- Republican leaders in Georgia and Michigan are pressuring Nikki Haley to drop out.
- Their statements come on the heels of Trump’s double-digit win in New Hampshire.
- Haley has made it clear she will remain in the race.
Republican leaders in two critical states are lining up behind former President Donald Trump, furthering the pressure on former UN Ambassador Nikki Haley to drop out of the race even though only two states have voted.
Their messages come after Trump on Tuesday won New Hampshire’s GOP primary by double digits.
"With President Trump's decisive win in New Hampshire, he is now the presumptive nominee of the Republican Party and we can start to focus our efforts on BEATING Joe Biden, rather than in-party fighting," Michigan GOP chairman Pete Hoekstra said in a statement posted on X, formerly known as Twitter.
Georgia's top Republican leadership chimed in with a similar message.
"As we look at the map & the path going forward it is difficult to see how Ambassador Haley can secure the nomination," Georgia GOP chairman Josh McKoon and the state's two Republican National Committee members said in a statement.
It's not just state leaders either. Republican National Committee Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel strongly suggested on Tuesday that Haley should bow to the inevitable. In a sign of Trump's grip on the party, many top officials are saying that the race is over.
"I'm looking at the map and path going forward and I don't see it for Nikki Haley," McDaniel told Fox News. "I think she has run a great campaign, but I do think there is a message coming from voters that has been very clear: we need to unite around our eventual nominee which is going to be Donald Trump and we need to make sure we beat Joe Biden."
Haley's campaign made it clear that she will remain in the race.
"We don't do coronations in this country. We do elections," Haley spokesperson Olivia Perez-Cubas said in a statement to Business Insider. "The political elites can back Donald Trump, but Nikki Haley will continue to fight for the nearly 50% of Republican primary voters and the 70% of all Americans who don't want a Biden-Trump rematch."
Not everyone is happy with this call to effectively end the race when less than 500,000 Republicans have voted. Only 61 delegates have been allocated thus far; a presidential hopeful needs 1,215 to secure the GOP's nomination.
"The GAGOP's role is to support our party's nominees, not try to decide them," Cody Hall, a top advisor to Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp, wrote on X. "One would think they should have learned that lesson in 2022."
Republicans in Michigan and Georgia won't vote until February 27 and March 12 respectively. Michigan is also doing things a little differently by awarding some of their delegates based on the February primary and others based on caucuses held on March 2nd.
Both state parties have recently faced tensions over their alignment with Trump. Kemp, who clashed with Trump after he refused to support his lies about the 2020 election, went so far as to set up his own fundraising organization for his reelection campaign. Michigan ousted its chair Kristina Karamo over a series of ideological and fundraising struggles. Hoekstra, her replacement, was Trump's former ambassador to the Netherlands, a post he was appointed to after leaving Congress.
Georgia and Michigan are widely expected to be closely contested states in November's general election, raising the stakes over any potential squabbles that could impede the GOP's organization.