HALEY SUSPENDS HER PRESIDENTIAL CAMPAIGN
Leaves Trump as last candidate for the 2024 Republican nomination
NEW YORK — 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.
Ms. Haley didn’t endorse the former president in a speech in Charleston, S.C. 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.”
Ms. Haley, a former South Carolina governor and former U.N. ambassador, was Mr. 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 Mr. Trump, whom she argued was too consumed by chaos and personal grievance to defeat President Joe Biden in the general election.
Her departure clears Mr. Trump to focus solely on his likely rematch in November with Mr. Biden. The former president is on track to reach the necessary 1,215 delegates to clinch the Republican nomination later this month.
Ms. Haley’s defeat marks a painful, if predictable, blow to those voters, donors and Republican Party officials who opposed Mr. 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 Mr. Trump, who recently declared that Ms. Haley donors would be permanently banned from his movement, can ultimately unify a deeply divided party.
Mr. 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,” Ms. 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.”
Ms. Haley has made clear she doesn’t want to serve as Mr. 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, Ms. Haley drew enough support from suburbanites and college-educated voters to highlight Mr. 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 Ms. Haley’s supporters said they would be so dissatisfied if Mr. 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 Mr. Trump in the fall represented a small but significant segment of the electorate: 2 in 10 Iowa voters, onethird of New Hampshire voters, and one- quarter of South Carolina voters.
Ms. Haley leaves the 2024 presidential contest having made history as the first woman to win a Republican primary contest. She beat Mr. 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 Mr. Trump off his glide path to a third straight nomination.
Ms. Haley’s allies note that she exceeded most of the political world’s expectations by making it as far as she did.