Former Congressman Will Hurd (R-TX) gets straight to the point: “You have to know when to hold them and when to fold them.” Hurd, a former CIA officer who spent six years in Congress, joined Forbes Newsroom to talk about his decision to drop out of the 2024 presidential race.
Hurd admits he was a “dark horse” candidate, having failed to garner enough support in national polls to qualify for the first two Republican primary debates. Now, he is throwing his support behind former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley in an effort to help her secure the GOP nomination. “She has the momentum, she has the experience, and she’s the only person who’s consistently polled as beating Joe Biden in the general election.”
That said, Hurd acknowledges that Donald Trump has a staggering lead in the polls, with support from 59% of Republican voters in a recent Fox News poll, with Florida Governor Ron Desantis coming in at a distant second with 13%. But the same poll found that Haley has made the greatest gains since September, having doubled her numbers with 10% support.
“Donald Trump is not inevitable,” said Hurd. “He can be beat.”
Hurd maintains that Trump is “not fit for office,” and proved his “shockingly poor” grasp of foreign affairs with his response to the deadly Hamas attack on Israel. At a rally in West Palm Beach on Wednesday, Trump blamed the terrorist attack on his false premise that the 2020 election was “rigged” and praised the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah as “very smart.”
Hurd said Americans should be “outraged by the former president, the person leading in the polls of the Republican party, saying something positive about a terrorist group that’s attacking our ally.”
“The Republican Party has an opportunity to change a 20-year trend of losing the popular vote at the national level. That’s the opportunity we have – if we have the right leaders.”
For more on Hurd’s case for why Nikki Haley should win the GOP nomination, watch the full interview above.
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