While Haley called on Trump to earn Republicans' votes, Mitch McConnell suggested that he already has. "It is abundantly clear that former President Trump has earned the requisite support of Republican voters to be our nominee for President of the United States," McConnell said in a statement. The rest was pretty standard endorsement fare, going on to tout Trump's accomplishments on tax reform and judicial appointments, and criticizing Biden.

It's an undramatic end to the minor drama over whether the soon-departing majority leader would endorse Trump, with whom he's undoubtedly had a rocky relationship. In the end, McConnell waited until just after Trump's final major opponent dropped out to fall in line. With one of the last major (potential) party holdouts in his corner, the general election train is in full swing for Trump.

—Tia Yang, 538

According to the latest numbers from our colleagues at ABC News, Trump has 1,051 of the 1,215 delegates he needs to mathematically clinch the Republican nomination for president. Haley's withdrawal from the race puts him on track to reach that magic number next Tuesday, March 12. A total of 199 delegates will be allocated between now and then, and presumably Trump will win all or almost all of them.

—Nathaniel Rakich, 538

Haley took the stage in a bright red dress and in front of a row of American flags just after 10 a.m. from South Carolina, and announced she was suspending her presidential campaign. She began with a retrospective of the start of her campaign, and reiterated her conservative principles, including a low national debt, a small federal government and the need to promote democracy worldwide by standing by America's allies. With that, the final Trump challenger is out of the race, and Trump is the presumptive nominee, a fact Haley acknowledged.

Like most major candidates who ran for the Republican nomination, other than Trump, Haley had previously signed the RNC's pledge to support the eventual nominee, but she's distanced herself from that pledge a bit recently. Haley didn't endorse Trump this morning, but she did congratulate him, while slightly criticizing the way that he's run his campaign. "We must turn away from the darkness of hatred and division," she said. She went on to say that Trump needed to bring people into his cause, saying, "It is now up to Donald Trump to earn the vote of those in our party and beyond it." Haley has noted in previous speeches that she's captured a sizable portion of the vote in some states, even winning Washington, D.C., and Vermont, signaling that some Republican voters are dissatisfied with the former president as a choice for the future.

In the end, as Meredith noted, she made a somewhat rare reference to the historic nature of her campaign. She's the first Republican woman win any state's nominating contest, and she noted that her mother, a first-generation immigrant, had gotten to vote for her for president in South Carolina. She directed her final lines, quoting from the Book of Joshua, to women and girls who had watched her campaign.

—Monica Potts, 538

Back in late January, we wondered if the 2024 Republican presidential primary might be the shortest in modern history. But because Haley continued to contest the race until Super Tuesday, the competitive period of this year's GOP contest ended up falling short of setting any records. Still, it was undoubtedly on the quick side, historically.

The 2024 Republican race lasted 52 days from Iowa through today, during which time all states and the District of Columbia held 25 contests. The March 6 effective end date puts it just behind the record earliest end of a nomination season (March 3 in the 2004 Democratic contest) and the number of state-level elections (19 in the 2000 Democratic race). Nonetheless, going back to the 1976 election cycle, this year's Republican campaign was much shorter than the median number of competitive days (85 days), state-level contests (39) and end date (April 9).

To be clear, measuring the effective end date of a nomination race's competitive period is not always cut and dry, although it was this time around. We based our approach on political scientist Caitlin Jewitt's work on presidential primary competition, which classified a candidate as their party's presumptive nominee either when all viable opponents have dropped out or when they clinch a delegate majority from the results of primaries and caucuses. In Trump's case, Haley was his last viable opponent.

—Geoffrey Skelley, 538