Nikki Haley has notched up her first victory of the 2024 Republican primaries, after winning the vote in the District of Columbia.
Haley, the only remaining challenger to Donald Trump, won 62.9% of the vote, versus 33.2% captured by the former president. Haley will pick up 19 delegates from her win, a small portion of the 1,215 delegates needed to clinch the nomination.
The win in Washington makes Haley the first woman to win a Republican primary in US history, her campaign has said.
“It’s not surprising that Republicans closest to Washington dysfunction are rejecting Donald Trump and all his chaos,” Haley campaign spokesperson Olivia Perez-Cubas said in a statement.
Haley still faces near-impossible odds in her quest to win the Republican nomination to take on Joe Biden in November. Trump won the first eight nominating contests by significant margins.
Opinion polls show that the former president is also expected to win almost all upcoming contests.
On Saturday, Trump picked up all 39 delegates at the Michigan Republican party convention. Fifteen states will hold primaries on Tuesday in which Trump’s status as Republican candidate is expected to be cemented.
Despite her continued losses, Haley has said she would remain in the race at least through those contests, although she has declined to name any primary she felt confident she would win. After last week’s loss in her home state of South Carolina, Haley remained adamant that voters in the places that followed deserved an alternative to Trump despite his dominance thus far in the campaign.
Haley held a rally in the nation’s capital on Friday before heading back to North Carolina and a series of states holding Super Tuesday primaries.
As she gave her standard campaign speech, criticising Trump for running up the federal deficit, one attendee yelled out, “He cannot win a general election. It’s madness.” That prompted agreement from Haley, who argues that she can deny Biden a second term but Trump won’t be able to.
Washington is one of the most heavily Democratic jurisdictions in the nation, with only about 23,000 registered Republicans in the city. The city also is home to a significant number of federal workers who Trump allies have pledged to fire en masse and replace with loyalists if he wins in November.
“While Nikki has been soundly rejected throughout the rest of America, she was just crowned Queen of the Swamp by the lobbyists and DC insiders that want to protect the failed status quo,” Karoline Leavitt, the Trump campaign press secretary said in a release.
This is not the first time Republicans in the capital have rejected Trump. During the last competitive Republican nominating contest in the District of Columbia, in 2016, Trump received less than 14% of the vote and no delegates, even as he went on to win the nomination nationally.
The Associated Press and Reuters contributed to this report
