Republican presidential hopeful Nikki Haley will host a rally Tuesday in metro Denver as she looks to garner support for her campaign in the GOP primary against Donald Trump.
Haley’s campaign confirmed in an email that she will attend the event, which starts at 1:30 p.m. at the Wings over the Rockies Exploration of Flight campus at Centennial Airport, 13005 Wings Way, in the south suburbs.
The 52-year-old former South Carolina governor and United Nations ambassador in the Trump administration said this week that she plans to stay in the primary against the former president, even as other major candidates have dropped out and she hasn’t won a primary contest yet.
She will do so, she said, even if she doesn’t win in her home state when South Carolina holds its Republican primary Saturday.
Colorado’s primary election is March 5, and mail-in ballots have already gone out.
“Nikki Haley is taking her campaign to Colorado in the coming days ahead of Super Tuesday because the American people deserve a better choice than two 80-year-old names from the past,” campaign spokesperson Brittany Yanick wrote in a statement to The Denver Post. “No matter how many gold sneakers Trump sells, he’s consumed by endless legal drama, he’s losing to Joe Biden and he’s flirting with dictators.”
It’s time, Yanick wrote, for “a new generational conservative leader” to lead the country into the future.
The Colorado Republican Party endorsed Trump in the GOP primary, despite its bylaws prohibiting endorsements before primary elections. The party has also collected tens of thousands of dollars from other candidates to allow their names to make it onto the primary ballot.
Colorado GOP Chairman Dave Williams said Wednesday that it was hard to see a path forward for Haley and that it was unlikely she had a shot at winning the party’s primaries in any other states, except potentially Massachusetts.
“We think that the primary’s effectively over,” Williams said. “Donald Trump is our presumed nominee. And if Nikki Haley wants to continue her race, that’s her right, but at this point, we all need to unify around Donald Trump and defeat Joe Biden.”
Although the Colorado Supreme Court ruled in December that Trump was ineligible to be on the Colorado ballot because his role in stoking the Jan. 6, 2021, U.S. Capitol riot amounted to insurrection, the decision was placed on hold until a final decision by the U.S. Supreme Court — meaning Trump appears on Colorado’s primary ballot.
The conservative-majority justices at a hearing earlier this month appeared unlikely to allow the state to bar the former president from the its ballot.
Haley’s visit to Colorado will be the first major public event by a presidential candidate in the state during the primaries. President Biden, a Democrat, visited Pueblo in late November for an event promoting his record; he also attended a private fundraiser in Cherry Hills Village, south of Denver.
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