Nikki Haley beats Trump to clinch 1st Republican primary win

Former South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley won her first contest in the Republican presidential nomination race in Washington D.C. on Sunday.

Her triumph in D.C.'s primary breaks rival Donald Trump's sweep of the Republican presidential voting contests. 

The former United Nations Ambassador has pledged to stay in the race at least through Super Tuesday this week, when 16 states will vote. But Trump has a commanding lead according to opinion polls in nearly all of those states.

Trump won the most delegates in the early-voting states in January and February and is posied to rack up more delegates on Super Tuesday.

The candidate competing to clinch the nomination for their party has to win a certain number of delegates to become the nominee to appear on the general election ballot.

In the case of the Republican nomination, a candidate needs to secure 1,215 delegates. In DC, Haley won 62.% of the vote, while Trump won 33.2% of the vote. Because Haley won more than half of the votes, she won all 19 delegates at stake.

Republicans in Washington reject Trump

"It’s not surprising that Republicans closest to Washington dysfunction are rejecting Donald Trump and all his chaos," Haley campaign spokesperson Olivia Perez-Cubas said in a statement.

Washington is one of the most heavily Democratic jurisdictions in the nation, with only about 23,000 registered Republicans in the city.

The capital's moderate set of Republicans, many of whom work in politics, are vastly different from those in other states. They believed that Washington could represent Haley's best chance to win a primary.

Trump’s campaign issued a statement shortly after Haley’s victory sarcastically congratulating her on being named “Queen of the Swamp by the lobbyists and DC insiders that want to protect the failed status quo.”