Everyone Agrees the GOP Primary Is Over—Except Nikki Haley
Donald Trump’s double-digit win in Tuesday’s New Hampshire primary has pretty much everyone arguing that it’s time to either rally around Donald Trump as the GOP candidate or, if you’re not so inclined, to begin the campaign against him in earnest. There is, however, one person not on board with this plan—Nikki Haley.
“You’ve all heard the chatter among the political class. They’re falling all over themselves saying this race is over,” Haley told a crowd of supporters after acknowledging Trump’s win in the Granite State. “Well I have news for all of them—New Hampshire is first in the nation. It is not the last in the nation.”
“This race is far from over. There are dozens of states left to go,” Haley added.
Technically, that is true. But positioning herself once again as Trump’s leading rival doesn’t seem to be convincing anyone—including President Joe Biden, whose campaign took Trump’s Tuesday night win as the starting gun for “one of the longest and most grueling general elections in modern American history,” according to Politico.
Typically, a candidate needs to win 1,215 delegates across the country to secure their party’s nomination for the White House. But the resilience of Trump’s personality-cult fandom and his nationalist appeal to the Republican base, which at times has put him more than 55 percentage points ahead of his opponents in nation-wide polls, have singled him out as an “unbeatable” candidate in the GOP race, even with just 32 delegates in the bag.
“I’m looking at the math and the path going forward, and I don’t see it for Nikki Haley,” Republican National Committee Chair Ronna McDaniel told Fox News’s Bret Baier and Martha MacCallum on Tuesday. “I think she’s run a great campaign, but I do think there is a message that’s coming out from the voters, which is very clear.”
“We need to unite around our eventual nominee, which is going to be Donald Trump, and we need to make sure we beat Joe Biden,” McDaniel added.
Other prominent figures from Republican leadership agreed with the sentiment, pushing Trump forward as their nominee after just one primary.
“It’s time for Republicans to unite around President Donald Trump and make Biden a one-term president,” Nebraska Senator Deb Fischer said in an announcement endorsing Trump.