Nikki Haley drops out of Republican presidential race, clearing path for Trump vs. Biden in November

Nikki Haley has suspended her bid for the 2024 Republican nomination after losing 14 out of 15 Super Tuesday primaries and caucuses to former President Donald Trump.

"I wanted Americans to have their voices heard," the former South Carolina governor said Wednesday morning in Charleston. "I have done that. I have no regrets. And though I will no longer be a candidate, I will not stop using my voice for the things I believe in."

Trump, who gained several hundred delegates with sweeping victories in such states as Texas and California, now becomes the GOP’s “presumptive” nominee for the third straight election cycle. Barring unforeseen circumstances, Trump will formally secure his party’s nomination at the Republican National Convention in July.

But in a sign of intraparty tension that may linger through the fall, Haley pointedly did not endorse Trump in her concession speech — despite vowing last summer to back the eventual GOP nominee.

"I have always been a conservative Republican and always supported the Republican nominee," Haley said. "But on this question, as she did on so many others, Margaret Thatcher provided some good advice when she said, 'Never just follow the crowd. Always make up your own mind.'"

"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," Haley continued. "At its best, politics is about bringing people into your cause, not turning them away. And our conservative cause badly needs more people. This is now his time for choosing."

In response to Haley's exit, President Biden said in a statement that "Donald Trump has made it clear he doesn't want Nikki Haley's supporters. I want to be clear: There is place for them in my campaign."

Prior to Tuesday’s primaries, Haley had said she no longer felt bound by her so-called loyalty pledge — which the Republican National Committee required of all 2024 GOP debate participants — because the increasingly Trump-controlled RNC is “now not the same” as before (even as she ruled out running as an independent in November).

“I haven’t heard him pledge to me that he would support me if I won,” Haley added Tuesday morning. “So I don’t know why I have to go and pledge to him that I would support him.”

Why Haley dropped out

A full 854 GOP delegates were up for grabs Tuesday — more than a third of this year’s total. A candidate needs 1,215 delegates to clinch the 2024 GOP nomination. As of Wednesday morning, Trump had 995 delegates to Haley’s 89, putting him on track to reach the 1,215-delegate mark by March 19 at the latest.

Haley went into Super Tuesday with a bit of wind at her back. She won the Washington, D.C., primary on Sunday — her first primary victory and the first primary victory ever for a female Republican presidential candidate. A few days earlier, Haley was endorsed by Sens. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Susan Collins of Maine, two centrist Republicans from Super Tuesday states.

But, in the end, it wasn’t enough. Maine and Alaska went for Trump, along with other moderate-leaning states where Haley’s campaign had hoped to make inroads, such as Massachusetts, Utah and Virginia. Vermont was Haley's only Super Tuesday prize.

In contrast to earlier, proportional contests, most of the day’s primaries and caucuses awarded all of their delegates to the candidate who cleared 50% of the vote. And in some, only Republicans could participate.

Both rules helped Trump expand his lead to the point where it became mathematically prohibitive for Haley to catch up.

What Haley’s candidacy revealed about Trump

Ultimately, Trump’s grip on the GOP was never really in doubt. Haley lost by 32 percentage points in Iowa; by 11 points in New Hampshire, where she invested heavily; by 20 points in her home state; by more than 40 points in Michigan; and by even wider margins across many Super Tuesday states. In the Nevada primary — a contest that Trump skipped — Haley finished 33 points behind “none of these candidates.”

Yet by consistently drawing strong support from independent, suburban and college-educated voters — groups that are uneasy about Trump’s criminal cases and who tend to swing elections one way or the other — Haley underscored Trump’s biggest vulnerability heading into a November rematch with Biden, where he will need to supplement his base of inconsistent voters with some higher turnout, pro-Haley types.

Before the Iowa caucuses, some 43% of Haley’s voters there told pollsters they would rather cast their November ballots for Biden than Trump. And in exit polls conducted Tuesday, 80% of Haley voters in North Carolina, 69% in California and 69% in Virginia were unwilling to say they’ll support the GOP nominee “whoever it is.” Similarly, large majorities of Haley voters also said Tuesday that Trump would be unfit for office if convicted of a crime and that they’d be dissatisfied with him as the nominee. In North Carolina (50%) and Virginia (51%), they gave Biden a higher approval rating than Americans overall.

