Washington, United States:
Nikki Haley won the Republican presidential primaries in Washington DC on Sunday, earning her first victory as she struggles to stay relevant in her underdog race against Donald Trump.
Haley's symbolic victory in the nation's capital comes just before a decisive day in the long US nomination process: Super Tuesday, in which fifteen states and one territory vote.
Washington is a solidly Democratic city with a small number of registered Republicans. CNN, one of the outlets that reported Haley won on Sunday, put it at just 22,000.
Haley received 63 percent of the vote in a primary held in just one place: a downtown hotel, according to Politico, which cited Washington party officials.
In the 2020 election against Trump, then-candidate Joe Biden won 92 percent of the vote in Washington.
The city has never produced a majority vote for a Republican presidential candidate.
The Haley campaign released a statement saying, “It is not surprising that the Republicans closest to Washington's dysfunction are rejecting Donald Trump and all his chaos.”
Trump's campaign, in turn, released a so-called statement about Nikki Haley being crowned Queen of the Swamp.
“Tonight's results in Washington DC reaffirm the goal of President Trump's campaign: he will drain the swamp and put America first,” the statement said.
The Super Tuesday milestone is expected to bring Trump within a hair's breadth of clinching the Republican Party's presidential nomination. He has already won all the early state elections.
Super Tuesday is seen as Haley's last real chance to undermine the former president's march to once again become the party's standard-bearer against Biden.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)