Plodding across frigid New Hampshire ahead of Tuesday’s primary, Nikki Haley offered the state’s proudly freethinking voters a tantalizing proposal: choose her and save America from the presidential rematch seemingly nobody wants.
“Seventy per cent of Americans have said they don’t want to see a Donald Trump-Joe Biden rematch,” Haley exclaimed on Sunday, drawing head nods and murmurs of agreement from attendees packed into a middle school library in Derry. Haley leaned in: “Do we really want to have two presidential candidates in their 80s?”
Biden, the 81-year-old Democratic president, is coasting to his party’s nomination and Trump, the 77-year-old former president, is marching toward the Republican one as the field narrows and he consolidates support from across the party. But Haley, who celebrated her 52nd birthday hopscotching the state on Saturday, insisted there was a different – viable – path.
Haley, the former “Tea Party governor” of South Carolina who served as Trump’s first United Nations ambassador, has staked her presidential aspirations on a strong showing in the first-in-the-nation primary.
“New Hampshire is do-or-die for Nikki Haley,” said Mike Dennehy, a veteran Republican strategist in New Hampshire who worked on John McCain’s winning presidential primary campaigns in the state in 2000 and 2008 and is unaffiliated. “She needs to go all in and speak specifically to independent voters who want change in this country.”
Trump demolished his rivals in the Iowa caucuses. Haley finished third, behind the Florida governor, Ron DeSantis, who dropped out of the race on Sunday and threw his support behind Trump, the latest sign of Republicans closing ranks around the former president.
A Suffolk University/Boston Globe/NBC10 Boston daily tracking poll of New Hampshire voters on Monday had Trump ahead of Haley by double digits, 57% to 38%, with his lead ticking slightly higher in recent days.
A competitive night in the Granite state, she hopes, will deliver enough momentum to vault her campaign into her home state of South Carolina, which holds the south’s first presidential primary next month.
The secretary of state is predicting record turnout for the Republican primary. And unlike in Iowa, where arctic temperatures likely dampened turnout, Tuesday’s forecast in New Hampshire is several degrees above freezing, or, as locals joke, “shorts weather”.
High turnout is expected to favor Haley, who is relying on outsized support from the nearly 40% of registered voters who do not belong to a political party and can choose to participate in either primary. New Hampshire’s famously freethinking independents have long injected a degree of unpredictability into the state’s contest, setting it apart from socially conservative Iowa.
Haley’s best chance of wresting the nomination from Trump may depend on voters like Marie Mulroy, 76, a self-described political moderate from Manchester who despises Trump and voted for Biden in 2020.
“I’m sick of it,” Mulroy said. “Two incumbents. Two lame ducks. I’m tired of the forced choices.” On Tuesday, she’ll choose a Republican ballot and vote for the candidate she has seen on the campaign trail 12 times and believes could be the nation’s first female president.
Though Mulroy disagrees with Haley on some social issues, particularly abortion, she is impressed by Haley’s approach to foreign policy and the federal debt. Importantly, Mulroy added, she was confident that if Haley were the Republican nominee and lost the election, she would concede. “We won’t have a January 6 with her,” Mulroy said.
Haley will also need support from conservative voters like Erin Williams of Newmarket. Williams supported Trump in 2020 but says it’s time to usher in a younger generation of leaders. Drawn to Haley’s “energy and no-nonsense approach”, Williams cringed at the possibility of a Biden-Trump repeat.
“I don’t even want to think about that,” she said after Haley’s Sunday night rally at a high school in Exeter.
‘One fella and one lady’
On Sunday, just two days before voters go to the polls, DeSantis’s departure set the stage for the one-on-one showdown with Trump in New Hampshire that Haley has been seeking.
Moments after DeSantis announced his departure Haley shared the news with the mix of patrons and supporters gathered at Brown’s Lobster Pound on New Hampshire’s seacoast.
“It’s now one fella and one lady left,” she said, sending the crowd into a frenzy of cheers and applause. “May the best woman win.”
Haley has invested heavily in New Hampshire, where Trump is potentially more vulnerable in the highly educated, less religious state. Deep-pocketed allies have helped knock doors and troll Trump on her behalf.
SFA Fund Inc, a Haley aligned Super Pac, taunted Trump with mobile billboards outside one of his rallies this week. A spokesperson for the group said the ads were targeting “Trump supporters who are tired of losing”.
Americans for Prosperity Action, the political network backed by the conservative billionaire Charles Koch, has contacted more than 210,000 voters in the state since endorsing Haley in November, said Greg Moore, the group’s New Hampshire director.
In a briefing with reporters, he said that those conversations made it clear that, true to form in a state known for “breaking late”, many voters were still making up their minds.
“Some of the narrative is that it’s all moderates for Haley and all conservatives for Trump. I know that’s not true,” Moore said. “She is pulling from both conservatives and moderates.”
A Monmouth poll released on Monday found that the number of registered independents who planned to take a Republican ballot has increased from 52% in November to 63%, suggesting a “measurable influx of Democratic-leaning independents” in Tuesday’s primary.
