Haley won the DC GOP primary by 62 percent, breaking Trump’s winning streak as he marches towards the GOP nomination.
WASHINGTON—Former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley secured her first GOP primary win over former President Donald Trump on March 3, winning 62.8 percent of the vote in the District of Columbia’s primary.
President Trump won 33.2 percent. Because Ms. Haley won more than 60 percent of the vote, she now gets all of the district’s 19 delegates. The district is deep blue, with 92 percent of its electorate voting for candidate Joe Biden in 2020.
The primary came one day after President Trump swept up all three Republican caucuses in Michigan, Missouri, and Idaho. Until March 3, the former president had won every single primary contest since Iowa in January—all of them by large margins.
Ms. Haley is the first woman to win a Republican presidential primary in U.S. history.
“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.
President Trump’s campaign said the results “reaffirmed the object of President Trump’s campaign—he will drain the swamp and put America first.”
“While Nikki Haley has been soundly rejected throughout the rest of America, she was just crowned Queen of the Swamp by lobbyists and D.C. insiders that want to protect the status quo,” Trump press secretary Karoline Leavitt said in a statement.
Prior to the district’s primary, President Trump had 244 delegates, and Ms. Haley had 24. The former South Carolina governor’s first primary victory brings her delegate count up to 43.
The North Dakota Republican Primary on March 4 is followed by Super Tuesday, on March 5, when 15 states and American Samoa will vote.
This year’s turnout was 2,035 of the 22,500 registered Republicans in the nation’s capital, according to District of Columbia GOP chair Patrick Mara, who said the voter roll had just been cleaned up. In comparison, the contested 2016 and 2012 primary campaign turnouts were 2,800 and 5,200, respectively, and about 1,550 voters participated in the uncontested primary in 2020.
By Terri Wu
