Supporters of Donald Trump slammed his Republican rival, former United Nations Ambassador Nikki Haley, after she refused to drop out of the race despite losing to the former president in the New Hampshire Republican primary election.
As the polls closed in the Granite State at 8 p.m., the Associated Press (AP) called the race instantly, with 19 percent of the votes tallied. Trump, with 54.3 percent, defeated Haley, who received 44.7 percent, according to the outlet’s projections. Despite losing to the former president, Haley refused to suspend her campaign, saying, “This race is far from over.”
Haley’s perseverance seemed to anger some of Trump’s supporters, who took to social media to blast the MAGA leader’s lone rival.
Trump has long been the GOP front-runner in the polls, which also suggested that he would have no issue winning last week’s Iowa caucuses, where he was the overwhelming victor. While New Hampshire’s first-in-the-nation primary was expected to be a closer race, Trump was still predicted to come out on top.
Republican presidential candidate and former President Donald Trump, left, on Tuesday takes the stage for a primary night victory speech in Nashua, New Hampshire, while GOP presidential hopeful and former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley, right, strikes an optimistic tone despite her loss while speaking in Concord, New Hampshire. Chip Somodevilla, Brandon Bell/Getty
Newsweek reached out via email on Tuesday night to representatives for Haley and Trump for comment.
Despite earning his second victory, the former president appeared agitated as he assailed Haley in his victory speech in Nashua, New Hampshire.
“Who the hell was the imposter that went up on the stage before and claimed a victory?” Trump said, also accusing her of “doing a speech like she won” the state.
Haley, in a speech shortly after the race was called in Trump’s favor, acknowledged the former president’s victory but remained defiant, pledging to stay in the race and questioning Trump’s mental fitness.
“He thinks he’d do better [on a mental test] than me. Maybe he would, maybe he wouldn’t. But if he thinks that, then he should have no problem standing on a debate stage with me,” Haley said.
Haley, who served as governor of South Carolina, said voters in her home state “don’t want a coronation” of the Republican primary.
“The political class is falling all over themselves, saying this race is over. I have news for all of them. New Hampshire is first in the nation—it is not the last in the nation,” Haley said.
Trump’s allies demanded that Haley call it quits and pledge loyalty to the former president, while sticking to the path of former GOP candidates Florida Governor Ron DeSantis and entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy after they exited the race.
Representative Byron Donalds, a Florida Republican, posted on X, formerly Twitter, that New Hampshire was Haley’s “best chance” to win a primary election.
“Tonight was a BIG night for President Trump,” Donalds said in the post. New Hampshire was Nikki Haley’s best chance to win a state & she’s already down nearly DOUBLE DIGITS. NV, SC & FL also will not go well for her. This thing is OVER & we ALL know it.”
Conservative commentator Charlie Kirk said Haley staying in the race is helping Democratic President Joe Biden.
“There is no path for Nikki to be the nominee. There is a path to slow down Trump and help Biden. That is what she is doing by remaining in this race,” Kirk, founder of Turning Point USA, wrote on X.
Former Trump adviser Stephen Miller accused Haley of having Democrats vote for her in New Hampshire.
“Nikki Haley getting Democrats to vote in the Republican primary—and still losing by a substantial margin—only magnifies the severity and totality of her loss. (Only 47% of NH GOP primary voters were Republicans),” Miller posted on X.
The former president’s eldest son, Donald Trump Jr., also accused Haley of working with Democrats to try to secure a win.
“Nikki Haley’s swamp money and dirty tricks (teaming up with the Democrats) were no match for the great MAGA patriots in New Hampshire. We love you New Hampshire,” Trump Jr. wrote in an X post.
Nikki Haley’s swamp money and dirty tricks (teaming up with the Democrats) were no match for the great MAGA patriots in New Hampshire.
MANCHESTER, N.H. — On the surface, this year’s primary has proceeded as usual.
Candidates spoke to packed rooms, with the cleverest booking spaces just smaller than the expected turnout to stoke the excitement. Presidential candidates dropped by the Red Arrow Diner here, including former President Donald Trump and former United Nations Ambassador Nikki Haley. The media descended on Dixville Notch in the far northern part of the state to cover midnight voting. (Haley swept it, winning all six votes.) And local TV stations played a seemingly endless loop of attack ads.
Yet the run-up to the Jan. 23 voting also offered signs that New Hampshire is slipping from its long-standing position as king of the presidential primaries. During three reporting trips to the state — in October, December and January — PolitiFact was not the only mediaoutlet to notice:
The Republican front-runner, Trump, came to the state only sporadically, mainly for big rallies and largely eschewing the politicking New Hampshire is famous for, while skipping events that every other candidate attended, such as the First in the Nation Summit in October.
Haley, fresh off a disappointing third-place finish in Iowa, rejected a long-planned televised New Hampshire debate, even though the state’s primary was considered a must-win for her.
After taking heat for her answer to a question on the Civil War, Haley went for several days without answering questions from New Hampshire voters, who are known for their political knowledge and inquisitiveness.
Immediately after the Iowa caucuses, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis bypassed New Hampshire and flew to South Carolina. He ended up holding only a fewevents in New Hampshire before dropping out of the presidential race two days before the primary.
On the Democratic side, the national party, at the urging of President Joe Biden, took away New Hampshire’s first-in-the-nation status for his party, handing it instead to South Carolina. This meant New Hampshire, required by law to have the nation’s first Democratic primary, did so Jan. 23, but it did not distribute Democratic delegates. Because of the shake-up, Biden never campaigned in the state, and backers were left to promote a write-in campaign.
By Jan. 21, two days before the primary, the GOP field had narrowed to only two major candidates, far fewer than in the past. In the last contested GOP primary in 2016, five candidates won at least double-digit-percentage shares of the vote, and in 2020, five Democrats secured at least 8% of the vote.
“Fewer candidates, fewer events, fewer opportunities for regular citizens to engage with candidates about their real lives — I’m not nostalgic about the past, but I do think the primary as we knew it, that served the nation well for decades, has changed,” said Fergus Cullen, a former state Republican Party chairman and now a Dover city councilor. “More than ever (this year), New Hampshire was just a set and voters were extras.”
Kathleen Sullivan, a longtime Democratic activist in Manchester, agreed. “It’s like watching bowling pins fall. There is not that much excitement and energy.” St. Anselm College, which was supposed to host a debate until Haley canceled, “was as dead as a doornail” over the final weekend before voting, Sullivan said.
Keri Thompson, who teaches at Emerson College and regularly travels to early caucus and primary states with her students, called the vibe this year in New Hampshire “disappointing.”
“I’ve been in New Hampshire with students the last few election cycles and it’s been a lot more exciting,” Thompson said at a Haley rally at a high school in Exeter. “It feels very tame.”
The Red Arrow Diner in Manchester, New Hampshire, has been a traditional stop for politicians to meet voters before the state’s primary. (Matthew Crowley/PolitiFact)
New Hampshire voters noticed, too.
“I blame Trump for this,” said Robert McCowen of Hampton Falls after attending a Haley rally in Exeter. “Trump should have been in on the first debate and going on. Defend your record. To quote — I think it was (former GOP primary candidate) Chris Christie — he is a coward. He will not back up what he did.”
At an elementary school voting site in Manchester, voter Scott Gonzales said that although he cast his ballot for Biden in 2020, he was disappointed that the Republican candidates did not debate. A planned Jan. 18 debate hosted by ABC and WMUR, the state’s only local TV station and a PolitiFact partner, was scrapped when Haley said she would debate only Trump or Biden. A planned Jan. 21 CNN debate was also canceled.
“They should be debating,” Gonzales said. “If you want to get people’s vote, you should see the differences they have when they talk to each other.”
A relic of the 2020 New Hampshire primary in WMUR-TV’s green room. The 2024 version will be more sparse. (Louis Jacobson/PolitiFact)
Snubbing WMUR was “a big deal,” said Michael Graham, managing editor of New Hampshire Journal, a website that covers the primary extensively.
“As the only New Hampshire TV station, it’s viewed as the community bulletin board,” Graham said. “Plenty of people have the attitude that if it didn’t happen on WMUR, it didn’t happen.”
Other media outlets were left in the cold, too, often facing challenges getting into public events for Haley and other candidates, The Boston Globe reported.
PolitiFact attended various candidates’ appearances in Exeter, Hampton, Henniker, Manchester, Peterborough and Rochester in the week leading up to the primary, but our attempts to attend Trump rallies in Atkinson, Concord, Laconia, Manchester and Rochester were rejected. (We fact-checked Trump anyway, thanks to livestreams.)
Democratic presidential candidate Dean Phillips addresses voters at an event in Manchester, N.H., on Jan. 18, 2024. (Louis Jacobson/PolitiFact)
On the Democratic side, Minnesota Rep. Dean Phillips — Biden’s long-shot challenger in the Jan. 23 nondelegate-awarding primary — was an unexpected beneficiary of the Republican primary’s dwindling hold on the state. Phillips “drew a bit of media attention at his campaign events this week because many national reporters were milling around Manchester with nothing else to do,” Semafor wrote. (We were among the outlets that covered Phillips.)
The longer-term question for Democrats is whether the party will give New Hampshire prominence again. Along with the first caucus state, Iowa, New Hampshire has declined in relevance for many Democratic officials because of demographics: Both states have a far greater share of white residents than the nation as a whole, and even more so compared with the Democratic Party’s electorate.
A few inches of snow didn’t stop New Hampshire residents, but candidates ignoring norms for the First in the Nation primary state irked many voters. (Louis Jacobson/PolitiFact)
Fans of the old-school New Hampshire primary look with hope to 2028, when the presidential contest won’t include any incumbents.
Early 2028 Democratic contenders, including Rep. Ro Khanna of California and Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, have made it a point to visit the state, even five years in advance, said Christopher Galdieri, a St. Anselm College political scientist.
