Super Tuesday has ended Nikki Haley’s campaign. Will she accept it?

Super Tuesday is all but over. They are still voting in a couple of western states, but the voters have spoken from Virginia to Oklahoma and from Maine to Texas, and the outcome is already abundantly clear. Donald Trump won, and Nikki Haley lost.

There is no gray area and there are no silver linings. Trump’s victories were universally expected. Now the question is how long it will take for Haley to accept reality and drop out.

Haley had a dream of being president. Now it’s time to wake up from that dream. It is not going to happen in 2024. Tuesday’s results aren’t really the deal-breaker, because she never had momentum or a shot. No poll showed her anywhere close to having majority support among Republicans, ever. But they should serve as her last chance at a graceful exit.

In sports, you play to the end, no matter the score — either until the clock runs out or until the final out. That sports analogy does not apply to politics, where it pays to know you’ve been beaten. Dropping out at the right time is key to winning again later.

How many former presidents and nominees of parties have failed in previous attempts? The list of nominees of the two political parties who had run before and lost is extensive and includes many presidents. Just going back to 1968, Hubert Humphrey only got the Democratic nod on his third try. Ronald Reagan failed to get the GOP nomination in 1976, George H.W. Bush came in second in 1980, but won in 1988. Bob Dole failed in 1980 and 1988, but prevailed in 1996. John McCain was a media darling in 2000, but had to wait until 2008 to get his party’s approval. Hillary Clinton lost in 2008, only to return eight years later. And Joe Biden had run two embarrassingly bad campaigns that never really got out of the starting gate before 2020.

All of these candidates knew when to call it. But Nikki Haley may have already waited too long. The only way to know for sure is for her to stop now. Going longer will only make things worse.

The public has a short memory for such things, so it can’t be said for certain that she’s ruined her GOP future. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis (R) dropped out just after Iowa, and many fervent Trump supporters are still demanding that he be punished for all eternity for even daring to run.

Weirdly, Haley hasn’t quite elicited the vitriol from Trump that DeSantis did. That can likely be chalked up to how much more effective the current governor of Florida has been in that post than the former governor of South Carolina was in hers. Comparing résumés, she’s much less of a threat, now or in the future, to any potential 2028 candidate, at least on paper.

But she can’t get to 2028, or even think about it, if she pulls a John Kasich and refuses to admit reality.

Kasich, the former Ohio Republican governor, won only his home state, late in the race, and only with a plurality. But the only person he hated more than Donald Trump was Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), the only other candidate remaining, so he stayed in the race and split the anti-Trump vote, delivering the nomination to the businessman.

People have speculated as to whether or not Kasich was playing spoiler in the hope of Trump losing, leaving the field open for him in 2020, but that was torpedoed when Trump won.

There was a time when Super Tuesday was a difference-maker for presidential aspirants. The day of multiple state primaries was a goal for many campaigns — making it this far was an accomplishment, adding retroactive justification to the campaign itself. But for Nikki Haley, it should just be the end.

If she steps up and gives the speech tonight, she will be doing all she can to position herself as Trump’s pick for running mate. That might sound crazy. Then again, so did Joe Biden’s choice of a wildly unpopular fellow candidate who had called him a racist to his face during a debate. Biden won after making that choice, but exactly how well it worked out for him is still an open question.

Trump could either continue to talk about the need for the party to unify behind his campaign, or he could make it happen. But nothing will happen if Haley fails to accept where things are.

Derek Hunter is host of the Derek Hunter Podcast and a former staffer for the late Sen. Conrad Burns (R-Mont.).