Super Tuesday primaries 2024: Trump, Biden dominate, Haley ekes out win in Vermont

Haley took the stage in a bright red dress and in front of a row of American flags just after 10 a.m. from South Carolina, and announced she was suspending her presidential campaign. She began with a retrospective of the start of her campaign, and reiterated her conservative principles, including a low national debt, a small federal government and the need to promote democracy worldwide by standing by America’s allies. With that, the final Trump challenger is out of the race, and Trump is the presumptive nominee, a fact Haley acknowledged.

Like all the major candidates who ran for the Republican nomination, other than Trump, Haley had previously said she would support the eventual nominee, but she’s distanced herself from that pledge a bit recently. Haley didn’t endorse Trump this morning, but she congratulate him, while slightly criticizing the way that he’s run his campaign. “We must turn away from the darkness of hatred and division,” she said. She went on to say that Trump needed to bring people into his cause, saying, “It is now up to Donald Trump to earn the vote of those in our party and beyond it.” Haley has noted in previous speeches that she’s captured a sizable portion of the vote in some states, even winning Washington, D.C., and Vermont, signaling that some Republican voters are dissatisfied with the former president as a choice for the future.

Republican presidential candidate and former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley walks off stage after announcing the suspension of her presidential campaign at her campaign headquarters, March 6, 2024, in Daniel Island, S.C.

In the end, as Meredith noted, she made a somewhat rare references to the historic nature of her campaign. She’s the second Republican woman to win delegates in a presidential nominating contest and first to win any state’s nominating contest, and she noted that her mother, a first-generation immigrant, had gotten to vote for her for president in South Carolina, and directed her final lines, quoting from the Book of Joshua, to women and girls who had watched her campaign.

—Monica Potts, 538