Nikki Haley Prematurely Declares Victory in the Primary, Says to Be Ready to Hear 'I Told You So'
Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley on Tuesday said naysayers are going to have to hear her say four big words when she emerges on top.
Haley, the former governor of South Carolina and a former ambassador to the U.N., is the only candidate left opposing former President Donald Trump in the race for the GOP presidential nomination.
As New Hampshire voters headed to the polls Tuesday for its state’s primary, most polls projected that Trump would win big. That led Martha MacCallum of Fox News to ask if Haley might want to find a future in a possible second Trump administration.
Haley fired off a defiant reply, according to a video posted to X.
NIKKI HALEY: “At some point y’all are gonna to realize that I won this race and you’re going to have to accept when I say I told you so. It is slow and steady wins the race.” pic.twitter.com/q3QyHtV8Wa
— Breaking911 (@Breaking911) January 22, 2024
“I’m running to win this race, and as much as everybody wants to talk about what I’m gonna do, at some point y’all are gonna to realize that I won this race, and you’re going to have to accept when I say I told you so,” she said.
“It is slow and steady wins the race. I’ve done this the entire time. We’re gonna finish it. I don’t want anything else. I don’t want anything else. I’m running to be president,” she said.
Haley said there is no end date for her campaign.
“I’m not going to pull out because somebody wants to be coronated. I’m not going to pull out because they think that I shouldn’t be there. The political class has never thought I should be here — in South Carolina, in Congress, at the U.N,” she said.
Haley added that “no one has ever thought I should be here. And that’s exactly why I should be here because I’m fighting for normal people, and I’ll always do that.”
Earlier in the day, Haley said she is not going to mourn a campaign that is far from dead.
“I didn’t get here because of luck. I got here because I outworked and outsmarted all the rest of those fellas. So I’m running against Donald Trump, and I’m not going to talk about an obituary,” she said, according to The New York Times.
“This has always been a marathon,” she said. “It’s never been a sprint.”
Responding to a Trump comment predicting she would drop out after the Tuesday primary, Haley replied, “I don’t do what he tells me to do. I’ve never done what he tells me.”
On Tuesday, a Haley campaign memo seemed to indicate that regardless of Tuesday’s numbers, Haley would press on, according to WHYY-TV.
“The political class and the media want to give Donald Trump a coronation,” Betsy Ankney wrote in the memo. “They say the race is over. They want to throw up their hands, after only 110,000 people have voted in a caucus in Iowa and say, well, I guess it’s Trump. That isn’t how this works.”
“And while members of Congress, the press, and many of the weak-kneed fellas who ran for president are giving up and giving in — we aren’t going anywhere,” the memo said, according to The Hill.
Ankney noted that the Feb. 24 South Carolina primary and the March Super Tuesday contests lie ahead.
“Until then, everyone should take a deep breath. The campaign has not even begun in any of these states yet. No ads have been aired, and candidates aren’t hustling on the ground. A month in politics is a lifetime,” the memo said.
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