Candidate Nikki Haley, the last rival standing for the Republican nomination against former President Donald Trump, plans to announce this Wednesday that she is withdrawing from the race for the White House.
The announcement, advanced by the main American media, comes hours after the celebration of Super Tuesday, a day in which 15 States voted in their primaries, and which ended with Trump's overwhelming victory in 14 of them.
In case there were any obstacles in that journey, the former president already has the way clear to run in the November elections against an old acquaintance on the Democratic side: Joe Biden.
The candidate is scheduled to give a withdrawal speech at 10:00 a.m. East Coast time (4:00 p.m. Spanish peninsular time) in Charleston, the elegant city she has chosen as her campaign headquarters.
Haley was the only woman among the 14 candidates who began the race in the Conservative party.
She provided her credentials as governor of South Carolina (2011-2017) and as United States ambassador to the UN, a position for which she was appointed by Trump when he was in the White House.
He managed to attract attention by launching his candidacy with a criticism of the advanced age of those who will finally be the candidates for the November elections for both parties, Biden, 81, and Trump, 77, for whom he requested training tests cognitive.
Later, she turned her message to attract moderate and undecided Republican voters, who were united by the powerful reason, she trusted, of fear of a return of the Republican magnate to the helm of the first world power four years later.
Other arguments in her attacks focused on Trump's "disrespectful treatment" of veterans (including Haley's husband) and the idea that his presidency brought chaos and instability to the United States. Joined.
None of all this, not even the fact that in recent weeks she seemed more aggressive, helped her against a Trump who gave her the treatment of contempt and insults that he usually gives to his enemies (he called her “knucklehead”). and that in the end has proven stronger than ever.
Haley, who lost by 20 points in a place as significant as South Carolina, a state that she governed with notable popularity ratings, has had to settle for a couple of testimonial victories: she won last weekend in the District of Columbia ( that is, in the very Democratic city of Washington) and in Vermont, where it was the big surprise (and the only emotion) of Super Tuesday.
It is a small state, which only contributes 17 of the 2,429 delegates to the Republican national convention, which will be held in Milwaukee (Wisconsin) in July.
At the time of her withdrawal, Haley had amassed 89 delegates, compared to her rival's 995.
The percentages achieved in places with open primaries such as South Carolina (40%) or New Hampshire (42%) could be indicative of the problems that await Trump in November, when they will have to vote slightly more than the Republicans.
They also served to make clear the enormous fracture in the party, divided between the minority of traditional conservatives, of the lineage of Ronald Reagan, with their optimism and their faith in institutions, in markets and in the role of the first power as police of the world, and the majority that blindly follows the magnate and his isolationist pessimism and the populist nationalism of the MAGA movement, acronym for
Make America Great Again
.
If those ideas were once on the margins, nine years after their leader's emergence on the American political scene they have been placed at the center of a formation divided in half.
Until the end, the candidate had the support of conservative donors who resist seeing Trump in the White House again.
Given that it is assumed that she will not support the magnate's candidacy, the candidate's withdrawal raises two questions: will her supporters vote for the former president, will they support Biden or will they abstain in November?
The second enigma is more urgent: where will all that money that supported her go?
By now, some of the most famous donors, such as Charles Koch, had already abandoned her, surrendered to the evidence of the end of her path.
And the Trump campaign has already begun these days to maneuver to attract some of those generous contributions to its coffers, while defenders of the alternative of a third party to get out of the quagmire of a repeat of the Trump-Biden duel entertain the idea that Haley wants to fly that flag.
It is as unlikely as the possibility that she will decide to complete the Republican ticket as vice president, an option that she has decisively publicly ruled out.
When asked what made her last so long, also after the resignation of her main rival for second place, Ron DeSantis, who threw in the towel in January, after the Iowa caucuses, analysts responded that Haley was taking advantage of the spotlight. of national attention they were targeting her to put together a solid candidacy for the 2028 elections.
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