Presidential candidate Nikki Haley won the Republican primary against former President Donald Trump (2017-2021) in the US capital, Washington, on Sunday. This is her first victory in the nomination process and a symbolic victory for the former United States ambassador to the United Nations.
According to the first projections from media such as CNN and NBC News, Haley, the only Donald Trump candidate left in the race, achieved 63% of the votes compared to Trump's 33% in the Republican Party primaries that were held this year. weekend in the capital.
"It is not surprising that Republicans closest to Washington's dysfunction reject Donald Trump and all his chaos," Haley campaign spokeswoman Olivia Pérez-Cubas said in a statement. Haley was the first woman to win a Republican primary in American history, she highlighted her campaign.
However, his chances for the Republican nomination are slim (if not none) to take on the likely Democratic nominee, President Joe Biden, in November. Trump won the first eight nomination contests by significant margins before losing to Haley in the US capital.
A merely symbolic victory because DC only has 19 delegates out of the 2,429 that the country has, but it comes before a key event, Super Tuesday, in which 16 states hold primaries on the 5th. In any case, it is expected that the former president will win almost all the primary elections that are to come, according to opinion polls.
"I stayed away from voting in Washington because it is the 'swamp', with very few delegates and no advantage," Trump wrote in a post on the Truth Social platform.
With these 19, the Republican has a total of 43 delegates, still far from the 244 that Trump has after winning the rest of the processes that have been held so far, among them in the Iowa or Michigan caucuses or in the primaries in South Carolina, the state of which Haley was governor.
Each of these internal processes is assigned a proportional number of delegates, who will name a candidate in July, at the National Convention of the Republican Party in Milwaukee. In total there are 2,429 delegates available and a candidate must win at least 1,215 to secure the nomination.
The country's capital, which is one of the most Democratic cities in the United States and a city that Trump often attacks in his speeches, has broken the former president's goal of remaining undefeated, just before Super Tuesday, when Republicans will elect to 865 delegates, 35.6% of the total. The core of Trump's base is rural, and is especially strong in low-educated areas. The city is also home to a significant number of federal workers who Trump's allies have promised to lay off en masse and replace with loyalists if he wins in November. Some categories of federal workers have seen an increase in death threats in recent years.
