Nikki Haley will suspend her presidential campaign on March 6 after being soundly defeated across the country on Super Tuesday, according to people familiar with her decision, leaving Donald Trump as the last remaining major candidate for the 2024 Republican nomination.

Three people with direct knowledge, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they weren’t authorized to speak publicly, confirmed Ms. Haley’s decision ahead of an announcement by her scheduled for March 6 morning.

Ms. Haley is not planning to endorse Mr. Trump in her announcement, according to the people with knowledge of her plans. Instead, she is expected to encourage him to earn the support of the coalition of moderate Republicans and independent voters who supported her.

Ms. Haley, a former South Carolina governor and U.N. ambassador, was Mr. Trump’s first significant rival when she jumped into the race in February 2023. She spent the final phase of her campaign aggressively warning the GOP against embracing Mr. Trump, whom she argued was too consumed by chaos and personal grievance to defeat President Joe Biden in the general election.

Her departure clears Mr. Trump to focus solely on his likely rematch in November with Mr. Biden. The former President is on track to reach the necessary 1,215 delegates to clinch the Republican nomination later this month.

Ms. Haley’s defeat marks a painful, if predictable, blow to those voters, donors and Republican Party officials who opposed Mr. Trump and his fiery brand of “Make America Great Again” politics. She was especially popular among moderates and college-educated voters, constituencies that will likely play a pivotal role in the general election. It’s unclear whether Mr. Trump, who recently declared that Ms. Haley donors would be permanently banned from his movement, can ultimately unify a deeply divided party.

Mr. Trump on March 5 night declared that the GOP was united behind him, but in a statement shortly afterward, Ms. Haley spokesperson Olivia Perez-Cubas said, “Unity is not achieved by simply claiming, ‘We’re united.’”

“Today, in state after state, there remains a large block of Republican primary voters who are expressing deep concerns about Donald Trump,” Ms. Perez-Cubas said. “That is not the unity our party needs for success. Addressing those voters’ concerns will make the Republican Party and America better.”

Ms. Haley leaves the 2024 presidential contest having made history as the first woman to win a Republican primary. She beat Trump in the District of Columbia on Sunday and Vermont on Tuesday.

She had insisted she would stay in the race through Super Tuesday and crossed the country campaigning in states holding Republican contests. Ultimately, she was unable to knock Mr. Trump off his glide path to a third straight nomination.

Ms. Haley’s allies note that she exceeded most of the political world’s expectations by making it as far as she did.

She had initially ruled out running against Mr. Trump in 2024. But she changed her mind and ended up launching her bid three months after he did, citing among other things the country’s economic troubles and the need for “generational change.” Ms. Haley, 52, later called for competency tests for politicians over the age of 75 — a knock on both Mr. Trump, who is 77, and President Joe Biden, who is 81.

Her candidacy was slow to attract donors and support, but she ultimately outlasted all of her other GOP rivals, including Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, former Vice President Mike Pence and Sen. Tim Scott, her fellow South Carolinian whom she appointed to the Senate in 2012. And the money flowed in until the very end. Her campaign said it raised more than $12 million in February alone.

She gained popularity with many Republican donors, independent voters and the so-called “Never Trump” crowd, even though she criticized the criminal cases against him as politically motivated and pledged that, if President, she would pardon him if he were convicted in federal court.

As the field consolidated, she and Mr. DeSantis battled it out through the early-voting states for a distant second to Mr. Trump. The two went after each other in debates, ads and interviews, often more directly than they went after Mr. Trump.

The campaign’s focus on foreign policy following Hamas’ surprise attack on Israel in October tilted the campaign into Ms. Haley’s wheelhouse, giving her an opportunity to showcase her experience from the U.N., tying the war to her conservative domestic priorities and arguing that both Israel and the U.S. could be made vulnerable by what she called “distractions.”

Ms. Haley was slow to criticize her former boss directly.

As she campaigned across early states, Ms. Haley often complimented some of Mr. Trump’s foreign policy achievements but gradually inserted more critiques into her campaign speeches. She argued Mr. Trump’s hyperfocus on trade with China led him to ignore security threats posed by a major U.S. rival. She warned that weak support for Ukraine would “only encourage” China to invade Taiwan, a viewpoint shared by several of her GOP rivals, even as many Republican voters questioned whether the U.S. should send aid to Ukraine.