PolitiFact Copy Chief Matthew Crowley and Staff Writer Maria Ramirez Uribe contributed to this article.
HENNIKER, N.H. — When Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis dropped his presidential bid, he returned to his day job in Tallahassee, where the Republican-controlled Legislature is deciding what to do with his wish list and the scope of the state budget.
Both on the presidential campaign trail and back in Florida, DeSantis leaned heavily into touting his stewardship of his home state. In both his State of the State address and one of his last New Hampshire appearances, DeSantis delivered the same talking point about the state’s lean-machine state government.
“Florida state government (has the) lowest number of state employees per capita in the country,” DeSantis told a CNN town hall audience Jan. 16 at New England College.
Florida’s small state workforce long predates DeSantis; his predecessor and fellow Republican, now-Sen. Rick Scott, also bragged about the state’s low per capita ratio of government workers.
DeSantis’ office didn’t answer an inquiry from PolitiFact, but the statement appears to stem from an annual report by the Florida Department of Management Services, a state agency handling state employee workforce matters.
Other statistical analyses, published by independent groups that factor in local government employees, show that Florida has a low ratio of state workers per capita compared with most states, but not the lowest.
State report backs up DeSantis
The Florida agency’s report — which covers July 2021 to June 2022— used a few different measures of state government employment and compared them with the state’s population. (Florida’s current population is 22.6 million.)
One metric used the total of full-time and part-time employees, which amounted to 164,829 positions in 2022. Per capita, Florida had 96 state government workers per 10,000 residents, which ranked as the nation’s lowest, ahead of Nevada, Illinois, Texas and Arizona. The national average was 198 state government workers per 10,000 residents, the report found.
The agency also calculated the ratio using full-time equivalent employees, which converts the part-time workforce into an equivalent number of full-time positions. By this measure, too, Florida had the lowest ratio, with 82 state government employees per 10,000 residents. The national average was 164 workers per 10,000 residents.
An independent assessment looks a bit different
However, if you count both state and local government employees, Florida doesn’t stand alone. Some states with low state government payrolls may be able to shift duties to local governments, effectively reducing the number of workers that show up in the state employee column. This appears to be the case in Florida.
The American Legislative Exchange Council, which works with mostly Republican state legislators to pass conservative legislation, makes similar annual calculations as the Florida agency, but using state and local public employees per 10,000 population.
In the group’s most recent State Economic Competitiveness Index, Florida ranked third-lowest nationally, behind Nevada and Arizona. Florida had just less than 409 state and local employees per 10,000 population.
In recent iterations of the index, Florida has been close to the national low ranking, but never the lowest. Every year since 2016 — DeSantis’ entire tenure as governor — Florida has ranked third from the bottom, behind Nevada and Arizona.
Howard Frank, a public policy and administration professor at Florida International University, said lack of a state income tax is one likely reason for Florida’s small ratio of state government workers. Four of the 10 states with the lowest ratios in the Florida agency study have no state income tax: Florida, Nevada, Texas and Tennessee.
Compared with some states, Florida has aggressively sought to privatize state government functions, Frank said, noting the state’s 1996 move to break up the Department of Health and Rehabilitative Services. This meant the department’s nearly 25,000 employees fell off the government’s rolls virtually overnight.
The downsides of having a low ratio
Although DeSantis points to the metric with pride, having a low ratio of government workers has drawbacks.
For instance, Florida agencies often struggle with employee shortages that have resulted in high turnover rates and overwhelming departments with ballooning caseloads.
The shortages have even posed safety threats in state prisons, according to reporting by the Tampa Bay Times. The state was short thousands of correctional officers, the newspaper reported, and at one point had to rely on the Florida National Guard to keep order in prisons.
In October 2022, 28 of 29 state agencies had percentages of vacant positions in the double digits, according to a response to a Tampa Bay Times public records request. These vacancies were in such crucial departments as Education, State, Elder Affairs, Veterans Affairs and the Agency for Persons with Disabilities.
Florida’s rapid population growth in recent years — the state has grown by 4.7% in just the past three years alone — has meant not only more residents demanding services but also higher housing prices in what is generally a lower-wage state.
“The bigger picture may suggest a state that is becoming unaffordable for its ‘natives,’ regardless of government employment,” Frank said.
Our ruling
DeSantis said Florida has the “lowest number of state employees per capita in the country.”
A Florida agency’s recent report found the state had the fewest state government employees per capita of the 50 states, by two separate measures of employee counts. This trend predates DeSantis’ governorship.
When state government workers are combined with local government workers, as an independent group has calculated, Florida generally ranks low but isn’t quite the lowest.
The statement is accurate but needs additional information. We rate his claim Mostly True.
The last time Joe Biden ran in the New Hampshire primary he didn’t stick around to see the results.
For the state’s 2024 primary, his name isn’t even on the ballot.
Back in 2020 he was a supposed frontrunner struggling to look like one, fresh off a sluggish performance in the 2020 Iowa caucuses. He asked New Hampshire voters to help him flip the narrative and deliver him a comeback. He snarked back at critics, belittled a younger challenger and called one woman “a lying, dog-faced pony soldier” at a campaign event.
Then he skipped his own campaign party, headed to South Carolina, and finished a distant fifth in New Hampshire’s primary, faring worse than the former mayor of a midsized Midwestern city.
Why isn’t Biden on the 2024 New Hampshire primary ballot?
Almost four years later, Mr. Biden and national Democrats have helped create a situation where the president’s name won’t even appear on New Hampshire 2024 primary ballot. He is instead limited to only being a write-in option while a younger congressman from his own party tries to replace him as the presumptive Democratic nominee, citing fears the incumbent could lose to the likely Republican nominee, former President Donald Trump, in the general election.
Mr. Biden’s move to ignore New Hampshire’s primary — making him the first incumbent president in more than a half century to not file in the state’s early voting contest — is far from an ideal situation for a candidate facing questions about his age and political standing.
“It just sets up an incumbent president for a potential embarrassment,” said Steve Duprey, a former Republican National Committeeman from New Hampshire who supported Mr. Biden in the 2020 general election but is backing former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley in this year’s GOP primary.
Who is on the ballot for the 2024 New Hampshire primary?
Determined New England Democrats are leading a write-in campaign to help Mr. Biden in Tuesday’s primary against Minnesota Rep. Dean Phillips and author Marianne Williamson, the two leading candidates whose names are actually on the New Hampshire Democratic primary ballot.
Although longstanding New Hampshire law means the state has to hold the first presidential primary, Mr. Biden and the Democratic National Committee tried to change that after he became president.
Their plans called for the first primary to be held in South Carolina, the more diverse southern state that gave Mr. Biden his first 2020 primary win and revived his White House run. Iowa was jettisoned from the first caucus slot, and New Hampshire was told it could remain an early voting state but would be moved down to sharing its primary day with Nevada.
“It is really hard for us to continue to tell Black and Brown people that you are the core of our base, but the first two states are two of the whitest states in America,” said Michael Blake, a former DNC vice chair and Obama White House aide.
New Hampshire refused to budge and defied the DNC, costing them national clout and leading Mr. Biden’s campaign to swear off the state’s primary.
Mr. Biden’s 2024 reelection campaign did not comment when asked about the New Hampshire primary. That silence has meant the president’s New Hampshire allies have had to fill the void and call attention to Mr. Biden’s record on infrastructure, gun safety and the environment. Some well-known out-of-state Democrats have helped with the cause, even though DNC officials wrote in a recent letter that the party primary New Hampshire is holding “is meaningless.”
“The one thing I have heard from Democrats all over the state is, if there has ever been an election when we need to be united, it is this election coming up in November,” said Jim Demers, a leader of the write-in campaign. “Division is Donald Trump’s best friend.”
What does Biden’s absence on the ballot mean for the primary election?
The contest in New Hampshire is already presenting a storm of contradictions and confusion over what it could signify and how much it matters. The Biden campaign’s silence, and the DNC’s dismissiveness, reflects the sense that the contest doesn’t mean much to them.
But for Mr. Biden’s allies who know the state well and are hoping to try and keep the state’s primary at the front of the line four years from now, supporting the president by writing him in is framed as being critical.
A day before the primary, New Hampshire Democratic Sen. Maggie Hassan told reporters that “the DNC made a terrible decision not to have New Hampshire go first.”
“We care about our country in New Hampshire,” said Hassan, who is supporting Mr. Biden. “We care about democracy in New Hampshire. And we know what the stakes are here. We know Donald Trump is going to be the Republican nominee. And we know the threat that that poses to our democracy.”
When Mr. Biden ran for president during the 1988 campaign cycle, he dropped out after only a few months. In 2008, he quit after a lackluster finish in Iowa but went on to be picked as Barack Obama’s vice president.
Following the two failed presidential runs, Mr. Biden entered the 2020 race as the frontrunner.
But New Hampshire never treated him like one.
His campaign events ranged from relatively well attended to troublingly small at times. He wandered during his speeches, sometimes keeping things so short that it was almost as if there hadn’t been any event at all — or went long and rambled on.
Surrogates made stronger pitches for Mr. Biden than the man himself did. He worked the rope line like a professional however, talking to voters in a way that resonated far better than when he tried to win over a whole room.
Despite his early struggles, Mr. Biden went on to become his party’s standard bearer in the 2020 general election. And on the same day New Hampshire GOP Gov. Chris Sununu was re-elected by more than 30 points, Mr. Biden won the state by around seven points.
New Hampshire isn’t thought of as an important swing state, but it remains one in essence. Sununu has served as the state’s Republican governor for seven years and its state House and Senate are both controlled by the GOP. Al Gore lost the state in the 2000 election, but had he won New Hampshire, he would have become president instead of George W. Bush. And in 2016, Trump lost New Hampshire to former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton by less than 1 point.
