INDIAN AMERICAN Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley is trailing far behind her rival Donald Trump, who is most likely to emerge as the presumptive nominee after the Republican Party's crucial Super Tuesday contest.
Trump and Haley were campaigning vigorously in various Super Tuesday states, making a last-minute pitch to the Republican voters.
Super Tuesday is an important phase of presidential primaries when the early contests are over, and voters from multiple states cast ballots in primaries timed to occur on the same date.
RealClearPolitics, which keeps track of all national polls, reported that 77-year-old former president was leading by more than 60 percentage points on average in various national polls.
No political pundit is giving Haley, 51, any chance against Trump, the most popular politician in the Republican party in recent times.
Despite facing scores of legal battles and embarrassing indictments, Trump is attracting thousands of Republicans to his rallies, while the numbers at Haley's events are far less.
On Super Tuesday, Republican presidential primaries are being held in California, Texas, North Carolina, Tennessee, Alabama, Virginia, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Massachusetts, Utah, Minnesota, Colorado, Arkansas, Maine, and Vermont.
More than a third of all the Republican delegates are at stake on Super Tuesday, the biggest haul of any date on the primary calendar.
To win the presidential nomination of the Republican party, either of the two candidates needs 1,215 delegates, who are elected during the primaries.
So far, Trump has 244 delegates in his kitty, while Haley’s strength stands at 43.
Florida governor Ron DeSantis, who dropped from the presidential race earlier, has nine delegates, and Indian American entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy has three. Both of them have quit the race and endorsed Trump.
Even though Haley, the former US envoy to the UN, is trailing far behind her former boss, she has already broken several glass ceilings in the party.
On Monday (4), the former South Carolina governor won her first Republican nominating contest by trumping rival Trump in Washington, DC. With her win, Haley scripted history by becoming the first woman to win a Republican presidential primary.
She is the first Indian American politician to have won a presidential primary in any state in either the Democratic or the Republican party.
Her popularity has gained ground in the last two months, and in January and February alone, her campaign raised $28 million.
On Monday, a large number of people came out in support of her in Texas.
“We have been in 10 states just in the past week. I just finished a rally here in Houston, Texas. We had well over a thousand people show up," Haley told Fox News in an interview.
"This isn't an anti-Trump movement; this is a pro-America movement. This is something where they're saying they're tired of the chaos. They don't want two candidates in their 80s; they want to make sure that we go back to normal. They want to see a DC that works for the people instead of people working for the government,” she said.
“And so we've got people who are passionate, they're excited, they want to go and get America back where they can be proud again. And so we're going to do as much as we can.
"I want to be as competitive as we can. We certainly have numbers we're hoping for, but we'll see what happens tomorrow. But until then, I continue to remind everyone in those 16 states and territories that in a general election, we're given a choice. In a primary, we make our choice. And so I hope everybody will go out and make their choice tomorrow."
Haley claimed that 70 per cent of Americans want neither Trump nor 81-year-old incumbent US President Joe Biden, a Democrat, as president.
(PTI)
Karan Johar and Smriti Irani
