Former South Carolina Governor, Nikki Haley, announced on Wednesday that she was exiting the Republican presidential race.
She urged former President, Donald Trump to “earn” the support of voters who backed her.
Trump is now the only candidate in the Republican presidential race.
“The time has now come to suspend my campaign. I said I wanted Americans to have their voices heard. I have done that. I have no regrets”, Haley said during remarks in Charleston, South Carolina, following a series of losses in Grand Old Party nominating contests on Super Tuesday.
A report on CNN said Haley congratulated Trump in her address but did not endorse him.
“It is now up to Donald Trump to earn the votes, of those in our party and beyond it, who did not support him. And I hope he does that”, she said.
Sources familiar with her plans told the CNN before her speech that Haley’s approach appeared to leave room for her to endorse Trump ahead of the general election.
Haley, who was Trump’s US ambassador to the United Nations, also used the speech to take a swipe at the former President’s isolationist foreign policy views, saying, “Our world is on fire because of America’s retreat”.
“Standing by our allies in Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan is a moral imperative. But it’s also more than that. If we retreat further, there will be more war, not less”, she said.
Haley was the last of a dozen major candidates whom Trump vanquished in a GOP primary that he dominated from start to finish, including winning 14 of the 15 GOP contests on Tuesday, even as he skipped the party’s debates and maintained a much lighter schedule of early-state travel than all of his rivals.
Haley had vowed to stay in the race through at least Super Tuesday. She had also begun sharpening her attacks on Trump, questioning his mental fitness and lumping him together with President Joe Biden, the likely Democratic nominee, as one of two “grumpy old men”.
Haley had little hope of keeping pace with the former president with the race shifting into a new gear, moving from early-state contests in which retail politics take center stage to a national race with 56 per cent of the party’s delegates due to be awarded by 12 March and most of them in winner-take-all contests.
Still, in her campaign, Haley became the first Republican woman to win two primary contests: Vermont and the District of Columbia. The wins prevented Trump from being able to say that he shut out Haley in every state, but the victories were not enough to award her with a significant delegate count.
