Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley addresses supporters during a campaign stop in Beaufort, South Carolina.Jim Lo Scalzo/EFE/ZUMA
She’s…not running anymore.
Former UN Ambassador Nikki Haley has dropped out of the GOP presidential race, ending her increasingly hopeless quest to deny the nomination to Donald Trump. Haley, the last significant Republican candidate running against the former president, announced her decision in Charleston, South Carolina.
“The time has now come to suspend my campaign,” she said in a brief speech. “I said I wanted Americans to have their voices heard. I have done that and I have no regrets.”
Acknowledging that Donald Trump was now the party’s apparent presidential nominee, Haley wished the former president well but declined to officially endorse him. Instead, she signaled that she would continue to use her “voice” and expressed a desire to see Trump unite the GOP.
“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 said.
Haley, who previously served as the tea-party-aligned governor of South Carolina, cast herself throughout the race as the more reasonable—and younger—alternative to both Trump and President Joe Biden. But she still voiced several unhinged and straight-up false theories throughout the campaign, including when she blamed trans kids in locker rooms for teen suicides (without evidence, of course), as my colleague Arianna Coghill reported last year. More recently, as I reported, Haley joined her GOP colleagues in suddenly pivoting on in vitro fertilization, going from calling embryos “babies” to calling for federal protections for IVF clinics in the span of a week.
Despite losing all but two GOP primaries—she won the contests in Washington, DC, and Vermont—and even as polls consistently showed her losing to Trump by a wide margin, Haley remained defiant, refusing to drop out and continuing to schedule campaign events for the next month. “I feel no need to kiss the ring,” Haley told a crowd of supporters days before she lost her home state’s primary. “I have no fear of Trump’s retribution.”
Haley’s next steps are unclear. Trump said in January he would “probably” not pick her as vice president—which seems fine with her, given that she has also said being Trump’s vice president is “off the table.” And given Trump’s seemingly ironclad grip on the GOP, it seems unlikely Haley would find another place to serve within a second Trump administration.