Mr. Biden’s absence from the New Hampshire primary does not impact his ability to be the Democrat’s presidential nominee in this fall’s general election, yet the risk that he could lose the White House for Democrats haunts his 2024 run.
He has beaten Trump before. But the prospect of the former president returning to power after he attempted to overturn the 2020 election is a dynamic that can both swell support for Mr. Biden or trouble his detractors.
“Joe Biden, who I supported last time, in my view, is going to deliver us to Trump the sequel,” Andrew Yang, who ran as a Democrat in New Hampshire’s 2020 presidential primary, said while campaigning for Phillips.
The president also hasn’t made himself a vocal presence in New Hampshire lately. He’s only appeared in the state a few times since becoming president, though cabinet officials have traveled to New Hampshire over the last year. And at 81, he’s already the oldest ever sitting president.
Mr. Biden’s rejection of the New Hampshire primary isn’t sitting well with some Democrats in the state. Mackenzie Murphy, who was the New Hampshire state director for California Rep. Eric Swalwell’s presidential campaign in 2019, expressed mixed feelings ahead of writing Mr. Biden’s name on her ballot but acknowledged that she feels he has done great work as president.
“It speaks to the people of New Hampshire when Mr. Biden did not make an effort to come here to actually put his name on the ballot,” Murphy said.
New Hampshire has a tendency to humble candidates. And while the past isn’t always prologue, history has set a benchmark.
In the 1968 New Hampshire primary, sitting president Lyndon Johnson was put forward only as a write-in option as he faced opposition to the Vietnam War fury within his own party.
Johnson narrowly overcame a challenge from Minnesota Democratic Sen. Eugene McCarthy in the kind of performance that was a win on paper but a loss by any political standard.
Over half a century later, the incumbent president, struggling in the polls, has limited himself to only being a write-in option in the New Hampshire primary. His most vocal challenger is a Midwestern congressman urging generational change, eager to call to mind what happened the last time a Minnesotan took a stand against a sitting president from his own party.
“Democrats have a chance this time to wake up from this nightmare before it’s too late,” said Phillips, who has stressed a determination to keep Democrats from the upset loss they suffered to Trump in 2016.
Despite the heavy investments Phillips has put into his New Hampshire run, a strong showing against Mr. Biden appears to be a longshot. And even if Phillips manages to surprise in the state, the rest of the primary calendar is geared towards giving the president an easy path to the Democratic nomination.
Large-scale write-in-campaigns are a notoriously difficult political endeavor, however. And the reality is for Mr. Biden to win in New Hampshire on Tuesday, he will likely have to rely on some of the same voters who sided against him during the 2020 primary four years ago to write in his name this time.
“He’s done a lot for this state, and I think he was hurt,” Bill Shaheen, a Democratic National Committeeman in New Hampshire who supports the president, said about Mr. Biden’s last primary finish in the state.
It was a hard loss. Mr. Biden is human like the rest of us and no one is Superman, Shaheen said, predicting a better outcome for the president this time around.
“We don’t hold grudges by the way,” said Shaheen, who is married to the state’s senior U.S. senator. “Like Hillary Clinton, you can win one time and then lose to Bernie Sanders the next. There’s no free passes in New Hampshire.”
Jacob Rosen and Allison Novelo contributed to this report.
Hunter Woodall is a political editorial producer for CBS News. He covered the 2020 New Hampshire primary for The Associated Press and has also worked as a Kansas statehouse reporter for The Kansas City Star and the Washington correspondent for Minnesota’s Star Tribune.
As he stood on a frigid New Hampshire street corner on Saturday morning, Jim Demers was trying to persuade me that the fate of the republic hinges on today’s presidential primary—specifically, whether more people write “Joe Biden” on their ballot than fill in the bubble next to the names of his Democratic challengers. “This is an election like we’ve never seen before. This is one where democracy is on the ballot,” Demers, a lobbyist and former state representative, told me. “This is bigger than New Hampshire. This is about the future of America.”
It all sounded a bit overwrought. The Democratic Party has declared New Hampshire’s primary “meaningless,” and no delegates will be awarded based on the outcome. Democracy might be on the ballot, but the sitting president and the party’s all-but-certain nominee is not. Biden declined to file for the election or campaign in the state because of last year’s decision by the Democratic National Committee to ditch Iowa and New Hampshire as the earliest-voting states in favor of South Carolina. New Hampshire insisted on holding its first-in-the-nation primary anyway.
To Demers and a small but energetic group of party activists, the fight over the primary calendar is beside the point. As they see it, the results of today’s vote carry outsize significance—both to Biden’s viability in the fall and to the future of New Hampshire’s century-old tradition as a presidential proving ground. They are the organizers of the “Write-In Biden” campaign, a statewide grassroots effort aimed at offering the president a show of support—even if symbolic—to help him avoid an embarrassing result that could deepen Democratic worries about his electoral standing.
Given the unusual nature of the primary, the line between victory and humiliation remains murky. But Biden’s backers want to see him easily hold off Representative Dean Phillips and Marianne Williamson. “We want to make sure that headlines the day after the election are ‘He Wasn’t Even on the Ballot, and He Won. That’s Amazing!’” Donna McCay, a volunteer who was holding a Write-In Biden sign in Hampton, New Hampshire, told me.
Spending $70,000 over the past three months, Demers and a small group of operatives have mailed postcards, taken out ads, and issued yard signs instructing Democratic and independent voters how to cast a ballot for Biden. (It’s pretty simple: Fill in the oval next to “Write-In” and scrawl in “Joe Biden,” or even just “Biden.”) They’ve received help from a parade of local and national Democrats seeking to boost their own profiles in New Hampshire, but none officially from the Biden campaign.
Over the weekend, dozens of New Hampshire Democrats packed house parties and braved near-zero wind chills to stand outside and hold up signs alerting drivers to the write-in option. Many of those standing in the cold were almost as old as the two candidates likely to face off in the general election.
Polls in New Hampshire have shown a big advantage for Biden over Phillips and Williamson, but few people know what to make of them—incumbent presidents generally don’t rely on supporters to wage a write-in campaign on their behalf. One Democrat involved with the effort told me they wanted to see Biden crack 50 percent, which would match Donald Trump’s showing in Iowa, where the former president spent millions of dollars campaigning.
New Hampshire is fertile ground for a campaign like this. Its population is among the nation’s most highly educated and civically engaged—candidates in New Hampshire like to joke that “politics is the state sport.” It also helps that Biden is not a particularly hard name to spell.
Yet the write-in campaign is battling a number of obstacles in addition to Biden’s challengers. Anti-Trump independent voters, who can participate in either primary, must decide whether to back Biden or cast their ballot for Nikki Haley in the GOP contest. Biden allies argue that Haley’s chances of overtaking Trump are already shot. “You can try to game this process, but Biden is the only person who can beat Donald Trump,” John Carty, a Biden backer, told me. “A vote for Haley here might improve her showing in New Hampshire, but will it improve her chances of being the nominee? Most of us tend to think not.”
Then there is the lingering anger over Biden’s abandonment of the state. When the DNC told the state’s party chair that its primary would be “non-binding,” “meaningless,” and “detrimental,” New Hampshire’s Republican attorney general sent the national party a cease-and-desist letter.
Biden’s decision to stand by the DNC and skip the primary risks alienating constituents in a swing state whose four electoral votes could matter in a close presidential race. “It was a stupid political decision, equivalent to shooting yourself in the foot,” Colin Van Ostern, the Democratic nominee for governor in 2016, told me. “But I also vote for people I don’t agree with 100 percent plenty of times. And to me, it’s not complicated: Our democracy is at risk, and he is the one who can beat Trump.” (Both the Biden campaign and the DNC declined to comment.)
Phillips has tried to capitalize on Biden’s absence, occasionally to the point of hyperbole. “What was done to all of you is one of the most egregious affronts to democracy I’ve ever known in my lifetime,” Phillips told a packed audience at a restaurant in Hampton on Sunday, drawing applause. “A write-in vote for Joe Biden is a vote for Donald Trump, because he will lose to him.” As he spoke, a family in the front row held up posters distributed by Phillips’s campaign with an image of Biden on one side under the word MISSING. The other side read, Joe wrote you off. Why write him in?
The showing for Phillips—more than 100 people crowded in, shoulder to shoulder—suggests that his campaign has some momentum. But the turnout might reflect as much political tourism as electoral support: Of the first dozen or so people I encountered, I found residents of Massachusetts and Connecticut, visitors from Denmark, and a student group from Macon, Georgia, but not a single registered New Hampshire voter.
If nothing else, the Biden write-in campaign has succeeded in generating publicity for its cause; plenty of reporters and cameras trailed its volunteers and surrogates throughout the weekend. The risk, of course, is that a strong result for Phillips—a close second, say, or more than 40 percent of the vote—would seem more meaningful than it might have otherwise, making his candidacy more of a genuine threat to Biden.
But the president’s backers were growing more confident as the election neared. Despite his snub of New Hampshire, general-election polling in the state has shown Biden ahead of Trump and in far better shape than in other battlegrounds. Some Democrats are hoping that a decisive win for the presidential non-candidate will put New Hampshire back in the national party’s good graces and perhaps even restore its first-in-the-nation position for 2028. “If Joe Biden has a good win on a write-in effort, that gives New Hampshire a whole new story to tell,” Demers said.
As we spoke, more than 30 volunteers were holding up signs by the road. Some drivers honked in solidarity; others jeered in opposition. Representative Ro Khanna of California, a Biden surrogate, came over with donuts and kibitzed with the volunteers and reporters. Compared with the grand tradition of New Hampshire primaries, the display was enthusiastic but tiny.
If New Hampshire’s show of support was so crucial, I asked Demers, shouldn’t Biden be here? “I just want the president to be here next fall,” he replied.
