Nikki Haley suspended her presidential campaign on Wednesday after being soundly defeated across the country on Super Tuesday, leaving Donald Trump as the last remaining major candidate for the 2024 Republican nomination.
Haley didn’t endorse the former president in a speech in Charleston, South Carolina. Instead, she encouraged him to earn the support of the coalition of moderate Republicans and independent voters who supported her.
“It is now up to Donald Trump to earn the votes of those in our party and beyond it who did not support him. And I hope he does that,” she said. “At its best, politics is about bringing people into your cause, not turning them away. And our conservative cause badly needs more people.”
Haley, a former South Carolina governor and former U.N. ambassador, was Trump’s first significant rival when she jumped into the race in February 2023. She spent the final phase of her campaign aggressively warning the GOP against embracing Trump, whom she argued was too consumed by chaos and personal grievance to defeat President Joe Biden in the general election.
Her departure clears Trump to focus solely on his likely rematch in November with Biden. The former president is on track to reach the necessary 1,215 delegates to clinch the Republican nomination later this month.
Haley’s defeat marks a painful, if predictable, blow to those voters, donors and Republican Party officials who opposed Trump and his fiery brand of “Make America Great Again” politics. She was especially popular among moderates and college-educated voters, constituencies that will likely play a pivotal role in the general election. It’s unclear whether Trump, who recently declared that Haley donors would be permanently banned from his movement, can ultimately unify a deeply divided party.
Trump on Tuesday night declared that the GOP was united behind him, but in a statement shortly afterward, Haley spokesperson Olivia Perez-Cubas said, “Unity is not achieved by simply claiming, ‘We’re united.’”
“Today, in state after state, there remains a large block of Republican primary voters who are expressing deep concerns about Donald Trump,” Perez-Cubas said. “That is not the unity our party needs for success. Addressing those voters’ concerns will make the Republican Party and America better.”
Haley has made clear she doesn’t want to serve as Trump’s vice president or run on a third-party ticket arranged by the group No Labels. She leaves the race with an elevated national profile that could help her in a future presidential run.
By staying in the campaign, Haley drew enough support from suburbanites and college-educated voters to highlight Trump’s apparent weaknesses with those groups.
In AP VoteCast surveys conducted among Republican primary and caucus voters in Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina, between 61% and 76% of Haley’s supporters said they would be so dissatisfied if Trump became the GOP nominee that they wouldn’t vote for him in the November general election. Voters in the early Republican head-to-head contests who said they wouldn’t vote for Trump in the fall represented a small but significant segment of the electorate: 2 in 10 Iowa voters, one-third of New Hampshire voters, and one-quarter of South Carolina voters.
Haley leaves the 2024 presidential contest having made history as the first woman to win a Republican primary contest. She beat Trump in the District of Columbia on Sunday and in Vermont on Tuesday.
She had insisted she would stay in the race through Super Tuesday and crossed the country campaigning in states holding Republican contests. Ultimately, she was unable to knock Trump off his glide path to a third straight nomination.
Haley’s allies note that she exceeded most of the political world’s expectations by making it as far as she did.
She had initially ruled out running against Trump in 2024. But she changed her mind and ended up launching her bid three months after he did, citing among other things the country’s economic troubles and the need for “generational change.” Haley, 52, later called for competency tests for politicians over the age of 75 — a knock on both Trump, who is 77, and Biden, who is 81.
Her candidacy was slow to attract donors and support, but she ultimately outlasted all of her other GOP rivals, including Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, former Vice President Mike Pence and Sen. Tim Scott, her fellow South Carolinian whom she appointed to the Senate in 2012. And the money flowed in until the very end. Her campaign said it raised more than $12 million in February alone.
She gained popularity with many Republican donors, independent voters and the so-called “Never Trump” crowd, even though she criticized the criminal cases against him as politically motivated and pledged that, if president, she would pardon him if he were convicted in federal court.
(AP)
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10 Responses
America does not have a king.
Her bitter aura has already alienated voters away from her in 2028, 2032 & beyond
huju–it’s just a figure of speech. I’m sorry to see her go–I liked her a lot. Good luck Nikki–I’m sure you will still do wonderful things.
I think that the election was stolen. Jeb Bush really won in 2016 and Mike Pence this primary. It was rigged!!!!!!
Trump vs Haley and the moral issue at hand. The idea that many of us have about morality especially in politics. Accepting money from opposing opponents is a moral question in itself. It’s seems to me that people are redefining their own compass of morality to benefit one person over the other. The only way we can use that thought process is to compromise our individual morals. Sure “you” can argue our morals are evolving overtime with the advancement of humanity who have accept this new evolution of how we define morality. But in my opinion some morals should be a constant and not subjected to change from one generation to what a more in-lightening generation think, I could note examples. This is true with the old school of thought on the same subject. Is Trump the right candidate maybe yes but the real question should be is this “all we got”. In this respect Democratic’s have the same dilemma. It’s my thoughts in no way am I commenting on people’s preferences.
Let’s not forget that we lost the Senate because of Mr. Trump and we barely cling to a House majority vs. a topsy-turvy majority, also because of Mr. Trump. His brand of Republican does not represent a significant margin of the Republican party – only they’re stuck with him.
the problem is that all those illegals will now vote by mail and in person for Biden and they will steal it AGAIN
To 147: Hilary Clinton will be 81 in 2028. Do you really think she wants to run for any elective office at that time?
Winning the Republican nomination does not make you a “king”. At most it makes you the leading pretender to the throne.
And unlike Haley, who according to polls would have won by a landslide, the best Trump can hope for is to squeak in by a small margin, and perhaps end up facing a hostile Congress since he will have very small coattails and has been supporting very weak candidates for Congress (which could, if they have the chutzpah, decide that he was an insurrectionist and not let him take office, though that would result in his Vice President getting the job, so the Democrats probably won’t bother). And while Trump might find a way to repair his poor relationship with the 40% of Republicans who supported Haley (the ones Trump calls RINOs, also known as “Reagan Republicans”) and thereby win a decisive victory, Biden might be convinced (by his fellow Democrats, or perhaps the Angel of Death) to drop out forcing Trump to run against someone with full mental and physical abilities.
karlbenmarx: Even someone who received a green card in 2020 won’t be able to vote in 2024, and once they are naturalized they lose most incentives to support the Democrats (since more illegal aliens come to America to work hard and get rich, and the Democrats don’t approve of either rewarding hard work, or allowing people to get rich plus most of the illegal aliens are anti-abortion and anti-LGTBQ).
It appears the Republican have figured out that many people prefer mail ballots, and will run a better “ground game” to get out the vote and prevent fraud.