A Bridge Too Far: Nikki Haley Ends White House Bid After a Shellacking in Super Tuesday Primaries

Nikki Haley has suspended her presidential campaign after suffering a major loss in the Super Tuesday primaries. Despite winning Vermont yesterday, and Washington, D.C. over the weekend. Thought her Vermont win “blocked a Trump sweep, it showcased her losses in states that mathematically spelled delegate defeat,” The Hill noted. 

Speaking this morning in Charleston, South Carolina, the 51-year-old former governor of South Carolina and the former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, ended her campaign with the same words she began over a year ago quoting a verse from the Bible: “Be strong and courageous. Do not be afraid. Do not be discouraged. For God will be with you wherever you go,” she told her supporters, “especially to so many of the women and girls out there who put their faith in our campaign.”

Haley didn’t formally endorse former president Donald Trump, but congratulated him on his potential primary victory. She said she wants her former boss to earn her supporters’ votes heading into the general election. “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.” Emphasizing the importance of party unity, she said she’s would “wish anyone well who would be America’s president,” adding that “our country is too precious to let our differences divide us.” She has “always been a conservative Republican and always supported the Republican nominee,” she added. 

In response to Haley’s decision, President Biden, said that Trump has “made it clear he doesn’t want Nikki Haley’s supporters. I want to be clear: There is a place for them in my campaign.” He continued: “On the fundamental issues of preserving American democracy, on standing up for the rule of law, on treating each other with decency and dignity and respect, on preserving NATO and standing up to America’s adversaries, I hope and believe we can find common ground.” He also lauded her for “willing to speak the truth about Trump: about the chaos that always follows him, about his inability to see right from wrong, about his cowering before Vladimir Putin”

The president’s comments came before Trump’s. Taking to his social media platform “all of the Haley supporters to join the greatest movement in the history of our Nation. Ignoring his calls of unity, he mocked Haley’s losses. She “got TROUNCED last night, in record setting fashion,” he said, and attributed her one victory to “the fact that Democrats, for reasons unknown, are allowed to vote in Vermont.”

On the campaign trail, Haley had pitched herself as the best opportunity to move on from the former president.  She spent the last several weeks of her campaign stepping up her attacks on both Trump and President Biden, especially their age, and called for a new generation of leaders to move on from both of them. She pointed to polling that showed her performing the strongest of all the top Republican presidential candidates against Biden in hypothetical general election match-ups.  

She also went after Vice President Kamala Harris, warning South Carolina voters that the United States would soon have a female president: either Haley or Harris She attacked Trump during the race on various issues including the rising national debt during his presidency and his foreign policy stances. “Chaos follows Trump,” she repeatedly said. 

But as As NPR noted, at times she “appeared to struggle with her messaging as she straddled the difficult line between pleasing the Republican base and appealing to independents, moderate Republicans and other voters who are disaffected with Trump.” One of her most notable gaffes is when she failed to identify slavery as the cause of the Civil War when questioned during a campaign stop in New Hampshire. She, however, quickly walked back. 

She also stumbled in her response to a controversial Alabama Supreme Court ruling that threatened access to the fertility procedure in vitro fertilization, or IVF. “Embryos, to me, are babies,” she told NBC’s Ali Vitali. But in a later interview with Newsman, she clarified that “you don’t want to take those fertility treatments away from women.”

She surprised many when she started to gain significant momentum late last year. Although she surpassed Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis in most polls, she was unable to overtake the former president, who remained the consistent front-runner for the GOP nomination.

She had indicated last November that she would take the Christmas holiday to mull the presidential bid. “We are taking the holidays to kind of look at what the situation is,” she told the audience at the Nov. 29 at her alma mater, Clemson University in South Carolina where she is a trustee. “But I have said I’ve never lost a race. I’m not going to start now. If we decide to get into it, we’ll put 1,000 percent in and we’ll finish it.”

Her announcement to enter the GOP race was viewed as a stark contrast to her previous pledge not to run if Trump was. Replying to a question asked by The Associated Press in April 2021, Haley said she would support a future Trump presidential campaign. She also noted that she would not seek her party’s nomination if Trump were running. “I would not run if President Trump ran, and I would talk to him about it.” 

While announcing her presidential bid, she described herself as “a proud daughter of Indian immigrants,” Haley, who was born Nimrata Nikki Randhawa, calls herself “not Black, not White, but different.” She talked about how her mother always told her that her job is “not to focus on the differences, but on the similarities.” Her parents told her and her siblings every day how blessed they were to live in America, she said in the video. 

(Top photo: Nikki Haley/Facebook)