Donald Trump shares an essential trait with the voters of New Hampshire: a craving for flattery and affirmation.
Residents here are accustomed to parades of candidates trekking up every four years to tell them how sacred their first-in-the-nation primary is, how discerning their famously “independent” and “contrarian” voters are. Politicians strain endlessly to convey how vital New Hampshire is to the process.
But things feel precarious and a bit upside down here these days—more final whimper than first salvo.
I landed in Manchester on Friday afternoon and found the place almost numb with abandonment. Elm Street, the “main drag” of New Hampshire’s biggest city, which is usually good for a few candidate sightings and media scrums, was quiet. Once the marquee stopover on the presidential tour, this original colony felt neglected in the final weekend before today’s primary, and well past its glory.
“Where is everyone?” I asked the woman next to me at the counter of the downtown Red Arrow Diner on Friday. The century-old greasy spoon on Lowell Street has served as a landmark for visiting political hacks and as a reliable backdrop for candidate photo ops.
“Ryan Binkley was just here,” my stool-neighbor informed me. I Googled Ryan Binkley. He is a pastor from Texas who says he is running for president because God called him to. Who is Ryan Binkley? the yard signs say (good enough to finish fifth in Iowa, apparently).
You can see why the once-pandered-to populace of the Granite State might feel unloved. Last year, the Democrats—led by the current president of the United States—dumped New Hampshire in favor of South Carolina as the party’s official first primary. The scorned New England mainstay scheduled its primary anyway, even though the Democratic National Committee said it would not recognize the results or award any delegates derived from this unholy action. President Joe Biden has not campaigned in the state, and his name is not on the ballot.
Now Republicans keep dropping out, leaving the GOP race down to Trump, who routed the field in Iowa last week, and the former United Nations ambassador Nikki Haley (plus Binkley and a few others). Campaign events were still occurring in New Hampshire in this final week, but far fewer than usual; Trump, and to a lesser extent Haley, drew most of the attention and the biggest crowds.
The former president seemed both rambling and serene. “When I fly over a blue state, two days later, I get a subpoena,” Trump said at the start of a rally in Concord on Friday night. Technically, New Hampshire is itself a blue state, or at least it has been in the past several presidential elections; Trump lost it in both 2016 and 2020. But things were feeling quite safe here for Trump in the primary. Recent polls showed him with double-digit leads over Haley and Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, who was still in the race heading into the weekend but barely bothered with New Hampshire.
“DeSantis, God bless him. He’s a remainder at this point,” New Hampshire Governor Chris Sununu, a Republican, told me at a Haley event in a Milford restaurant on Friday afternoon. “What happened to this guy?” Trump asked of DeSantis a few hours later in Concord. “One of the great self-destructions I think I’ve ever witnessed.”
At the very least, DeSantis understood that the prevailing dynamic of the Republican Party over the past eight years has stayed intact. “You can be the most worthless Republican in America,” he said in one of his final campaign stops in Iowa, discharging a few nuggets of clarity as he approached the end. “If you kiss the ring, he’ll say you are wonderful.” The governor quit the race on Sunday and, yes, kissed the ring on the way out, endorsing Trump.
This followed a week’s procession of white flags. Former Trump “opponents” kept endorsing the former president—Vivek Ramaswamy last Monday; the governor of North Dakota, whoever that was, the day before; Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina on Friday, joining Trump in Concord. By Sunday, New Hampshire felt like the last stand of a battle that had never started.
Throughout the weekend, Trump tried to assure his supporters that he knows how important the state is, even though he would almost certainly rather spend his time elsewhere; he described New Hampshire as “a drug-infested den” in a 2017 phone call with the then-president of Mexico. He has been holding nightly rallies across the state since Friday, telling everyone how special they are, and the admiration is of course mutual.
“I’m thrilled to be back in the home of first-in-the-nation,” Trump said at his Concord rally. Any candidate who comes to New Hampshire cannot utter those four words—first in the nation—enough. And Trump did, four times in the space of a few sentences.
“You know who kept you first in the nation?” Trump asked the crowd.
“Trump!” he said, uttering his own name along with some in the audience.
“But I just want to tell you, you’re first in the nation,” he said. “You’re always going be first in the nation!”
For her part, Haley has been intent on convincing everyone that New Hampshire is still a race at all. A two-person race, to be precise. “Between Nikki and Trump,” Sununu repeated, like a fleece-wearing parrot, as he accompanied Haley across the state, four or five stops a day. He and Haley kept contrasting this particular two-person race with the one most Americans are dreading, between Trump and Biden.
“People don’t want two 80-year-olds running for president,” Haley said in a brief press conference Friday at a diner in Amherst (Trump is 77; Biden is 81). She devoted much of the session to scolding the media for not properly correcting the false things Trump says about her. “Y’all need to call him out,” she urged. She also theorized that although 70 percent of Americans don’t want to be subjected to a Trump-Biden rematch, “70 percent of the media does want a rematch.”
This is dubious, for what it’s worth. If anything, “the media” wanted a competitive primary campaign—some genuine uncertainty and drama, and a reason beyond obligation to keep tuning in.
Like Trump, Dean Phillips is happy to fill the vacuum of love for New Hampshire. “We’ve got to practice democracy,” the Democratic representative from Minnesota said at a Nashua senior center on Saturday afternoon. Phillips, a wealthy former gelato baron, is waging a long-shot campaign against Biden—actually, a write-in version of Biden, who, because he’s not on the ballot, can be voted for only that way by New Hampshirites willing to overlook the president’s ghosting of their state.
“Why write in Biden?” Phillips asked at the event, if Biden is “writing off New Hampshire?” Polite chuckles, maybe a moan or two. Phillips also suggested that Biden was “taking the Granite State for granted.” (Dean Phillips: The Dad Joke candidate!)
Back in Concord, Trump had gone even further in conveying his admiration for his host and its traditions—reaching all the way back to the Civil War. Uh-oh. Haley did this last month, and it didn’t go well. But Trump—student of history that he is—had an important lesson to share. “They said the people from New Hampshire were very tough fighters,” Trump said. “Did you know that?” (No one seemed to.) He said he had read that somewhere. “History,” he continued. “Very tough fighters.”
“You won a lot of battles. That was a nasty war.”
He later proceeded with a strange flurry of comments about Haley, ridiculing her failure to protect the U.S. Capitol on January 6—wait, did he mean Nancy Pelosi, then the speaker of the House? Maybe, but Trump kept saying Haley’s name, over and over.
“They,” he said, don’t want to talk about how Haley was in charge of security on January 6.
He also said that Haley—this time he apparently did mean Nikki Haley, the one he’s running against—was not “capable,” “tough,” “smart,” or “respected” enough to be president and handle Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping, or Kim Jong Un. “Very fine people,” Trump called them.
In a different time, this would be the kind of weird front-runner face-plant that could turn a New Hampshire primary on its head. Haley did her best to keep Trump’s bizarre comments aloft over the weekend. But mostly they were met with the usual resignation of a party with little will to fight, drifting toward the inevitable.
MANCHESTER, N.H. – After a few sporadic campaign events in New Hampshire in the days leading up to the state’s Jan. 23 primary, Gov. Ron DeSantis dropped out of the presidential race, saying there was “no clear path to victory” for him.
DeSantis said he was sticking to his commitment to back the Republican Party’s nominee and endorsed former President Donald Trump’s campaign, saying that the majority of Republican primary voters want to give Trump another chance.
“I have had disagreements with Donald Trump, such as on the coronavirus pandemic and his elevation of Anthony Fauci,” DeSantis said. “Trump is superior to the current incumbent Joe Biden.”
In recent days, the DeSantis campaign repeatedly changed his schedule, leaving it unclear whether he would return to New Hampshire or drop out. On Saturday, he alerted the media and supporters that he would hold a meet-and-greet at a Manchester restaurant Sunday evening, only to cancel it a few hours before. Television crews and photographers were beginning to set up at The Farm Bar and Grille restaurant shortly before DeSantis posted his exit video on X, which started with, “Greetings from Florida.”
“We left it all out on the field,” DeSantis said Jan. 21. “If there was anything I could do to produce a favorable outcome, more campaign stops, more interviews I would do it.”
DeSantis’ dropping out left Trump and his onetime ally and former United Nations Ambassador Nikki Haley as the remaining main Republican candidates seeking to oust President Joe Biden from office.
Haley, after hearing the news about DeSantis dropping out, told supporters at a campaign event that DeSantis had been a “good governor,” and said the race is now “one fella and one lady left.”
“Do you want more of the same or do you want something new?” she said.
Trump spent the last few days before New Hampshire’s election in front of thousands of loyal fans at boisterous rallies across the state and generally ignoring local media. Haley sought to persuade voters at smaller events. They should ditch the “chaos” of Trump, she told media outlets, and put her, a younger person with business bookkeeping experience, in the White House.
Trump sticks to entertaining his supporters
Republican presidential candidate former President Donald Trump gesturing to the crowd Jan. 20, 2024, after speaking during a campaign event in Manchester, N.H. (AP)
As the polling front-runner, Trump dedicated his attention to friendly and loyal fans who ignored frigid temperatures and crowded into his rallies across the state. Hundreds of Trump supporters started to line up more than five hours before his rally in Manchester, standing outdoors in single-digit-degree weather while vendors hawked MAGA T-shirts and hats.
He skipped an invite from WMUR-TV, the local ABC affiliate and PolitiFact partner, to take questions during their Sunday “Closeup” morning show. Haley appeared on the show and answered policy questions related to taxes and Social Security.
Trump’s rallies serve dual purposes: attack his primary rivals, Democrats and Biden while entertaining his supporters.
Trump at his rallies repeated many inaccurate and misleading talking points about his own electoral record and his rivals’ stance on border security and Social Security retirement age eligibility.
