Republican presidential candidate, former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley speaks during a campaign rally at the Indigo Hall and Events venue on February 05, 2024 in Spartanburg, South Carolina. (Photo by Brandon Bell/Getty Images)
Nikki Haley will suspend her presidential campaign Wednesday after being soundly defeated across the country on Super Tuesday, according to people familiar with her decision, leaving Donald Trump as the last remaining major candidate for the 2024 Republican nomination.
The former South Carolina governor and United Nations ambassador is scheduled to deliver remarks in Charleston, South Carolina, at 10 a.m. ET. She will make the announcement official in that speech, the Wall Street Journal first reported.
Three people with direct knowledge who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they weren’t authorized to speak publicly confirmed Haley’s decision ahead of an announcement scheduled for Wednesday morning.
Haley, a former South Carolina governor and 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.
FILE - Former U.S. President Donald Trump speaks during an event at his Mar-a-Lago home on November 15, 2022 in Palm Beach, Florida. (Joe Raedle/Getty Images)
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.
Haley leaves the 2024 presidential contest having made history as the first woman to win a Republican primary. She beat Trump in the District of Columbia on Sunday and 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.
FILE - Republican presidential candidate, former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley, speaks at a campaign rally on March 4, 2024, in Fort Worth, Texas. (Photo by Emil Lippe/Getty Images)
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 President Joe 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.
FILE - Republican presidential candidate former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley speaks at a campaign event at The Madison Hotel on March 01, 2024 in Washington, DC. (Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)
As the field consolidated, she and DeSantis battled it out through the early-voting states for a distant second to Trump. The two went after each other in debates, ads and interviews, often more directly than they went after Trump.
The campaign’s focus on foreign policy following Hamas’ surprise attack on Israel in October tilted the campaign into Haley’s wheelhouse, giving her an opportunity to showcase her experience from the U.N., tying the war to her conservative domestic priorities and arguing that both Israel and the U.S. could be made vulnerable by what she called "distractions."
Haley was slow to criticize her former boss directly.