Nikki Haley to pull out of Republican presidential race

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Nikki Haley has decided to end her presidential campaign, a person familiar with the matter said on Wednesday. The move caps a bid for the White House that outlasted all the other Republican rivals to Donald Trump but failed to gain enough support to topple the former US president.

Haley was due to speak from her home state of South Carolina at 10am Eastern Time on Wednesday after losing to Trump in the vast majority of Republican primary contests held on Super Tuesday.

While Haley is not expected to endorse Trump on Thursday, she will urge him to win over the voters who supported her, according to a second person familiar with her plans.

The only primary races she had won thus far were in Vermont and the District of Columbia, the seat of the US capital. Trump is now on the brink of securing enough delegates to win the Republican presidential nomination and Haley’s exit paves the way for him to move on to the general election campaign against Joe Biden.

“We want to have unity and we’re going to have unity, and it’s going to happen very quickly,” Trump told his supporters at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach, Florida, on Tuesday night.

Haley’s exit sets the stage for an eight-month long race between Trump and Biden that is expected to be both close and rancorous. According to the latest national polling average by RealClearPolitics, Trump has a small lead of 2 percentage points over the incumbent president.

Haley, a former South Carolina governor and former US ambassador to the UN, had cast herself throughout the campaign as a voice for traditional conservatism on economic and foreign policy, and part of a new generation of political leadership for the country.

After posting strong performances in the televised Republican debates last year, she began to rise in the polls and secured the support from prominent anti-Trump donors…