Former U.S. Ambassador and onetime South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley came away the victor in the Republican presidential primary for Washington, D.C., an expected outcome that nevertheless marks the first major triumph of her campaign.
Haley carried nearly 63 percent of the vote, with the D.C. Republican Party reporting a total of 2,035 voters participating, party officials announced on Sunday evening. Donald Trump placed second with just over 33 percent of the vote.
In a statement, Trump’s campaign snarkily congratulated Haley on being named “Queen of the Swamp by the lobbyists and DC insiders that want to protect the failed status quo.”
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Having received more than 50 percent of the vote, Haley was awarded all 19 of D.C.’s delegates, bringing her to a grand total of 43—a relatively inconsequential force that is unlikely to do much in the way of making up lost ground to an opponent who has already snatched up 244. The Republican nominee is expected to be whoever reaches 1,215 delegates first.
On Saturday, Trump crushed Haley in Missouri and Idaho’s caucuses and Michigan’s nominating convention, where the rest of the state’s 55 delegates were allocated after a primary earlier this week gave him the first 16. Last week, he trounced Haley in her own home state, in a primary that has long been considered a reliable indicator of who the presumptive Republican nominee will be.
Trump is widely expected to enjoy an overwhelming victory on Super Tuesday this week as well, when 13 states will hold their primaries and two states and one U.S. territory will caucus. A total of 854 Republican delegates will be at stake.
Despite the overwhelming odds still facing her, Haley’s campaign stuck to celebrating the win Sunday.
“This makes Nikki Haley the first woman to win a Republican primary in U.S. history,” her spokesperson Olivia Perez-Cubas noted in a tweet.
D.C. skews heavily blue and, of its tiny Republican population, heavily leans against Trump. In 2020, President Joe Biden cleaned up with more than 90 percent of the vote in the general election. Four years earlier, Trump lost the district’s Republican primary to Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, whose campaign was at that point running on fumes.
Haley’s victory came hours after she said that she no longer felt bound by the Republican National Committee’s loyalty pledge to endorse Trump if he becomes its presidential nominee. In a lengthy interview on NBC’s Meet the Press, she refused to conclusively rule it out, and instead repeatedly evaded the question.
“If you talk about an endorsement, you’re talking about a loss,” she said. “I don’t think like that.”