Haley is walking a fine line in icy New Hampshire, chasing both independent voters who despise Trump and conservatives who voted for him but are open to an alternative.
The effort has earned her the backing of New Hampshire’s popular Republican governor, Chris Sununu, who has escorted her around the state. On Sunday, Haley won the endorsement of the Union-Leader, a state newspaper which praised her as a candidate who could “run circles around the dinosaurs from the last two administrations, backwards and in heels”.
“She has the difficult task of trying to reach out to two very different parts of the electorate,” said Dante Scala, a professor of political science and international affairs at the University of New Hampshire. “There’s a real chasm.”
In stops around the state, Haley has played up her conservative credentials and hawkish foreign policy, rebutting Trump’s attacks on her, with vows to crack down on the southern border, stand up to China and never raise taxes.
Early in her 2024 campaign, Haley stepped gingerly around the topic of her former boss. But with Trump holding firmly to his lead in New Hampshire – and several of her would-be supporters in the state clamoring for more – Haley began to confront him head-on.
On the eve of Tuesday’s contest, she questioned Trump’s mental acuity, accused him of spreading “lies” about her record, berating his relationship with dictators and slamming his support from “Washington insiders”.
Yet she continues to sidestep questions about Trump’s web of legal troubles, which have only hardened the extraordinary loyalty he inspires from the Republican base. As president, she said she would pardon Trump if he’s convicted but not preemptively. Separately, she has committed to supporting the Republican nominee.
One of her campaign’s most consistent knocks on Trump is that he’s bad for Republicans. During his time in office, the party lost the House, Senate and White House during his time in office. They also repeatedly lost New Hampshire in the general election. Even then, she has left some of the sharpest attacks to her allies.
“I am tired of losing,” Sununu, his voice hoarse from days of campaigning, told a crowd in Exeter. “I’m tired of losers. And I’m sure as hell tired of Donald Trump.”
‘The sound of a two-person race’
Trump hopes to extinguish Haley’s path with a decisive victory on Tuesday before the race turns to an even friendlier contest in Nevada.
“We need big margins,” Trump said at a rally in Manchester.
A memo by the Trump campaign argued that Haley “must win” in New Hampshire. If she doesn’t, it said, she had two choices: suspend her campaign and endorse Trump or prepare to be “absolutely DEMOLISHED and EMBARASSED [sic] in her home state of South Carolina”.
Haley has vowed to ride on. Her campaign scheduled a rally in South Carolina on Wednesday, 24 hours after polls close in New Hampshire.
Part of Haley’s pitch is that she is more electable than the former president. She frequently points to polling that shows her beating Biden in a hypothetical matchup. But there is a creeping sense that the race for the Republican nomination is a foregone conclusion no matter what happens in New Hampshire.
In Manchester, Carter Crumley, 60, a retired engineer and registered independent, said Haley had “a lot of great qualities” but felt she didn’t have a chance. He plans to vote for Trump.
“You don’t just want to waste a vote because you like someone,” he said. “You want them to be electable.”
Haley is embracing her status as an underdog, reminding voters that she’d been underestimated and counted out for much of her career only to prove the “fellas” wrong: besting a 30-year Republican incumbent to win a seat in the state legislature and surging past a field of more prominent Republicans when she ran for governor in 2010.
And unlike Trump’s rowdy rallies, Haley has been doing the time-honored work of retail politics that New Hampshire voters expect – and demand – of their candidates. In recent days, she has answered interrogatories at Mary Ann’s diner in Amherst, tossed back a Guinness at the Peddler’s Daughter Irish Bar in Nashua before zipping to Chick-fil-A in the governor’s red mustang.
At a seafood restaurant in Epping, Haley dropped down to sign a drawing made for her by five-year-old Cora. The girl’s mother, who gave only her first name, Jessica, said her daughter was drawn to Haley because she was the only woman in the stack of campaign literature flooding their mailbox.
As for herself, she had hoped to support the former Arkansas governor, Asa Hutchinson, who dropped out of the presidential race after his anti-Trump candidacy failed to break through. Now, she said she will follow Hutchinson’s lead and support Haley.
In a sign of the times, protesters have disrupted multiple Haley’s events in recent days. As supporters booed, Haley quieted the crowd to say that she is always “happy to see a protester” because her husband, who is deployed, and other armed service members are serving to protect their right to free speech. It is one of her strongest applause lines.
An electric crowd filled a high school gymnasium in Exeter for Haley’s final campaign stop on Sunday. Her campaign shot T-shirts into the audience. A young supporter danced on stage.
“Can you hear that sound?” Haley asked as she began her remarks. “That’s the sound of a two-person race.”
But it was Judy Sheindlin, the straight-talking television arbiter known and loved by American viewers as Judge Judy, who delivered Haley’s closing argument.
“Please, New Hampshire. Use your brains and your heart,” Sheindlin said. “Bring her home on Tuesday.”
David Smith contributed reporting.