In November, Ms. Haley — an accountant who had consistently touted her lean campaign — won the backing of the political arm of the powerful Koch network. AFP Action blasted early-state voters with mailers and door-knockers, committing its nationwide coalition of activists and virtually unlimited funds to helping Ms. Haley defeat Mr. Trump.

With Mr. Trump refusing to participate in primary debates, Ms. Haley went head-to-head with Mr. DeSantis in a single debate, displaying a combative style that seemed to sit poorly with even those committed to support her in the Iowa caucuses. She would finish third.

Ms. Haley’s name emerged as a possible running mate for Mr. Trump, with the former President reportedly asking allies what they thought of adding her to his possible ticket. As Ms. Haley appeared to gain ground, some of Mr. Trump’s backers worked to tamp down the notion.

While Ms. Haley initially notably declined to rule out the possibility, she said while campaigning in New Hampshire in January that serving as “anybody’s vice president” is “off the table.”

After Mr. DeSantis exited the campaign following Mr. Trump’s record-setting win in the Iowa caucuses, Ms. Haley hoped that New Hampshire voters would feel so strongly about keeping the former President away from the White House that they would turn out to support her in large numbers.

“America does not do coronations,” Ms. Haley said at a VFW hall in Franklin on the eve of the New Hampshire primary. “Let’s show all of the media class and the political class that we’ve got a different plan in mind, and let’s show the country what we can do.”

But she would lose New Hampshire and then refused to participate in Nevada’s caucuses, arguing the State’s rules strongly favoured Mr. Trump. She instead ran in the State’s primary, which didn’t count for any delegates for the nomination. She still finished a distant second to “ none of these candidates,” an option Nevada offers to voters dissatisfied with their choices and used by many Mr. Trump supporters to oppose her.

She had long vowed to win South Carolina but backed off of that pledge as the primary drew nearer. She crisscrossed the state that twice elected her governor on a bus tour, holding smaller events than Mr. Trump’s less frequent rallies and suggesting she was better equipped to beat Mr. Biden than him.

She lost South Carolina by 20 points and Michigan three days later by 40. The Koch brothers’ AFP Action announced after her South Carolina loss that it would stop organizing for her.

But by staying in the campaign, Ms. Haley drew enough support from suburbanites and college-educated voters to highlight Mr. Trump’s apparent weaknesses with those groups.

Ms. Haley has made clear she doesn’t want to serve as Mr. Trump’s Vice President or run on a third-party ticket arranged by the group No Labels. She leaves the race with an elevated national profile that could help her in a future presidential run.

In recent days, she backed off a pledge to endorse the eventual Republican nominee that was required of anyone participating in party debates.

“I think I’ll make what decision I want to make,” she told NBC’s “Meet the Press.”

U.S. President Joe Biden from the Democratic Party and his Republican predecessor Donald Trump have swept in their parties’ presidential nomination primaries held in 15 states across the country, paving the way for a rematch between them in November and putting pressure on Indian-American candidate Nikki Haley to quit.

After Super Tuesday’s election results, Mr. Trump, 77, is hoping to establish a commanding lead in the delegate count and vanquish his only Republican opponent, Ms. Haley.

Seeking his re-election, Mr. Biden, 81, swept almost all the Democratic primary states.

He lost to Jason Palmer in American Samoa.

OPINION | Narrowing field: On 2024 U.S. presidential election’s Republican primaries race

“Joe Biden isn’t facing any major competition in the primary cycle, and has won all the Democratic contests so far tonight, CNN projects, as he gears up for a likely rematch with Mr. Trump in November,” CNN said.

Ms. Haley, 52, the former U.S. envoy to the U.N. failed to make a mark Tuesday even as she showed strong support in the states of Vermont, where she won.

That victory, however, will do little to dent Mr. Trump’s primary dominance.

Mr. Trump prevailed in most of the Super Tuesday states: California, Texas, North Carolina, Tennessee, Alabama, Virginia, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Massachusetts, Utah, Minnesota, Colorado, Arkansas and Maine.

