Haley Stays Alive, Wins DC GOP Primary Race

Nikki Haley finally notched a win in the GOP primary.

In fact, she made history while doing it.

Haley beat Donald Trump in the DC primary, making her the first woman in history to win a GOP primary event.

Defeating Trump

In the overall scheme of things, this is a fly on an elephant’s hind quarters, but it will keep her alive in the race going through Super Tuesday.

While having been defeated in every other state thus far, Haley beat Trump 62.8 to 33.3% in the DC primary.

For her efforts, she takes all 19 delegates and 16 alternate delegates to add to her total thus far.

After winning, Haley’s campaign stated, "It's not surprising that Republicans closest to Washington dysfunction are rejecting Donald Trump and all his chaos."

The Trump campaign responded, "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."

While it is a win, there were only about 2,000 votes cast, so I would not get too excited about this if I were Haley.

What this did do, however, was give Haley a reason to stick around in the race through Super Tuesday.

Unfortunately, if polling is anywhere even close to voting results, Haley is going to get the floor mopped with her and will have no path to the nomination once all the votes are cast.

Trump is dominating these states, including a 73.4-18.6 advantage in California, a 78.4-14.4 advantage in Texas, the two largest prizes of the day.

Trump will not be able to close out Haley on Super Tuesday, but he will be pretty close.

Texas and California alone account for 330 delegates, which Trump will add to his 247 delegates thus far (on the road to 1215).

There are more than 500 delegates available in the remaining states, so assuming Trump wins the lion’s share, which he will, he will be very close to getting the nod.

By Wednesday morning, I would suspect that Haley will make the call to suspend her campaign with no clear path to the nomination.

If she stays beyond this, it is clearly just a vanity move to raise her profile and make herself out to be the great conservative hope against Donald Trump taking over the party.

But at this point, if people are donating to her campaign, they are just flushing money down the drain in a quest that is clearly going to fail.