Haley intensifies attacks against Trump, uses data to characterize the U.S. in disarray
Republican presidential candidate and former United Nations Ambassador Nikki Haley meets voters Jan. 17, 2024, after a rally in Rochester, N.H. (Louis Jacobson/PolitiFact)
Haley’s more low-key events aimed to win support from Republican and undeclared voters, many who were listening to her stump speech for the first time.
“How many of you are hearing me for the first time?” Haley asked voters in Peterborough, New Hampshire. “All of you. Well, it’s great to see you. I’m glad you’re here.”
Haley has focused on in-person events in New Hampshire after forgoing New Hampshire debates scheduled by WMUR and CNN. During her speeches in cities and small towns across the Granite State, Haley paints a picture of a country in disarray, and her leadership as its hope for success.
“It’s a tough time right now in the country,” Haley said in Peterborough before sharing grim statistics about students’ low proficiency in math and reading, illegal border crossings under Biden and fentanyl’s dangers.
One voter at Haley’s Peterborough rally told PolitiFact that she wanted Haley to win the primary, but would back Trump if Haley didn’t succeed.
Politics at the Red Arrow diner and midnight voting
Donald Trump greets supporters April 27, 2023, at the Red Arrow Diner after his rally in Manchester, N.H. (AP)
Democrats Dean Phillips, D-Minn., and Marianne Williamson also were on the ground vying for attention, but drawing little compared with the Republicans.
Phillips has been a regular at the Red Arrow Diner, a longtime must-stop for national politicians and candidates, including Haley. When politicians sit at the counter, the diner installs a plaque showing who sat there — including Sens. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, and Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., who ran in past cycles, and Miami Mayor Francis Suarez, who dropped out of the 2024 Republican race months ago. In 2023, Chris Christie left a note for Asa Hutchinson on a check at the diner “Asa — I warmed them up for you. I owe you a call. Will get you this weekend. The oatmeal was great! Chris Christie.”
If one word could sum up Nikki Haley’s ambivalent challenge to Donald Trump in the New Hampshire Republican primary, that word might be: if.
If as used by New Hampshire’s Republican Governor Chris Sununu, Haley’s most prominent supporter in the state, when he concluded his energetic introduction of her at a large rally in Manchester on Friday night. “If you think Donald Trump is a threat to democracy, don’t sit on your couch and not participate in democracy,” Sununu insisted. “You gotta go vote, right?”
In that formulation, if served as more shield than sword. By framing his argument that way, Sununu clearly intended to appeal to the voters who do consider Trump a threat to democracy, but without endorsing that sentiment himself.
That slight hesitation about fully confronting the GOP’s fearsome front-runner has been the consistent attitude of Haley’s campaign. Haley, the former South Carolina governor, has shown impressive political skills and steely discipline to outmaneuver a large field of men and emerge as the most viable remaining alternative to Trump. She has displayed fortitude in soldiering on against Trump as a procession of Republican elected officials has endorsed him for the nomination over the past few weeks. And beginning with her speech last Monday night after the Iowa caucus, Haley has turned up the volume on her own criticism of Trump, yoking him to Joe Biden as too old and divisive. “With me, you’ll get no drama, no vendettas, no vengeance,” she told the crowd on Friday night.
But in this possibly decisive week of the GOP race, Haley has made clear that she will go so far and no further in criticizing or challenging Trump, just as Sununu did with his telltale if. Tuesday’s New Hampshire primary realistically represents the last chance for Haley to stop, or even slow, the former president’s march to his third consecutive GOP nomination. If Trump wins, especially by a big margin, he will be on a glide path to becoming the nominee. Nothing Haley has done this week reflects the gravity of that moment. “She’s got to swing for the fences, and so far she’s just throwing out bunts,” Mark McKinnon, who served as the chief media adviser to George W. Bush’s two presidential campaigns, told me.
Many New Hampshire political leaders resistant to Trump fear that Haley has not done nearly enough to generate a surge of turnout among independent voters—known locally as “undeclared voters.” Mike Dennehy, a longtime GOP strategist in New Hampshire, says that Haley’s messaging to these undeclared voters has lacked enough urgency to generate the brushfire of excitement she needs among them. “In my opinion, she’s not doing what she needs to do to connect with independent voters,” Dennehy told me. Haley, he believes, should be framing the choice to New Hampshire voters much more starkly, telling them: “It’s the end of the road here; I’m your last chance to stop a Trump-Biden rematch.” Haley fleetingly raised that argument in her remarks following the Iowa caucus, but it has receded as she’s reverted toward her standard stump speech in New Hampshire.
McKinnon and Dennehy know something about New Hampshire presidential campaigns that catch fire among independents. Dennehy was the New Hampshire campaign manager for then–Senator John McCain when he stunned George W. Bush, McKinnon’s candidate, in the 2000 New Hampshire primary. Bush arrived after a big win in the kickoff Iowa caucus and held a commanding lead in national polls. On the day of that New Hampshire primary, I had lunch with McKinnon; Matthew Dowd, the campaign’s voter-targeting guru; and Karl Rove, Bush’s chief strategist. They were relaxed, confident, and starting to kick around ideas for how they would contest the general election, while I scribbled in a notebook. Then, halfway through the lunch, Rove took a call, abruptly left the table, and never came back. The reason for his sudden summons back to campaign headquarters became apparent a few hours later: McCain that night beat Bush among independent voters by three to one, exit polls found, and won the state overall by nearly 20 percentage points.
In retrospect, McKinnon said, the Bush campaign should have seen what was coming. “McCain was definitely on fire; you could feel it on the ground,” he told me. For months McCain had held lengthy town halls across the state, answering questions for hours and then driving to the next event on the “Straight Talk Express” campaign bus, taking questions from reporters for hours more. He was provocative, funny, unfiltered, and unafraid of challenging Republican orthodoxy. “He was entirely authentic, entirely accessible; he was campaigning like he was running for governor of New Hampshire, steely, granite-like,” McKinnon recalled.
Like McCain, Haley has burrowed into New Hampshire with months of grassroots events. But the similarities stop there. Haley’s town halls are much more structured and controlled; sometimes she doesn’t even take questions from the audience. Her interactions with reporters are limited and often stilted. And she made a choice this week to reject debates by ABC and CNN unless Trump also participated, which forced the sponsors to cancel the sessions. Some Republican strategists are sympathetic to her decision not to appear again with Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, but more of the people I spoke with believe that by withdrawing, she forfeited the biggest platforms she would have had this week to drive a message to New Hampshire voters. “It’s about pulling as many independents out to vote as you can, and you can’t get to those independents if you don’t go on places like CNN and WMUR,” Dennehy said, referring to the powerful local New Hampshire television station that would have co-hosted one of the debates with ABC.
Haley is pushing a tougher message against Trump than she was before Iowa. When a reporter this weekend asked her what her closing message was to New Hampshire voters, Haley replied, “Americans deserve better than what the options are. You’ve got Biden and Trump both distracted with investigations, both distracted with other things that aren’t about how to make Americans’ lives safer and better.” She says flatly that Trump is lying about her record and that America should not have to choose between two roughly 80-year-old candidates. After Trump at a Friday-night rally confused Haley with former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi during an extended monologue about the January 6 riot, Haley on Saturday responded by questioning his mental acuity: “When you’re dealing with the pressures of a presidency, we can’t have someone else that we question whether they’re mentally fit to do this.” And she’s been willing to differentiate from Trump on issues where she can reaffirm positions that were considered conservative in the Ronald Reagan–era GOP. That includes criticizing Trump for running up the federal deficit, not taking a tough enough stand against China, and playing “footsy,” as she termed it, with dictators such as Russia’s Vladimir Putin.
But Haley has muffled her case against Trump by more often refusing to confront him or by even defending him. When asked by CNN’s Dana Bash last week about Trump being held liable for sexual abuse in the defamation case brought against him by writer E. Jean Carroll, Haley implausibly replied, “I haven’t paid attention to his cases.” Last Friday, reporters asked Haley whether she saw racism in Trump’s multiplying jabs at her immigrant ancestry, which included reposting an inaccurate “birther”-like claim that she was ineligible to run because her parents had not been U.S. citizens when she was born. Her response could not have been more tepid: “I’ll let people decide what he means by his attacks.”
Haley has also continued to insist that, if elected, she would pardon Trump should he be convicted in any of the cases against him. Hours before the Iowa caucuses last Monday, she told a Fox News anchor that she would vote for Trump over Biden “any day of the week.” She’s closing her New Hampshire campaign with an unusual three-minute ad centered on a testimonial to her compassion and commitment from the mother of Otto Warmbier, the American college student who died in North Korean captivity; but nowhere does the ad criticize Trump for his coziness with the North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un. In Haley’s stump speech to New Hampshire voters, she still declares that chaos “follows” Trump “rightly or wrongly,” as he if is potentially just an innocent bystander to all the firestorms that he ignites with his words and actions. (Haley does Olympic-level contortions to avoid expressing any value judgments about Trump.) On Saturday, she even tempered her criticism of Trump’s confusion the night before when she reassuringly told a Fox interviewer, “I’m not saying that this is a Joe Biden situation.” To truly threaten a front-runner as commanding as Trump, “you’ve just got to throw caution to the wind,” McKinnon said. “And it’s the opposite with Haley: The wind throws caution to her.”
The evidence from Iowa suggests that Haley’s cautious approach has left her with a coalition too narrow to make a strong stand. With Trump bashing her in ads and his stump speech as “liberal” and “weak,” particularly on issues relating to immigration, Haley predictably ran poorly in Iowa among the most conservative voters, according to the entrance poll conducted by Edison Research for a consortium of media organizations.
