Former US ambassador to the UN Nikki Haley has won the Republican primary in the District of Columbia, notching her first victory in this year’s presidential campaign.
Her victory on Sunday at least temporarily halts former US president Donald Trump’s sweep of the Republican voting contests, although Trump is likely to pick up several hundred more delegates in this week’s Super Tuesday races.
Despite her early 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.
Photo: AFP
Following her 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.
The Associated Press declared Haley the winner on Sunday night after DC Republican Party officials released the results. She won all 19 delegates at stake.
“It’s not surprising that Republicans closest to Washington dysfunction are rejecting Donald Trump and all his chaos,” Haley spokesperson Olivia Perez-Cubas said in a statement, adding that Haley became the first woman to win a Republican primary in history.
Washington is one of the most heavily Democratic jurisdictions in the nation, with only about 23,000 registered Republicans in the city. US President Joe Biden won the district in the 2020 general election with 92 percent of the vote.
Trump’s campaign issued a statement shortly after Haley’s victory, sarcastically congratulating her on being named “Queen of the Swamp by the lobbyists and DC insiders that want to protect the failed status quo.”
Haley on Friday held a rally in the nation’s capital before heading back to North Carolina and a series of states holding Super Tuesday primaries.
She joked with more than 100 supporters inside a hotel ballroom: “Who says there’s no Republicans in DC, come on.”
“We’re trying to make sure that we touch every hand that we can and speak to every person,” Haley said.
As she gave her standard campaign speech, criticizing Trump for running up federal deficit, one rallygoer bellowed: “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 cannot.
While campaigning as an avowed conservative, Haley has tended to perform better among more moderate and independent-leaning voters.
Four in 10 Haley supporters in South Carolina’s Republican primary were self-described moderates, compared with 15 percent for Trump, according to AP VoteCast, a survey of more than 2,400 voters taking part in the Republican primary in South Carolina, conducted for AP by NORC at the University of Chicago. On the other hand, 8 in 10 Trump supporters identified as conservatives, compared with about half of Haley’s backers.
Trump won an uncontested DC primary during his 2020 reelection bid, but placed a distant third four years earlier behind US Senator Marco Rubio of Florida and former Ohio governor John Kasich. Rubio’s win was one of only three in his unsuccessful 2016 bid.
Kehinde Sanni spends his days smoothing out dents and repainting scratched bumpers in a modest autobody shop in Lagos. He has never left Nigeria, yet he speaks glowingly of Burkina Faso military leader Ibrahim Traore. “Nigeria needs someone like Ibrahim Traore of Burkina Faso. He is doing well for his country,” Sanni said. His admiration is shaped by a steady stream of viral videos, memes and social media posts — many misleading or outright false — portraying Traore as a fearless reformer who defied Western powers and reclaimed his country’s dignity. The Burkinabe strongman swept into power following a coup in September 2022
TRUMP EFFECT: The win capped one of the most dramatic turnarounds in Canadian political history after the Conservatives had led the Liberals by more than 20 points Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney yesterday pledged to win US President Donald Trump’s trade war after winning Canada’s election and leading his Liberal Party to another term in power. Following a campaign dominated by Trump’s tariffs and annexation threats, Carney promised to chart “a new path forward” in a world “fundamentally changed” by a US that is newly hostile to free trade. “We are over the shock of the American betrayal, but we should never forget the lessons,” said Carney, who led the central banks of Canada and the UK before entering politics earlier this year. “We will win this trade war and
‘FRAGMENTING’: British politics have for a long time been dominated by the Labor Party and the Tories, but polls suggest that Reform now poses a significant challenge Hard-right upstarts Reform UK snatched a parliamentary seat from British Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s Labor Party yesterday in local elections that dealt a blow to the UK’s two establishment parties. Reform, led by anti-immigrant firebrand Nigel Farage, won the by-election in Runcorn and Helsby in northwest England by just six votes, as it picked up gains in other localities, including one mayoralty. The group’s strong showing continues momentum it built up at last year’s general election and appears to confirm a trend that the UK is entering an era of multi-party politics. “For the movement, for the party it’s a very, very big
‘BODIES EVERYWHERE’: The incident occurred at a Filipino festival celebrating an anti-colonial leader, with the driver described as a ‘lone suspect’ known to police Canadian police arrested a man on Saturday after a car plowed into a street party in the western Canadian city of Vancouver, killing a number of people. Authorities said the incident happened shortly after 8pm in Vancouver’s Sunset on Fraser neighborhood as members of the Filipino community gathered to celebrate Lapu Lapu Day. The festival, which commemorates a Filipino anti-colonial leader from the 16th century, falls this year on the weekend before Canada’s election. A 30-year-old local man was arrested at the scene, Vancouver police wrote on X. The driver was a “lone suspect” known to police, a police spokesperson told journalists at the
RSS