“If Donald Trump is the nominee, we will lose. It is that simple,” Haley predicted last week in Utah. “At some point, if Republicans really want to get this back on track, we’ve got to acknowledge that maybe it’s him. Maybe Donald Trump is the reason we're losing.”

Does Haley have a future in the Republican Party?

Once careful not to offend Trump’s MAGA supporters, Haley became increasingly hostile toward her rival as the race continued, criticizing his relationship with Russia, his chaotic temperament, his loose attitude toward the Constitution, his age and his expensive legal woes, among other things.

It wasn’t enough to change the race. Instead, her favorability rating among GOP primary voters plummeted.

The question now is where does Haley go next — and do her supporters go with her?

The former governor has a long history of managing and modulating her relationship to Trump for political ends. Despite agreeing to serve as his United Nations ambassador in 2017 — and describing him as her “friend” even after he tried to overturn the 2020 election — Haley was one of the first Republicans to speak out against the Manhattan mogul when he first ascended to the top of the GOP polls in the summer of 2015.

“We need to make sure that we’re always communicating in a way that’s got respect and dignity,” Haley said at the time. “A harsh tone ... hurts people, and it’s just not necessary.”

Instead, Haley backed Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, then sided with Texas Sen. Ted Cruz after Rubio dropped out. Ultimately she said she would vote for Trump — even though she was “not a fan.”

Offered the U.N. ambassadorship, Haley nonetheless went on to navigate “the Trump era with a singular shrewdness, messaging and maneuvering in ways that kept her in solid standing both with the GOP donor class as well as with the president and his base,” as Politico’s Tim Alberta wrote in a 2021 profile.

Today, Haley is walking an even thinner tightrope. If she refuses to make nice with Trump, it’s hard to imagine how she could run again in 2028. But if she does bend the knee, how will her new anti-Trump followers react?

In an interview Friday with the Dispatch, Haley hinted that she might try to leverage her support to inch the GOP back toward more traditional conservative values — and even encourage her fans to turn elsewhere if the effort fails.

“You have a massive amount of people who are saying, ‘We don’t like that Republicans no longer care about how much they’re spending,'" she said. "'We don’t like that Republicans don’t want allies. We don’t like that Republicans are OK with deciding if you do like Donald Trump, you’re a Republican, and if you don’t want to be with Donald Trump, you’re a Democrat.’

“It is my job and my duty to make sure that we fight for these people and that they have a voice,” Haley continued. “Don’t expect them to automatically vote with the party just because. If they feel unwanted, if they feel unheard, if they feel like the Republican Party’s not even trying to get them, they either won’t vote … or they will find some other person to vote for.”

And “guess what,” she added. “At the end of the day, you can’t win without everybody.”

How Haley got this far

Haley was the first major candidate to announce that she was challenging her old boss for the 2024 GOP nomination. The daughter of immigrants from India, she launched her campaign in February 2023 with a video touting her foreign policy bona fides and her status as a conservative woman of color.

"Republicans have lost the popular vote in 7 out of the last 8 presidential elections. That has to change," Haley said in the video. “It’s time for a new generation of leadership.”

As she was prepping her White House run, Haley made sure to emphasize her gender — and her toughness. The title of her pre-launch book, “If You Want Something Done …,” was a nod to Thatcher, who once quipped that “if you want something said, ask a man; if you want something done, ask a woman.”

“They all think we can be bullied, kicked around,” Haley said in her launch video. “I don’t put up with bullies. And when you kick back, it hurts them more if you’re wearing heels.”

The subtext of Haley’s candidacy — that she was the opposite of Trump in almost every way — was hard to miss.

“He is a senior citizen,” Yahoo News wrote at the time. “She was once the youngest governor in the country. He is white. She is the daughter of Indian immigrants. He is a New Yorker. She comes from a small town in South Carolina. He is a he. She is a she.”

It turned out, however, that Republican primary voters didn’t want the opposite of Trump. They didn’t even want a “new-and-improved” Trump — a more disciplined (and less criminally exposed) culture warrior such as Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis.

They just wanted Trump.

But DeSantis and others exited the race after meager early results. Only Haley remained.

“I didn’t get here because of luck,” she said at a New Hampshire polling site. “I got here because I outworked and outsmarted all the rest of those fellas.”