The only surprise here was that the former UN Ambassador and South Carolina governor didn’t drop out last night. Instead, Nikki Haley encouraged her supporters up to the very last potential poll closing moment out west to go to the polls and keep the momentum alive. Momentum just met reality.
All the networks are reporting as of 6:15am Wednesday morning that Nikki Haley has scheduled a statement for 10am Eastern from her home in Charleston. But John McCormick at the Wall Street Journal reports the extra news that she won’t specifically endorse Trump during her remarks.
Nikki Haley plans to suspend her Republican presidential primary bid in a speech Wednesday morning, people familiar with her plans told The Wall Street Journal.
The former South Carolina governor and United Nations ambassador is expected to make an appearance to deliver brief remarks in the Charleston area around 10 a.m. ET. Her decision arrived the day after Super Tuesday, when she won only Vermont among 15 states that held GOP contests.
Haley won’t announce an endorsement Wednesday, the people said. She will encourage Donald Trump, who is close to having the delegates needed to win the GOP nomination, to earn the support of Republican and independent voters who backed her.
Quite simply, the math became Haley’s enemy. The path to the Republican nomination is to do anything possible to acquire 1,215 delegates. After Super Tuesday’s rout of every state except the open primary state of Vermont, Donald Trump is sitting on 995 delegates, compared to Haley’s 89. For Haley, she would have to all but run the table for the rest of the primary season. It’s just not going to happen.
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Since the Republican primary race consolidated to the head-to-head matchup people opposed to Donald Trump desired, Haley has noticeably sharpened her rhetorical attack on the former President, citing his age as being problematic, and flat-out stating that there’s no possibility that Trump would beat Joe Biden in the fall. And three months ago, I would have agreed with her on that forecast.
The current state of the race for president is a completely different landscape than it was even at Christmastime. Donald Trump can win, and actually could be considered the frontrunner. Why? Joe Biden is just that bad of a president, is worse as a campaigner, and every day there’s a new Biden gaffe, that’s the new standard bearer for Biden’s best day. At 81, Joe Biden is never going to be better tomorrow than he is today. He might be jacked up on the happy juice to get him through the State of the Union, which will earn Hosannah’s from regime media, but the hangover will take him out of play for the next five days. He certainly won’t be able to immediately hit the campaign trail in all the swing states and continue to pound the messages and themes from the State of the Union like every president running for reelection before him does. He just physically isn’t up to that level of vigor. He’ll be in Delaware sleeping it off.
For Haley, if an endorsement of Trump is to come, she has to wait a beat before issuing it if it’s to be accepted with any sincerity. Just this week, she said she was no longer bound by the RNC pledge she took to endorse the ultimate nominee, because the RNC isn’t the same RNC as when the pledge was required in order to participate in debates. It’s clear her attack on Trump became more personal the longer the campaign dragged on. She’s not going to be able to convince anyone it was just business, and everything between her and Trump are good now. At least not immediately.
Will she endorse Trump eventually? Probably. No Labels may come calling, but No Labels is falling apart faster than Fani Willis’ case against Donald Trump in Georgia. She’s not going to hitch her wagon to that falling star.
We appreciate the campaign Haley ran. It was a campaign that needed to be run to give voice to the wing of the Republican Party that is the torchbearer from the Reagan-Bush era. But today’s Republican Party, for better or worse, is now much more of a populist party. If Haley is to have any future in the party for any national office, she’s going to have to make peace with it and adapt her message to reflect where the plurality of the base is.
Now that she is allegedly suspending her campaign, Donald Trump is the presumptive nominee, and can coordinate with the RNC. Resources and personnel become available, which is important since Joe Biden and the DNC has been intertwined for three-plus years. And speaking of Biden and the Democrats, here’s just some recent examples why I’ve become more inclined to believe Trump can actually pull this election off. Here’s MSNBC’s post-Super Tuesday coverage by Joy Reid.
You’re all racists. It’s not the economy, it’s not the border, you’re all racists. That’s a winning issue if I’ve ever heard one. Here’s Alex Wagner on the same set.
Not only is Trump a racist, but all Evangelicals are racists, too. Spectacular analysis from MSNBC’s The View. To complete the trifecta, here’s former Biden Press Secretary Jen Psaki and Rachel Maddow mocking the issue of immigration being important in the Commonwealth of Virginia.
That’s real finger on the pulse of the nation stuff right there. That’s how parties lose elections, actually. Immigration, and the crime that comes as a consequence of that flood of humanity, the fentanyl, the human trafficking, the crowding out of educational resources that would otherwise go to legal residents of Virginia, all that is mocked and discounted by these incredulous leftist women pundits on MSNBC.
Then, they go further to say that perhaps the only border Virginia cares about is the border with West Virginia, and maybe a wall should be put up to keep them out? Seriously, well done, everyone. They couldn’t have made a better advertisement for why people are coming home to the Republicans. Donald Trump said last weekend that he was going to make a big play for Virginia this November. He might not have to work that hard if regime media and Biden continue to take the Commonwealth for granted.
Funniest moment of Super Tuesday’s results was the Fox News desk calling America Samoa’s Democratic delegates for…Jason Palmer. Here’s Bret Baier.
I don’t know who Jason Palmer is, either. But clearly, Joe Biden has lost the Samoans. Polling shows he’s losing large swaths of Blacks and Latinos. He’s hemorrhaging with Jewish-Americans and independents, and Muslim-Americans are ticked at him for not being anti-Israel enough. Those indies might not be fully on board with Trump, yet, but Biden has lost them. Biden can’t afford to lose any more of his base, but there seems to be no floor Biden can install to shore up his support. He doesn’t have a running mate that is capable of a coherent thought, let alone a sellable message that resonates. The country is not happy, and the mood out there in virtually every poll seems to be a growing desire to throw the bums out. The bums right now are Democrats.
Let’s hope that Nikki Haley respects the will of the Republican voters and encourages her supporters to become wholly committed to electing Donald Trump and turning the American ship around.