Super Tuesday is an important phase of presidential primaries when the early contests are over, and voters from multiple states cast ballots in primaries timed to occur on the same date. Almost all the results were one-sided in favour of Trump except for Vermont, where the winning difference was about one per cent.

More than a third of all the Republican delegates were at stake on Super Tuesday, the biggest haul of any date on the primary calendar.

To win the presidential nomination of the Republican party, either of the two candidates needs 1,215 delegates, who are elected during the primaries. Before Super Tuesday, Mr. Trump had 244 delegates in his kitty, while Ms. Haley had 43.

Speaking from Palm Beach, Florida, Mr. Trump claimed that “we have a very divided country,” and vowed to unify it soon.

“This was an amazing night and an amazing day, it’s been an incredible period of time in our country’s history,” Mr. Trump said at his election night watch party at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach.

“We have a very divided country. We have a country [where] a political person uses weaponisation against his political opponents,” he said.

He compared the state of the U.S. political system to “third-world countries”.

“Never happened here. It happens in other countries, but they’re third-world countries. And in some ways, we’re a third-world country.” Talking up some of his achievements from his time in office, notably the half-built border wall between the U.S. and Mexico, Mr. Trump claimed he delivered “the safest borders in the history of our country” and went on to rail against what he described as “migrant crime”, without citing any evidence.

Also Read | AI chatbots’ inaccurate, misleading responses about U.S. elections threaten to keep voters from polls

“And so the world is laughing at us, the world is taking advantage of us,” he said.

He goes on to describe his aims to make the U.S. “energy independent and energy dominant”.

“All the… tragedy, you will not have to think of it. All of the problems we have today, we would not have had any of them,” he said.

“You would only have success and that is what ultimately going to unify this country and unify this party,” he added.

‘Trump driven by grievance and grift’: Biden

Earlier, Mr. Biden touted the work his administration has accomplished in its first term in office while issuing a stark warning that a second Trump term would mean a return to “chaos, division, and darkness.” “Four years ago, I ran because of the existential threat Donald Trump posed to the America we all believe in,” Mr. Biden wrote in a statement, highlighting progress under his administration on jobs, inflation, prescription drug prices, and gun control.

He then warned that if Mr. Trump returns to the White House, the progress his administration has made will be at risk.

“(Mr. Trump) is driven by grievance and grift, focused on his own revenge and retribution, not the American people,” Mr. Biden noted.

‘Haley getting nowhere’: Trump

Ms. Haley, the former South Carolina governor, said she has not made a final decision as to whether or not she would endorse her ex-boss Mr. Trump if she ends her presidential bid, but her campaign is receiving a lot of feedback on the subject, sources familiar with recent discussions tell CNN.

People who are close to Ms. Haley have different opinions. Some believe that it would be good for her to back Mr. Trump because she would be viewed as a team player. Others ardently oppose her endorsing him because that would give Ms. Haley the freedom to be critical of Mr. Trump and build her own movement. They have shared those opinions with Ms. Haley and her campaign in recent days and weeks, sources said, CNN said.

Ms. Haley herself has recently said she is not focused on endorsing anyone because she is focused on winning herself.

Mr. Trump, however, in an interview on Tuesday bashed Ms. Haley, saying she was angry because her campaign is “just getting nowhere.” CNN reported earlier this evening that Mr. Trump’s team is aware he won’t cross the delegate threshold tonight to become the presumptive Republican nominee, but the hope is that he secures enough delegates to ensure he does meet that milestone as early as next Tuesday, March 12.

Mr. Trump’s campaign is also hoping that a definitive win in Super Tuesday will effectively force Ms. Haley to drop out of the race.

“President Biden and former President Donald J. Trump romped through the opening contests of Super Tuesday, piling up wins in states including Texas, the second-largest delegate prize of the night, as they moved inexorably toward their parties’ nominations and a rematch for the White House in November,” The New York Times reported.

“Former president Donald Trump and President Biden are dominating Super Tuesday contests with roughly one-third of the delegates at stake that will determine the Republican and Democratic party nominations. Voters in 15 states are participating in primaries or caucuses,” The Washington Post said.

Washington:

Donald Trump won the first six primary elections called by US networks as results came in from the 15 “Super Tuesday” states in the race for the Republican presidential nomination.

