once said that,” she said.

Baier then reminded Haley that she had, in fact, said that in an interview with Bloomberg in August.

One day after the first GOP presidential debate in Milwaukee, the outlet interviewed Haley who said Medicare and Social Security will be bankrupt soon if changes aren’t made.

“The way we deal with it,” she said at the time, “is we don’t touch anyone’s retirement or anyone who’s been promised in, but we go to people like my kids in their twenties when they’re coming into the system, and we say the rules have changed.”

She didn’t have an answer in the interview as to what the “right age” to move retirement benefits is but said that “65 is way too low.” The current established age to receive full retirement benefits for anyone born after 1960 is 67 years old, not 65 as Haley previously suggested.

Presented with this information by Baier at Monday’s town hall, the hopeful nominee backtracked.

“Yes, for those in their twenties,” she said. “But I have never said retirement age is ‘way too low’ for everyone else. I mean he’s totally misrepresenting the facts, that’s what he’s done.

As Business Insider noted in August, Haley’s plan to raise the age of retirement would likely face significant resistance. A Quinnipiac poll from March 2023 found that nearly 80% of respondents opposed raising it to 70 years old.

Presidential candidates’ campaigns on both sides of the aisle used Haley’s stumble to their advantage: an X account run by Democratic President Joe Biden’s campaign shared a version of the clip and former President Donald Trump’s referenced it in a Tuesday morning press release that (along with the capitalization error) said, “NIkki Haley lies as easily as she breathes.”

As of early January, Haley is currently in third place in an average of national polls, just one percentage point behind DeSantis and 50.6 percentage points behind Trump. A newly released poll from New Hampshire, however, showed her in second place in the state, just seven percentage points behind the former president.

Read the original article on Business Insider