Nikki Haley suspended her presidential campaign after being soundly defeated nationwide during the Super Tuesday primaries, the former South Carolina governor announced Wednesday, leaving Donald Trump as the last major candidate remaining for the 2024 Republican nomination.
Haley confirmed her decision, which had been reported by the main American media, in a speech in Charleston, the main city of South Carolina, the state of which she was governor.
Haley said she is “full of gratitude for the outpouring of support” she has received from across the country. “But the time has come to suspend my campaign,” she said.
“I said I wanted Americans to make their voices heard. And I have,” she added. “I do not regret anything”.
Haley, who was also ambassador to the UN during Trump’s presidency, was the former president’s first significant challenger when she entered the race in February 2023. She spent the final phase of her campaign aggressively warning the Republican Party against supporting to Trump, who she said was too mired in chaos and personal problems to defeat President Joe Biden in the general election.
“In all likelihood, Donald Trump will be the Republican nominee,” Haley said during her speech. “I congratulate him and wish him the best. I wish the best to anyone who wants to be president of the United States.” However, she did not announce his endorsement of the former president. On the contrary, she asked him to win the support of the moderates and independents who supported her in the primaries.
“Now it’s Donald Trump’s turn to win over the votes of those in our party and beyond who didn’t support him, and I hope he does,” Haley said.
Haley’s withdrawal from the primary allows Trump to focus solely on his likely rematch with Biden in November. The former president is on track to reach the 1,215 delegates needed to win the Republican nomination at the end of this month.
Following Haley’s announcement, the Republican National Committee issued a statement declaring Trump the presumptive candidate. Ronna McDaniel, the committee chairwoman who will leave office this week, congratulated Trump and then applauded Haley “for running a hard-fought campaign and becoming the first woman to win a Republican presidential primary.”
Painful withdrawal for moderate Republicans
Haley’s defeat is a painful, if predictable, blow to voters, donors and Republican Party leaders who opposed Trump and his ardent “Make America Great Again” policy.
He was especially popular among moderates and college-educated voters, groups that are likely to play a key role in the general election. It’s unclear whether Trump, who recently declared that Haley’s donors would be permanently banned from his campaign, can finally unify a deeply divided party.
Despite her retirement, Haley made history as the first woman to win a Republican primary. She defeated Trump in the District of Columbia on Sunday and in Vermont on Tuesday.
Haley had insisted she would remain in the race until Super Tuesday and crisscrossed the country campaigning in states where Republican contests were being held. In the end, she couldn’t knock Trump off his path to a third consecutive nomination.
Haley’s allies point out that she exceeded most of the political world’s expectations by making it this far.
She had initially ruled out running against Trump in 2024. But she changed her mind and ended up launching her candidacy three months after he did, citing among other things the country’s economic problems and the need for a “generational change.” Haley, 52, later called for competency testing for politicians over 75, a criticism of both Trump, who is 77, and President Joe Biden, 81.
His candidacy was slow to attract donors and support, but he ultimately bested all of his other GOP rivals, including Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, former Vice President Mike Pence and Sen. Tim Scott, his fellow South Carolinian whom he nominated as a senator. in 2012. And the money flowed until the end. His campaign said it raised more than $12 million in February alone.
He gained popularity among many Republican donors, independent voters and so-called Never Trumpers, even though he criticized the criminal cases against him as politically motivated and promised that, if he were president, he would pardon him if he was convicted in federal court.
As the campaign consolidated, she and DeSantis faced off in early voting states for a distant second place to Trump. The two attacked each other in debates, ads and interviews, often more directly than they attacked Trump.
The campaign’s focus on foreign policy following Hamas’ surprise attack on Israel in October tilted the campaign toward Haley, giving her the opportunity to showcase her UN experience, tying the war to her conservative priorities in domestically and arguing that both Israel and the United States could be made vulnerable by what she called “distractions.”
Haley was slow to directly criticize her former boss.
While campaigning in the early states, Haley often praised some of Trump’s foreign policy achievements, but gradually inserted more criticism into her campaign speeches. She argued that Trump’s hyperfocus on trade with China led him to ignore security threats posed by a major rival of the United States. He warned that weak support for Ukraine would “only encourage” China to invade Taiwan, a view shared by several of his GOP rivals, even as many Republican voters questioned whether the United States should send aid to Ukraine.
In November, Haley – an accountant who had consistently promoted her austerity campaign – won the endorsement of AFP Action’s political arm. the powerful network of conservative Koch businessmen. AFP Action bombarded voters in early states with mailings and door-knocking, committing its national coalition of activists and virtually unlimited funds to help Haley defeat Trump.
Haley’s name emerged as a possible running mate for Trump, and the former president is said to have asked his allies what they thought about adding her to his possible candidacy. As Haley appeared to gain ground, some of Trump’s supporters worked to mitigate the idea of her.
Although Haley initially flatly refused to rule out the possibility, during her campaign in New Hampshire in January she said that being “nobody’s vice president” is “out of the question.”
After DeSantis dropped out of the campaign following Trump’s record-breaking victory in the Iowa caucuses, Haley hoped New Hampshire voters would feel so strongly about keeping the former president out of the White House that they would turn out to support her in large numbers.
“America doesn’t do coronations,” Haley said at a VFW hall in Franklin on the eve of the New Hampshire primary. “Let’s show the entire media class and the political class that we have a different plan in mind, and let’s show the country what we can do.”
But he would lose New Hampshire and then refused to participate in the Nevada caucuses, arguing that the state’s rules strongly favored Trump. Instead, he ran in the state’s primary, which did not count for any delegates toward the nomination. Still, she came in a distant second to “none of these candidates,” an option that Nevada offers to voters dissatisfied with her choices and that many Trump supporters use to oppose her.
He had long vowed to win South Carolina, but backed off as the primary approached. She toured the state that twice elected her governor on a bus tour, holding smaller rallies than Trump’s less frequent rallies and suggesting she was better prepared than he to beat Biden.
They lost South Carolina by 20 points and Michigan, three days later, by 40.
AFP Action, owned by the Koch brothers, announced after its defeat in South Carolina that it would stop organizing its campaign.
But by staying on the campaign trail, Haley attracted enough support from suburban and college-educated voters to highlight Trump’s apparent weaknesses with those groups.
Haley has made it clear that she does not want to be Trump’s vice president or run on a third-party ticket organized by the group No Labels. She leaves her career with a raised national profile that could help her in a future presidential run.
In recent days, he has backed away from his promise to support the eventual Republican nominee, required of anyone who participates in party debates.
“I think I’ll make whatever decision I want to make,” he told NBC’s “Meet the Press.”
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