The former president, who is bidding for a sensational comeback after being unseated by Democrat Joe Biden in 2020, could claim a clean sweep of states Tuesday on the way to the Republican Party nomination.

Alabama, Maine, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Tennessee and Virginia were all called for Trump, who expressed his thanks on his Truth Social site as counts continued in the other Super Tuesday states across the country.

His longshot challenger, former UN ambassador Nikki Haley, has failed to provide a significant obstacle in Trump’s path to the nomination, but has so far refused to drop out of the race.

Polling averages from RealClearPolitics show 77-year-old Trump 65 points clear in the primary, and two points ahead of President Joe Biden in a one-on-one match-up in the November election.

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)

A voter casts their votes at a polling station in Nashville, Tennessee on Super Tuesday, March 5, 2024. Americans from 15 States and one territory vote simultaneously on “Super Tuesday,” a campaign calendar milestone expected to leave Donald Trump a hair’s breadth from securing the Republican Party’s presidential nomination.
| Photo Credit: AFP

Donald Trump looked to cement his hold on the Republican presidential nomination with a sweep of Super Tuesday primaries, all but kicking off the formal campaign against President Joe Biden and an attempted shock return to the White House.

Fifteen States and one U.S. territory were holding nomination contests, offering a huge slew of delegates. In normal election years, the day often sees one candidate emerge from a crowded field.

This time, Mr. Trump’s sole remaining challenger Nikki Haley is only just hanging on, giving the scandal-plagued ex-president a chance to bury her for good.

Ms. Haley is a “lost cause,” physicist Andrew Pugel told AFP at a polling station in Huntington Beach, California.

“Today’s her last day,” he said, though he added that it would be smart of Mr. Trump to make her his running mate and “unite the country more.”

The expected Mr. Trump surge comes a day after the Supreme Court denied a bid by a handful of states to keep him off the ballot over his attack on the 2020 election when he refused to concede defeat to Mr. Biden and sparked a mob assault on the U.S. Capitol.

A Trump-Biden rematch in November now looks all but certain.

Mr. Biden, 81, is also on the ballot in Tuesday’s Democratic primaries but is only being challenged by little-known outsiders, making his re-nomination a formality.

On March 7, the Democrat will address the nation in the State of the Union address to Congress, a high-profile opportunity to lay out his campaign platform and attack Trump, 77.

The states up for grabs Tuesday, which include the giant battlegrounds of California and Texas, offer 70 percent of the delegates a candidate needs to be named the presumptive nominee.

They do not officially become the nominees until they are confirmed by their party conventions later in the summer.

Mr. Trump would not be able mathematically to close out the contest Tuesday but he expects to be anointed by March 19 at the latest, according to his campaign.

Will moderates back Trump?

Mr. Trump said over the weekend that his campaign was moving “like a rocket” towards the Republican nomination.

He made clear he is already looking past the primary, telling a rally in Richmond, Virginia: “The biggest day in the history of our country is November 5.”

Mr. Trump is backed by a passionate core of supporters ready to ignore his attack on the 2020 election, judgments of liability for fraud and sexual assault, and four ongoing criminal cases.

However, Ms. Haley’s campaign questioned whether middle-of-the-road Republicans will drift away from Trump by November.

“Biden’s too old and Trump’s a little too crazy,” 70-year-old John Campbell told AFP at a polling station in Quincy, Massachusetts. But Haley, he said, “seems to be somewhat normal.”

Ms. Haley, 52, lost the early nominating States to Mr. Trump but has vowed to remain in the contest at least through Tuesday.

Haley’s ‘chaos’ warning

She argues that the public has rejected Mr. Trump’s divisive brand in almost every vote since 2016 and would do so again in November.

She also warns of the “chaos” surrounding a candidate who in just the last few months has been labeled an insurrectionist by a federal judge, and ordered to pay hundreds of millions of dollars over sexual assault and business fraud.

Mr. Trump— who denies all wrongdoing— also faces the threat of jail time for multiple federal and State felony charges, mostly for allegedly trying to cheat in or steal the 2020 election.

