Nikki Haley Dropping Out Of Republican Race, Leaving Path Clear For Donald Trump
Nikki Haley plans to suspend her campaign and drop out of the presidential race following her Super Tuesday defeats to former President Donald Trump, according to reports.
Haley is due to make an address at 10 a.m. ET, according to the Associated Press and other news outlets. She was not expected to endorse Trump during the speech, the AP reported.
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The move was widely expected after Haley was projected to lose all Super Tuesday contests bar Vermont. She also won a contest in the District of Columbia over the weekend.
Trump will now face off later this year with President Joe Biden, as has been expected throughout most of the race. Trump has been miles ahead of the rest of the pack, although at times Haley had narrowed his margin. She has impressed on a campaign trail that initially expected Ron DeSantis to be Trump’s closest challenger.
At last count, Biden and Trump were projected to be Super Tuesday winners, by a wide margin, of party primaries in California, Colorado, Texas, Virginia, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Maine, Arkansas, Massachusetts, Utah, Minnesota, Alabama and Tennessee. Biden also was projected to win Utah and Vermont, Trump was the winner in Alaska.
The lingering question at that point was whether Nikki Haley would continue her bid for the Republican nomination as Trump’s last remaining rival.
In his speech at Mar-a-Lago, Trump said: “We’re gonna win this election because we have no choice. If we lose the election, we’re not gonna have a country left.”
Haley’s campaign released a statement afterward saying, “There remains a large block of Republican primary voters who are expressing deep concerns about Donald Trump. That is not the unity our party needs for success.”
While Haley had stepped up her attacks on Trump in recent weeks, questioning his mental capacity, among other things, she had held her fire through much of her campaign. She had stuck to her script that “chaos” followed the former president. Yet she also raised her hand at the first Republican debate when asked whether she would still support Trump even if he was convicted of a crime.
Major news networks were torn on the extent to which they should cover Trump’s victory speech. MSNBC was the first to cutaway, sparking a debate at news outlets over how to cover the former president’s fusillade of false claims and unfounded accusations.
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