Nikki Haley secures first victory of Republican
primaries with Washington DC win
Haley is the first woman to win a Republican primary,
her campaign has said, but faces steep odds with Donald Trump expected to
secure the nomination
Guardian
staff and agencies
Sun 3 Mar
2024 21.21 EST
Nikki Haley
has notched up her first victory of the 2024 Republican primaries, after
winning the vote in the District of Columbia.
Haley, the
only remaining challenger to Donald Trump, won 62.9% of the vote, versus 33.2%
captured by the former president. Haley will pick up 19 delegates from her win,
a small portion of the 1,215 delegates needed to clinch the nomination.
The win in
Washington makes Haley the first woman to win a Republican primary in US
history, her campaign has said.
“It’s not
surprising that Republicans closest to Washington dysfunction are rejecting
Donald Trump and all his chaos,” Haley campaign spokesperson Olivia Perez-Cubas
said in a statement.
Haley still
faces near-impossible odds in her quest to win the Republican nomination to
take on Joe Biden in November. Trump won the first eight nominating contests by
significant margins.
Opinion
polls show that the former president is also expected to win almost all
upcoming contests.
On
Saturday, Trump picked up all 39 delegates at the Michigan Republican party
convention. Fifteen states will hold primaries on Tuesday in which Trump’s
status as Republican candidate is expected to be cemented.
Despite her
continued losses, Haley has said she would remain in the race at least through
those contests, although she has declined to name any primary she felt
confident she would win. After last week’s loss in her home state of South
Carolina, Haley remained adamant that voters in the places that followed
deserved an alternative to Trump despite his dominance thus far in the
campaign.
Haley held
a rally in the nation’s capital on Friday before heading back to North Carolina
and a series of states holding Super Tuesday primaries.
As she gave
her standard campaign speech, criticising Trump for running up the federal
deficit, one attendee yelled out, “He cannot win a general election. It’s
madness.” That prompted agreement from Haley, who argues that she can deny
Biden a second term but Trump won’t be able to.
Washington
is one of the most heavily Democratic jurisdictions in the nation, with only
about 23,000 registered Republicans in the city. The city also is home to a
significant number of federal workers who Trump allies have pledged to fire en
masse and replace with loyalists if he wins in November.
“While
Nikki has been soundly rejected throughout the rest of America, she was just
crowned Queen of the Swamp by the lobbyists and DC insiders that want to
protect the failed status quo,” Karoline Leavitt, the Trump campaign press
secretary said in a release.
This is not
the first time Republicans in the capital have rejected Trump. During the last
competitive Republican nominating contest in the District of Columbia, in 2016,
Trump received less than 14% of the vote and no delegates, even as he went on
to win the nomination nationally.
The
Associated Press and Reuters contributed to this report
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