BREAKING: Nikki Haley Ends Republican Presidential Race—-Former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley announced Wednesday that she is exiting the Republican presidential race and urged presumptive nominee Donald Trump to “earn” the support of voters who backed her.

“The time has now come to suspend my campaign. I said I wanted Americans to have their voices heard. I have done that. I have no regrets,” Haley said during remarks in Charleston, South Carolina, following a series of losses in GOP nominating contests on Super Tuesday.

Haley congratulated Trump in her address but did not endorse him.

“I have always been a conservative Republican and always supported the Republican nominee, but on this question, as she did on so many others, Margaret Thatcher provided some good advice when she said, ‘Never just follow the crowd. Always make up your own mind,’” the former governor said.

“It is now up to Donald Trump to earn the vote – those in our party and beyond it, who did not support him. And I hope he does that,” she said. Sources familiar with her plans told CNN prior to her speech that Haley’s approach appears to leave room for her to endorse Trump ahead of the general election.

Haley, who was Trump’s US ambassador to the United Nations, was the last of a dozen major candidates the former president vanquished in a GOP primary that he dominated from start to finish — including winning 14 of the 15 GOP contests on Tuesday – even as he skipped the party’s debates and maintained a much lighter schedule of early-state travel than all of his rivals.

Haley had vowed to stay in the race through at least Super Tuesday. She had also begun sharpening her attacks on Trump, questioning his mental fitness and lumping him together with President Joe Biden, the likely Democratic nominee, as one of two “grumpy old men.”

But her home state of South Carolina served as her fourth straight loss in 2024 – including one to “none of these candidates” in the Nevada primary, where Trump wasn’t competing and there were no delegates at stake. (He opted to participate instead in the party-run caucuses, which awarded delegates.)

Haley had little hope of keeping pace with the former president with the race shifting into a new gear, moving from early-state contests in which retail politics take center stage to a national race with 56% of the party’s delegates due to be awarded by March 12 — most of them in winner-take-all contests.

Still, in her campaign, Haley became the first Republican woman to win two primary contests: Vermont and the District of Columbia. The wins prevented Trump from being able to say that he shut out Haley in every state, but the victories were not enough to award her with a significant delegate count.