Former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley will announce Wednesday that she is exiting the Republican presidential race, according to sources familiar with her plans, clearing the path for former President Donald Trump.
She is expected to deliver remarks in Charleston, South Carolina, at 10 a.m. ET, following a series of losses in GOP nominating contests on Super Tuesday.
Haley is not expected to endorse Trump, the sources familiar with her plans tell CNN. Instead, she will call on the former president to earn the support of voters who backed her. The plan appears to leave the room for her to endorse Trump ahead of the general election in November.
Haley, who was Trump’s US ambassador to the United Nations, was the last of a dozen major candidates the former president vanquished in a GOP primary that he dominated from start to finish — including winning 14 of the 15 GOP contests on Tuesday – even as he skipped the party’s debates and maintained a much lighter schedule of early-state travel than all of his rivals.
Haley had vowed to stay in the race through at least Super Tuesday. She had also begun sharpening her attacks on Trump, questioning his mental fitness and lumping him together with President Joe Biden, the likely Democratic nominee, as one of two “grumpy old men.”
But her home state of South Carolina served as her fourth straight loss in 2024 – including one to “none of these candidates” in the Nevada primary, where Trump wasn’t competing and there were no delegates at stake. (He opted to participate instead in the party-run caucuses, which awarded delegates.)
Haley had little hope of keeping pace with the former president with the race shifting into a new gear, moving from early-state contests in which retail politics take center stage to a national race…
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