The ex-President has spent nine days in court this year alone, and complains his prosecutions are keeping him from the campaign trail— although he has turned court appearances into part of his fundraising campaign.

Stephanie Perini-Hegarty voted for Mr. Biden in Quincy, Massachusetts.

“I think we need a leader who is not involved in any corruption, and who is going to look out for the best interests of the people. And I think that the Democrats right now are the people that do that,” the 55-year-old told AFP.

This combo image shows President Joe Biden, and Republican presidential candidate former President Donald Trump,. File
| Photo Credit: AP

Presidential candidates crisscrossed the country in the run up to Super Tuesday (March 5) this year, when 17 U.S. States and territories hold their primaries and caucuses to pick their contenders for November’s general election. The support of more than a third of each party’s delegates (i.e., representatives who vote in the parties’ conventions to select the candidate) is up for grabs on Tuesday.

Former U.S. President Donald Trump is expected to sweep the Republican contests on Tuesday, with Nikki Haley, the former American Ambassador to the U.N., having won just one race thus far (Washington DC). Although, at this stage, a Biden-Trump showdown is all but certain, further campaigning has been planned for the following weeks, with groups of states voting in March and April. Mr Trump, who has just under 100 cases against him, received a boost on Monday as the U.S. Supreme Court said it was wrong for the State of Colorado to have taken him off its ballot for his role in the January 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol.

 The incumbent, U.S. President Joe Biden, is running uncontested for the Democratic (re)nomination in many of the states, while some states will have other contestants on them, such as self-help author Marianne Williamson and Minnesota Congressman Dean Phillips.

Mr Biden is therefore expected to win the day on Tuesday but the process has revealed that the ultimate path to the White House – when the primaries are completed and Mr Biden presumably faces Mr Trump – will be far more challenging for Mr Biden, than is often the case for a sitting President seeking a second term. Questions about Mr Biden’s age, perceptions about the economy and inflation and Mr Biden’s handling of the Israel-Hamas conflict have been working against him.

Mr Biden was faced with bleak polling results over the weekend. A New York Times/ Sienna College poll indicated that the President had the support of 43% of registered voters versus Mr Trump’s 48%. Some 10% of those who voted for Mr Biden in 2020 were planning to vote for Mr Trump in 2024. Democratic primary voters were more or less equally split on whether Mr Biden should be their party’s candidate, as per the poll, with the strongest opposition to the idea from those under 45 years of age. The data also indicated that Mr Biden’s edge over Mr Trump among non-white non-college graduates had also significantly narrowed since 2020.

After Democratic politicians urged primary voters in the crucial swing state of Michigan to show their frustration with Mr Biden’s policy towards Israel’s retaliatory attacks on Gaza, which have claimed more than 30,000 lives, more than 100,000 Michiganders cast an ‘ uncommitted’ ballot in last week’s Democratic primary.

This was more than the target of 10,000 uncommitted votes and was some five times the number of such votes in the last two presidential elections and is being seen as a warning to Mr Biden to change his accommodative stance towards Israel. A growing number of voters, not just Muslim Americans but also younger voters across the board , could sit at home on election day if the administration continues with the status quo. A few thousand voters could make a huge difference: Mr Trump beat former Democratic presidential candidate Hilary Clinton in Michigan by less than 11,000 votes in 2016 and Mr Biden won the state from Mr Trump in 2020 by a margin of 2.8% (just over 154,000 votes).

On Sunday, Vice President Kamala Harris called for an immediate ceasefire in the region and a return of hostages taken by Hamas. On Monday, she was scheduled to meet with Israeli War Cabinet Member Benny Gantz.

Trump set to win big on Tuesday

Mr Trump has so far won 247 delegates – more than 10 times Ms Haley’s tally. So far his legal troubles have not prevented Mr Trump from moving forward and he has used them in his campaign rallies to portray himself as the victim of a political witch-hunt.

Ms Haley, who served on the Trump cabinet, has said she will remain in the race as long as she is “ competitive” but declined to define this term. She has shown some traction among college graduates and independent voters as well those who consider themselves’ moderate.