But although she performed better among more moderate elements of the GOP coalition—particularly those with four-year college degrees—she failed to inspire enough of them to come out and vote on a cold night. In Iowa, Haley won her highest share of the vote in the most populous urban and suburban counties. But the total number of votes she won in the big counties was only a fraction of the total that had come out for Marco Rubio, a candidate who appealed to a similar coalition, in the 2016 GOP caucus. Max Rust, a data analyst at The Wall Street Journal, told me in an email that his unpublished analysis found that Iowa turnout fell more compared with 2016 in better educated and more affluent areas than in rural and blue-collar places. “I was really surprised how much Haley underperformed in the suburbs,” David Kochel, a longtime GOP strategist, told me.
With Trump holding a steady double-digit lead over her in the New Hampshire tracking polls, Haley faces the prospect of a similar squeeze in Tuesday’s primary. Trump’s ferocious attacks on her from the right leave her with little opportunity to crack his support among staunch conservatives. And her much more carefully nuanced criticism of him leaves her facing long odds of catalyzing the massive turnout among independent voters she’d need to generate any momentum moving forward. The Suffolk University/Boston Globe/NBC-10 tracking poll released Saturday showed Haley only running even with Trump among undeclared voters, signaling that she’s failing to draw into the primary the large center-left contingent most hostile to the former president. (At the same time, Trump continued to lead her in the survey by two-to-one among Republicans.)
“There’s always been this ambivalence that emanates from her about Trump,” Dante Scala, a political scientist at the University of New Hampshire, told me. Scala, the author of Stormy Weather, a book about the New Hampshire primary, said that he understands that Haley must maneuver carefully, because “ultimately, if you want to win the nomination of this party, you are going to have to win over voters who like Trump.” But, Scala added, “I have to think [her] ambivalence rubs off on voters” and may discourage many of those most critical of Trump from bothering to turn out. (Sununu hasn’t helped that problem by publicly insisting that Haley may be hoping only for a strong second-place finish, and repeatedly declaring that he would vote for Trump if he wins the nomination.)
In my interactions with voters at a few Haley events here, she seems to inspire more respect than enthusiasm. Some are drawn to her contained and cerebral style, and to her message of generational change. “I was thinking if we give her a chance, we will get an opportunity to go in a new direction,” George Jobel, a marketing manager from Concord, told me after Haley’s Manchester rally. But for many others, Haley is simply the last option to register a vote of disapproval about Trump. Dan O’Donnell, a realtor and undeclared voter from Hollis, is planning to cast his ballot for the former South Carolina governor. But he told me that when friends ask him if he’s voting for Haley, “I tell them, ‘No, I’m going to vote against Trump.’” In the latest Suffolk tracking poll, most independent voters backing Haley likewise said that they were motivated primarily to vote against Trump, rather than for her.
In fairness to Haley, it’s not like anyone else this year—or, for that matter, in 2016—cracked the code of beating Trump in a Republican primary. DeSantis tried the opposite of her strategy, by running to Trump’s right and hoping that moderates would eventually consolidate around him if he was the only alternative remaining; that approach has left DeSantis in an even weaker position than Haley, barely surviving in the race. And toppling a front-runner is never easy: Even after McCain’s New Hampshire upset in 2000, he won only a few more states, and Bush recovered to resoundingly win the nomination.
But McCain at least went down swinging, indelibly imprinting a maverick image that allowed him to come back and win the GOP nomination eight years later. In his own way, even DeSantis seems liberated by the prospect of defeat, publicly declaring that Trump cares more about personal loyalty than the good of the country or even the party, and accurately complaining that Fox and other conservative media outlets function as a “Praetorian guard” suppressing criticism of the former president.
Haley, by contrast, still seems here to be weighing every word, as if she expects she will eventually need to defend it from the witness box in some Stalin-esque future MAGA-loyalty trial. If Haley thought she had a better chance to win, maybe she and her allies would dispense with the word if when describing Trump’s potential threat to American democracy. But her reluctance to fully confront Trump probably betrays what she really thinks about the odds that she can wrest control of the party from him this year. In this break-the-glass moment for Trump’s Republican opponents, Haley has made clear she will do no more than tap lightly on the window.
MANCHESTER, N.H. — Rep. Dean Phillips, D-Minn., has been campaigning aggressively in New Hampshire, hoping to convince Democratic voters that a new face is needed to keep the party in control of the White House in 2024.
In a series of events in the state on Jan. 18, Phillips, who is challenging incumbent Joe Biden for the Democratic presidential nomination, traveled with entrepreneur and 2020 Democratic presidential candidate-turned-independent Andrew Yang. The two discussed the promise, and potential pitfalls, of artificial intelligence.
In a packed room at the University of New Hampshire, Manchester, Phillips said AI “can be beautiful, but it also has great risks. It’s going to disenfranchise this economy. It’s going to be disruptive in ways that we can actually anticipate.”
Philips compared relative inaction on AI policy now with inaction on climate change a century ago. “We had 100 years to prepare for climate change,” Phillips said. “We knew 100 years ago what would happen by burning fossil fuels.”
PolitiFact checked with several academics who have studied the history of climate change science and found that the reality was not so clear cut.
“In principle, the effects of burning fossil fuels were known” by a century ago, “but this was not widely known or recognized,” said Ben Lieberman, a historian at Fitchburg State University and co-author of “Climate Change in Human History: Prehistory to the Present.” Only later in the 20th century did this knowledge begin to amass, Lieberman said.
The first inklings in the scientific community emerged in the 1850s, said John Brooke, an emeritus professor of history at Ohio State University and author of “Climate Change and the Course of Global History: A Rough Journey.” Then, in 1896, the Swedish scientist Svante Arrhenius wrote a paper explaining how industrial carbon dioxide emissions could spur a warming trend that would become known as the greenhouse effect.
So, in theory, the world has had more than a century to prepare for significant climate change, said Joshua P. Howe, an associate professor of history and environmental studies at Reed College and author of “Behind the Curve: Science and the Politics of Global Warming.”
“There was a lot that was still unknown, but if the sentiment was that we have known about this at least in broad terms for a long time, that’s right,” Howe said.
However, other historians cautioned that it took more time for this knowledge to coalesce and gain wide acceptance.
“This was pre-computer, and hypothetical,” Brooke said.
Even after another scientist, Guy Stewart Callendar of England, echoed Arrhenius’ argument in the late 1930s, “he was ignored, because warming was not yet an obvious problem,” Brooke said.
By the 1950s, hard evidence linking carbon burning to climate began to amass, with Charles David Keeling’s measurements of carbon dioxide levels at the Mauna Loa observatory in Hawaii. (Keeling’s students included Al Gore, the future vice president, Democratic presidential nominee and climate change campaigner.) Climate change merited a mention in President Lyndon Johnson’s policy agenda in 1965.
Nevertheless, it took years for the complicated interactions of atmospheric carbon dioxide to increase global temperatures notably. Only when the temperature climb accelerated earnest in the 1970s did scientists and policymakers began paying serious attention, experts said.
PolitiFact Audience Engagement Producer Ellen Hine contributed to this article.
MANCHESTER, N.H. — We’ve hit the halfway mark for PolitiFact’s pre-primaryNew Hampshire trip, and I almost can’t believe it.
Friday was a travel day for most of our team, so Senior Correspondent Louis Jacobson and I had a respite from the breakneck pace we’ve kept for the last few days. We visited WMUR-TV in the morning so Lou could film one more hit there.
Senior Correspondant Louis Jacobson films a segment with our New Hampshire partner, WMUR-TV. (Ellen Hine/PolitiFact)
Friday’s topic was a claim by former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, who said at her Wednesday event in Rochester that former President Donald Trump “proposed when he was president” that “he wanted to raise the gas tax up to 25 cents.” We say that’s Mostly False. Trump expressed lukewarm support for a 25-cent hike to the federal gasoline tax to help pay for infrastructure improvements. But he didn’t formalize the idea or pitch it to the public.
We’ve also checked Haley’s repeated claim that she has a 17-point national polling edge over President Joe Biden and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ False claim that booster shots make a COVID-19 infection more likely.
Lou is heading home after a long week of fact-checking in New Hampshire. (Ellen Hine/PolitiFact)
Lou had a flight home in the afternoon, so we said goodbye outside the station. But I wasn’t by myself in Manchester for too long. Senior Correspondent Amy Sherman and Staff Writer Maria Ramirez Uribe arrived later that evening. They’ll be anchoring our New Hampshire coverage until Tuesday’s election.
Staff Writer Maria Ramirez Uribe, left joined me and Senior Correspondent Amy Sherman on Friday in Manchester., N.H. (Ellen Hine/PolitiFact)
Because Friday was a bit of a slower day, I thought it would be a good idea to slow it down a bit and take a big-picture look at our coverage for 2024.
You might remember that when I told you PolitiFact was traveling to New Hampshire, I also asked for your help. Both in our newsletter and on Instagram, I asked readers a few questions:
How are you feeling about this election year? What issues are on your mind?
What do you find confusing about the 2024 election? What do you want to learn more about?
What do you want to know about PolitiFact or fact-checking in general? Is there anything you don’t understand about our process that you’d like to know more about?
I asked these questions because, as public service journalists, we want to make sure our work is useful to you. Here are some of the answers I received.
You want to know how we find our facts
Readers told me they wanted to know more about how we decide what’s a fact.
“Can you provide a bit more info on how you source facts, verify that what you report is accurate, etc.” one wrote.
An Instagram user asked, “How do you know you’re finding the most reliable sources?”
You can learn more about how we decide which claims to fact-check on our website, but I handed these questions over to Lou to answer.
You care about democracy
Readers shared many different issues they cared about going into 2024: abortion rights, immigration, conflict in the Middle East, housing and LGBTQ+ rights. Many said they wanted more insight into why some voters remain loyal to former President Donald Trump and expressed frustration with the Democratic Party for not having strong enough messaging.
But a running theme through many of the emails and comments I received was concern about the state of democracy.
