Just days before Super Tuesday and subsequently dropping out of the presidential race, former GOP candidate Nikki Haley made some comments that angered presumptive GOP nominee Donald Trump.
Haley, the former governor of South Carolina, claimed that she had a better chance of competing in a general election against President Joe Biden. She referred to some polls that showed she performed better in hypothetical head-to-head matchups with Biden than Trump did.
But, Trump quickly shot down those comments while calling into the Fox & Friends program on Tuesday, saying:
“It’s a lie. She knows it’s a lie. We are winning against Biden in every single poll, and everybody knows it, whether it’s the New York Times, whether it’s any of the polls that have been taken over the last three months.
“So, she is misrepresenting that fact, and it’s fine. It’s not going to matter because I think we’re going to win every state tonight.”
Trump was just about spot on with that last remark, as he won 14 out of the 15 primary elections that were held on Super Tuesday — losing only Vermont.
In those 14 states that he won, Trump garnered less than 70% of the vote in only four of them — Colorado (63.3%), Massachusetts (60%), Utah (57%) and Virginia (63.1%).
The comments Haley made were a last-ditch effort to prop her campaign up and resonate among Republican voters, but it did not work. On Wednesday, she suspended her campaign, knowing full well that she has no realistic shot at winning enough delegates to claim the GOP nomination.
In dropping out, she didn’t outright endorse Trump for president, saying instead that he would need to “earn” support from people who backed her campaign.
As she said in announcing the suspension of her campaign:
“I have always been a conservative Republican and always supported the Republican nominee, but on this question, as she did on so many others, Margaret Thatcher provided some good advice when she said, ‘Never just follow the crowd. Always make up your own mind.’
“It is now up to Donald Trump to earn the vote — those in our party and beyond it, who did not support him. And I hope he does that.”
Sources told CNN that Haley is leaving open the possibility that she might still endorse Trump as the general election draws nearer.
That would be quite a switch in stance for Haley, who has levied some pretty strong criticisms of Trump during the primary season. That included remarks she made on Fox & Friends when she said:
“I campaigned for a lot of governors and a lot of House and Senate members, and after we lost all those elections, that’s when we decided to jump in because we lost in 2018.
“We lost in 2020. We lost in 2022. I was just in Michigan, and since Donald Trump became president in 2016, they lost the governor’s mansion. They lost the state House. They lost the state Senate. Same thing in Minnesota.”