While she has claimed she is not anti-Trump, Ms Haley’s attacks on her former boss have become sharper in the run up to Super Tuesday. She has suggested that both lead candidates are too old for the job, has pointed to the fiscal deficit and spending – particularly during Mr Trump’s time in the White House and criticized his ‘ isolationist ‘ foreign policy and admiration for Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Significantly, Ms Haley did not commit to supporting Mr Trump if he is the chosen GOP candidate, when questioned about a pledge all GOP candidates had to take before an intra-party debate that they would support the eventual nominee. She cited changes in the party organisation, specifically Mr Trump’s daughter-in-law Lara Trump’s bid for the position of Co-Chair of the Republican National Committee (RNC).

“The RNC is now not the same RNC , now it’s Trump’s daughter in law, “ she told NBC’s ‘ Meet the Press’ on Sunday. She also said she did not know if Mr Trump would abide by the country’s constitution if elected.

Other important contests to be held on Tuesday

There are also a number of ‘ down ballot ‘ primaries on Super Tuesday- such as a primary contest for the post of governor (North Carolina), several for the U.S. House of Representatives , where the Republicans have a four seat majority, and the U.S. Senate., including a primary contest in California for the late Senator Diane Feinstein’s Senate seat.

Washington, United States:

Americans from 15 states and one territory vote simultaneously on “Super Tuesday,” a campaign calendar milestone expected to leave Donald Trump a hair’s breadth from securing the Republican Party’s presidential nomination.

Typically, the event — the biggest single day of voting in the country’s drawn out, state-by-state primary season — has been a make-or-break moment for candidates as the race narrows.

On the Republican side, more than a third of the delegates who will be assigned to the party’s national nominating convention in July are up for grabs on March 5.

But Trump, despite his legal woes, has swept all early state primaries and Super Tuesday is seen as the last real chance for challenger Nikki Haley to upend the former president’s march towards becoming the party’s flagbearer once again.

There is even less high-stakes drama on the Democratic front, as incumbent President Joe Biden is widely expected to be renominated for the job by his party — and likely setting up a rematch with Trump.

Here are key elements to watch for on Super Tuesday:

Millions casting ballots

Tens of millions of Americans are eligible to vote in primaries and caucuses Tuesday, with contests to be held from Maine in the northeast to California on the West Coast, as well as the remote Pacific territory of American Samoa. 

Primaries or caucuses are also scheduled in Alabama, Alaska, Arkansas, Colorado, Massachusetts, Minnesota, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Vermont and Virginia.

Alaska’s vote will only cover the Republican primary, with the state’s Democrats voting in April.

Republicans already held their contest in Iowa earlier this year, but on Tuesday Democrats will announce the winner of their mail-in vote in that state.

Predictable outcome?

In years past, success on Super Tuesday has required a tremendous ground game, top-notch fundraising and serious momentum. 

The contest has previously showcased the nation’s social and economic diversity, providing an opportunity for candidates to demonstrate their ability — or not — to draw from a broad swath of voters from different backgrounds and across different regions.

But Biden has been running without any serious challengers — typical for incumbent presidents. 

And Trump, meanwhile, has steamrolled past his early Republican challengers, with only Haley, his former UN ambassador, left standing.

At stake Tuesday on the Republican side are 874 delegates — more than a third of the 2,429 delegates who will officially vote for candidates at the party’s July nominating convention, offering Trump a chance to all but sew up his runaway lead, barring a major surprise.

With Trump claiming major support among Republicans, especially in the largest states California and Texas, his campaign predicts he will win at least 773 delegates on Super Tuesday and surpass the magic number needed to secure the nomination about two weeks later.

Haley stays in race 

Until she posted a symbolic win Sunday night in the Washington DC primary, Haley, a former South Carolina governor, had not won a single contest. But she did clinch 40 percent of the vote in New Hampshire and South Carolina — a sign, she argues, that the party remains divided over Trump. Haley maintains she would fare better than her rival in a general election matchup against Biden.

She has previously pledged to stay in the race through Super Tuesday — though another slate of losses could doom her campaign.

Haley has argued that a majority of voters are opposed to a rematch between “chaos” candidate Trump and Biden — two aging men aged 77 and 81 respectively — who she says are past their prime.

But analysts see Haley deciding to remain in the hunt largely in the event Trump gets laid low by his legal woes or other circumstances such as ill health.

(This story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)