“Normally I would be looking forward to vote, but with so much misinformation and voters who believe in the lies & BS being spread on the Republican side by the frontrunner, it’s VERY worrisome,” another newsletter reader wrote.
When I asked our Instagram followers to list their top issues for 2024, I got responses such as, “Preserving democracy,” “Ease and safety of voting, proper representation of districts,” and “Civility, respect and protecting democracy.”
“At this time I can honestly say that I am frightened,” one reader told me. “I feel like our democracy is in real trouble! Am I wrong about this?”
Further down in the message, the same reader said, “I like to be informed but feel a sense of burnout from all the ‘noise.’ I really care and have never seen such polarization!”
Helping people be informed participants in democracy is the reason we publish here at PolitiFact. We know it can be hard, sometimes downright exhausting, to try to find accurate information in a sea of rhetoric.
But you’re not in this alone. If you hear something you think sounds suspicious, send it our way at [email protected] so we can investigate it for you.
And if you want to help us disrupt the misdirecting agendas of politicians across the ideological spectrum, share our stories with your friends or family or donate to our nonprofit newsroom.
Some sad news: This will be my last update from New Hampshire, but my teammates who are staying through the election will be sending you updates throughout the weekend. If you’re signed up for PolitiFact Daily, I’ll be back in your inbox sometime next week.
Thanks for coming along on this journey with me, readers! (Ellen Hine/PolitiFact)
As I’ve mentioned before, this is my first time covering a presidential election. This week has been an incredible learning experience, one I will never forget. Thank you so much for joining me on this trip, readers!
A few days away from next week’s critical New Hampshire primary, Nikki Haley is intensifying her criticism of former President Donald Trump and drawing a contrast between their approaches to governing.
The former ambassador to the United Nations is characterizing the nomination contest as a two-person race, and she and her campaign are focused on targeting Trump.
“Trump says things. Americans aren’t stupid to just believe what he says,” Haley told reporters Thursday during a campaign stop in Hollis, New Hampshire. “The reality is — who lost the House for us? Who lost the Senate? Who lost The White House? Donald Trump, Donald Trump, Donald Trump.”
These direct attacks on Trump deviate from Haley’s usual dismissiveness of the former president and have emerged as Haley attempts to close the gap with Trump in New Hampshire.
During campaign stops throughout the Granite State, she’s been urging voters to move past “the political chaos” that follows Trump and consider her as the alternative to his “drama.”
“My style is different (from Trump’s). No vendettas, no trauma, no vengeance. It’s about results,” Haley said in Hollis.
For his part, Trump is swinging harder at Haley, mocking her birth name on Truth Social, referring to her as “Nimbra” and saying “she doesn’t have what it takes.” Haley, born “Nimarata Nikki Randhawa” in South Carolina, goes by her middle name.
At a campaign stop in Amherst on Friday, Haley brushed off Trump’s slur and assured voters the name-calling is just evidence of Trump’s fear.
“I’ll let people decide what he means by his attacks,” Haley said. “What we know is, look, he’s clearly insecure. If he goes and does his temper tantrum, if he’s going and spending millions of dollars on TV, he’s insecure. He knows that something’s wrong. I don’t sit there and worry about whether it’s personal or what he means by the end of the day,” Haley said.
Haley, a former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations and South Carolina governor, made the comments during a CNN town hall at New England College in Henniker, New Hampshire.
CNN moderator Jake Tapper said Haley’s political group, Stand For America, once referred to a previous version of the child tax credit as “no-strings-attached welfare handouts.” After noting these credits “cut child poverty in half,” Tapper asked Haley if she’s against expanding child tax credits to help more low-income families.
“I’m for child care tax credits for everyone. If you’re going do it, do it across the board and make sure that it’s fair,” she said.
Republican presidential candidate and former UN Ambassador Nikki Haley on Thursday speaks during a campaign stop at the historic Robie Country Store in Hooksett, New Hampshire. During a later CNN town hall, Haley discussed what she would do about the child tax credit if she wins the presidency. Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
Haley continued by saying that when evaluating welfare systems, “the goal that I want to look at is what are we doing to lift them up.”
She then spoke of her time as governor, saying she worked to help people on welfare find work with businesses that would train them.
“We moved 35,000 people from welfare to work. We had family parties so that we could celebrate the fact that they were now contributing members of society,” she said.
“Don’t just give handouts. What are you doing to lift them up to? And if you’re going to do tax credits, do it for everybody. Don’t play favorites. Don’t pick winners and losers,” she continued. “That’s not what we do in America.”
The GOP hopeful then described how tax credits could have a negative impact on some Americans.
“When you just throw out a tax credit and say, ‘We’re going give it to these people or give it to these people’—that’s not sustaining anything, that’s actually harming them. Instead, let’s do the harder work and say, ‘What can we do to get them into a better situation?’” Haley said.
CNN’s town hall with Haley took place days before New Hampshire’s Tuesday primary. Her campaign will look to benefit from former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie withdrawing from the GOP race last week.
A CNN poll released on January 9 conducted by the University of New Hampshire (UNH) pointed to how Christie’s followers could help Haley. The poll found Haley had shaved Trump’s lead in the New Hampshire primary race to 7 percentage points. If Haley gains a sizable portion of Christie’s supporters, she may take the win in the state during its January 23 primary.
The CNN/UNH poll found 39 percent of likely Republican primary voters in New Hampshire said they would vote for Trump, compared to 32 percent who support Haley. However, the same poll showed 12 percent of the GOP voters said they would back Christie.
Uncommon Knowledge
Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
It was a great holiday season for lots of fan of marijuana – and only a few Grinches in sight!
The holiday season was great for the cannabis industry. In 2023, Delaware, Ohio, and Minnesota passed recreational marijuana. More than half of U.S. population lives in places where marijuana is legal for recreational use with even more having access to medical marijuana. The holidays are a time of indulgence and spending. Consumers defied expectations for spending in December. Retail sales rose 0.6% in December from November, which was more than analysts expected. The holiday sales confirm marijuana is mainstream by the way the public spent on products.
And in a major culture shift, Gen Z is moving away from alcohol and moving softly toward marijuana. Young adults not in college were even more likely to avoid alcohol. Nearly 30% of this group in 2018 reported that they did not drink beer, wine or spirits. The number was about 24% in 2002.
Decreases in alcohol consumption by Gen Z coincide with an uptick in cannabis use, according to numerous reports. Is this a one-for-one trade in substances? Some signs point that way
Photo by Kindel Media via Pexels
According to BDSA, a leading national data analyst company which covers cannabis, it was an important marijuana sales year. Already, the day before Thanksgiving is a banner year Comparing same 7 holiday days of 2022 to 2023 and they saw an average of a 19% increase year over year. The day before Turkey Day is known as Green Wednesday in the cannabis industry. It is also a large alcohol sales day and is known as Blackout Wednesday or Drinksgiving. But alcohol sales only saw 3.8% rise.
“Christmas is historically a significant holiday for the legal cannabis industry, with the days leading up to Christmas bringing a sizable boost to legal sales. In 2022, the day before Christmas eve (12/23/22) saw the second highest daily sales total of any day that month, with daily sales totaling +38% higher than the daily sales average for December 2022.” shared BDSA.
Edibles saw an even greater boost on the week before Christmas 2023. BDSA reports edible sales on the week before Christmas were +23% higher than the average weekly edible sales total for the month. This is makes sense as gummies are the #1 way people consumer – almost 49% of users say the use have a gummy.
States which started their program (except for NY) did especially well. Marijuana retailers in Michigan sold a whopping $3.06 billion in adult-use and medical products in 2023. There are few Grinches, the Governors of Iowa, Florida and New Hampshire are working hard to block sales and Senator Mitch McConnell is still working to block any national marijuana legalization. And all eyes are on the DEA to see what they are going to do about rescheduling.
Former President Donald Trump continues to attack Nikki Haley’s position on Social Security as he tries to siphon support from her in New Hampshire ahead of the state’s Jan. 23 presidential primary.
“Americans were promised a secure retirement. Nikki Haley’s plan ends that,” a narrator says in a new Trump campaign ad airing in the Granite State. “Haley’s plan cuts Social Security benefits for 82% of Americans.”
The 30-second spot features older people and a clip of Haley, Trump’s former U.N. ambassador, responding to a question about how she would address entitlement programs. “We say the rules have changed,” Haley says in the ad. “We change retirement age to reflect life expectancy. What we do know is 65 is way too low, and we need to increase that.”
A still from Donald Trump’s 2024 campaign ad “Threat from Within.” (Screenshot from YouTube)
We know from a previous fact-check that this excerpt of Haley’s quote is missing context; Haley specified that the rules should change for younger Americans, not current or imminent beneficiaries.
But would her plan, as this new Trump ad claims, cut Social Security benefits for 82% of Americans — or roughly 272 million people?
No. The Trump ad is an extreme exaggeration of how many Americans would be affected by Haley’s plans for Social Security. It would not affect retirees or people nearing retirement.
Trump’s campaign didn’t respond to PolitiFact about its statistic’s source. The ad cites a CNN article that doesn’t support the claim.
The 82% appears to reference a rough estimate of the total Americans eligible for Social Security benefits. (Some people are not included because they receive Social Security disability insurance or are ineligible for Social Security, such as infrequent workers, for example.)
Haley has never advocated cutting all Social Security benefits for everyone currently in that 82%. Trump’s ad gives the false impression that Haley’s plan would end or cut into older Americans’ Social Security retirement. Haley’s more limited plan wouldn’t apply to current beneficiaries or anyone nearing retirement.
Haley has repeatedly said she would support increasing the age for Americans in their 20s, which she explained in the same interview that Trump’s ad misleadingly clipped. “The way we deal with it, is we don’t touch anyone’s retirement or anyone who’s been promised in,” Haley said in the Aug. 24 Bloomberg News interview. “But we go to people like my kids in their 20s, when they’re coming into the system, and we say the rules have changed.”
How the retirement age affects Social Security benefits
The retirement age for collecting full Social Security benefits is 67 for Americans born in 1960 and later and age 65 for people born before.
Americans who choose to collect their benefits early (which they can do at 62) receive smaller monthly payments. This offsets the additional checks they’ll receive over their lifetimes. For example, people who collect Social Security benefits at age 64 instead of 67 receive 80% of their full monthly benefit. People who retire at 62 receive 70% of their full monthly benefit.
Raising the full retirement age means people who retire before the new cutoff would receive smaller benefits, and people who opt to wait for full benefits will have to retire later.
“As the system’s retirement age increases, everyone’s benefits fall a bit, depending on the age you start collecting,” said Richard Johnson, director of the Urban Institute’s program on retirement policy.
It’s not clear what year or age Haley’s proposal would kick in. But based on population estimates from the 2022 U.S. Census, if people ages 25 and older were excluded from a retirement age increase, which is in line with Haley’s pitch, her plan would likely reduce benefits for 26% of Americans alive today — decades from now.
Haley’s proposal ties the increased age requirement to gains in average U.S. life expectancy, which ticked up in 2022 after two years of decreases. (Not everyone is expected to live longer, though — research shows that life expectancy is shorter for people with lower socioeconomic status, — so, raising the retirement age based on that metric would reduce the years they’d receive Social Security benefits.)
The kicker in Trump’s attack
Trump is hitting Haley for a similar position that he once held. In his 2000 book “The America We Deserve,” Trump warned that the Social Security trust fund would run out in decades (which was accurate then and now). He suggested raising the retirement age to 70.
“A firm limit at age seventy makes sense for people now under forty,” Trump wrote. “We’re living longer. We’re working longer. New medicines are extending healthy human life. Besides, how many times will you really want to take that trailer to the Grand Canyon? The way the workweek is going, it will probably be down to about twenty-five hours by then anyway. This is a sacrifice I think we all can make.”
Trump no longer supports raising the retirement age and has vowed he wouldn’t make any cuts to the program. But he hasn’t offered a plan that would keep the Social Security trust fund solvent.
Johnson said that “doing nothing at all” would mean “all beneficiaries, including those with disability benefits, would suffer.”
Gary Burtless, Brookings Institution economist and senior fellow, said Haley’s plan wouldn’t reduce costs until today’s 20-somethings reach their early 60s, so it would have no impact on Social Security’s funding shortfall in the next 10 years, when the reserve fund is expected to be depleted.
Our ruling
A Trump campaign ad claimed Haley’s plan “cuts Social Security benefits for 82% of Americans.”
The number is wrong. Haley’s plan wouldn’t affect current beneficiaries or Americans anywhere close to retiring, let alone 82% of the U.S. population.
While most proposals that call for increasing the retirement age represent a benefit cut for Social Security beneficiaries, Haley’s plan would apply to Americans in their 20s and younger. If people ages 25 and older were excluded from her proposed retirement age increase, that would represent benefit cuts for around 26% of Americans alive today — 40 years from now.
We rate Trump’s claim False.
PolitiFact Copy Chief Matthew Crowley contributed to this report.
Donald Trump’s victory in the Iowa caucus was as dominant as expected, underscoring the exceedingly narrow path available to any of the Republican forces hoping to prevent his third consecutive nomination. And yet, for all Trump’s strength within the party, the results also hinted at some of the risks the GOP will face if it nominates him again.
Based on Trump’s overwhelming lead in the poll conducted of voters on their way into the voting, the cable networks called the contest for Trump before the actual caucus was even completed. It was a fittingly anticlimactic conclusion to a caucus contest whose result all year has never seemed in doubt. In part, that may have been because none of Trump’s rivals offered Iowa voters a fully articulated case against him until Florida Governor Ron DeSantis unleashed more pointed arguments against the front-runner in the final days.
Trump steamrolled over the opposition of the state’s Republican and evangelical Christian leadership to amass by far the largest margin of victory ever in a contested Iowa GOP caucus. He drew strong support across virtually every demographic group—though, in a preview of a continuing general election challenge if he wins the nomination, his vote notably lagged among caucus-goers with at least a four-year college degree.
The results as of late Monday evening showed DeSantis solidifying a small lead over former South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley for a distant second place behind Trump. Even though DeSantis held off Haley, his weak finish after investing so much time and money in the state—and attracting endorsements from local political leaders including Governor Kim Reynolds—likely extinguishes his chances of winning the nomination. That’s true whether he remains in the race, as he pledged on Monday, or drops out in the next few weeks.
Though Haley could not overtake DeSantis here, she has a second chance to establish momentum next week in New Hampshire, where she is running close to Trump in some surveys. But the magnitude of Trump’s Iowa victory shows how far Haley remains from creating a genuine threat to the front-runner. Her support largely remained confined to an archipelago of better-educated, more moderate voters in the state’s largest population centers.
After the Iowa results, “she’ll be the alternative to Donald Trump,” said Douglas Gross, a longtime GOP Iowa activist who supported Haley. Her credible showing “is not because of organization or message, because she didn’t have either. It’s because she’s perceived as the alternative to Trump and the other candidates tried to be Trump.”
Haley, though, clearly signaled her intent to escalate her challenge to Trump as the race moves on to New Hampshire. In an energetic post-caucus speech, she debuted a new line of argument against Trump, linking him to President Joe Biden as an aging symbol of a caustic and divisive past that American voters must transcend. “Our campaign is the last best hope of stopping the Trump-Biden nightmare,” she insisted, in a line of argument likely to dominate her message in the week until New Hampshire votes on January 23.
For Haley, the first challenge may be reversing the gathering sense in the party that Trump is on the verge of wrapping up the contest even as it just begins. The behavior of GOP elected officials in the final days before the caucus may have revealed as much about the state of the race as the result of the first voting itself. Trump in recent days has received a parade of endorsements, including from Utah Senator Mike Lee, who criticized him sharply in 2016, and Florida Senator Marco Rubio, whom Trump mercilessly belittled and mocked when he ran in the 2016 presidential race.
As telling: Reynolds, the most prominent supporter of DeSantis, and New Hampshire Governor Chris Sununu, Haley’s most prominent backer, each declared in separate television interviews just hours before the vote that they would support Trump if he’s the nominee. Haley did the same in an interview on Fox: “I would take Donald Trump over Joe Biden any day of the week,” she told the Fox News Channel host Neil Cavuto on Monday, hours before she unveiled her much tougher message toward the former president Monday night.
Trump himself revealed his confidence in a restrained victory speech Monday night that included rare praise of DeSantis, Haley, and Vivek Ramaswamy, who finished fourth and then dropped out of the race. Trump’s uncharacteristically sedate and conciliatory remarks suggested that he sees the opportunity to force out the others, and consolidate the party, before very long.
Trump’s commanding lead in the vote testified to the depth of his victory. Results from the “entrance poll” of caucus-goers on their way to cast their votes underscored the breadth of his win.
Across every demographic divide in the party, Trump improved over his performance in 2016, when he narrowly lost the state to Texas Senator Ted Cruz. This time, Trump won both men and women comfortably, according to the entrance poll conducted by Edison Research for a consortium of media organizations. He won nearly half of voters in both urban and suburban areas, as well as a majority in rural areas, the poll found.
DeSantis won endorsements from much of the state’s evangelical-Christian leadership, but Trump crushed him among those voters by almost two to one, according to the entrance poll. In 2016, Iowa evangelicals had preferred Cruz to Trump by double digits. Trump on Monday also carried nearly half of voters who were not evangelicals, beating Haley among them by about 20 percentage points. In 2016, Trump managed only a three-percentage-point edge over Rubio among Iowa caucus-goers who were not evangelicals. (In both the 2012 and 2016 Republican presidential primaries, the candidate who won Iowa voters who are not evangelicals ultimately won the nomination.)
Before Trump, the most important dividing line in GOP presidential primaries had been between voters who were and were not evangelical Christians. But on Monday night, as in 2016, Trump reoriented that axis: Education was a far better predictor of support for him than whether a voter identified as an evangelical.
Trump carried two-thirds of the caucus-goers who do not have a four-year college degree, the entrance poll found on Monday night. That was more than twice as much as Trump won among those voters in 2016, when Cruz narrowly beat him among them.
Other findings in the entrance poll also testified to Trump’s success at reshaping the party in his image. The share of caucus-goers who identified as “very conservative” was much higher than in 2016. About two-thirds of those attending the caucuses said they do not believe that President Joe Biden legitimately won the 2020 election. Rural areas that Trump split with Cruz in 2016 broke decisively for him this time.
Yet amid all these signs of strength, the entrance poll offered some clear warning signs for Trump in a potential general election—as did some of the county-level results.
Despite some predictions to the contrary, Trump still faced substantial resistance from college-educated voters, just as he did in 2016. In the entrance poll Monday night, he drew only a little more than one-third of them. That was enough to push Trump safely past Haley, who split the remainder of those voters primarily with DeSantis (each of them won just under three in 10 of them). But compared with the 2016 Iowa result, Trump improved much less among college-educated voters than he did among those without degrees.
Trump’s relative weakness among college-educated voters in the 2016 GOP primary presaged the alienation from him in white-collar suburbs that grew during his presidency. Though Biden’s approval among those voters has declined since 2021, Trump’s modest showing even among the college-educated voters willing to turn out for a GOP caucus likely shows that resistance to him also remains substantial. When the results are tallied, Trump might win all 99 counties in Iowa, an incredible achievement if he manages it. But Trump drew well under his statewide percentage in Polk County, the state’s most populous; in fast-growing Dallas County; and in Story and Johnson, the counties centered on Iowa State University and the University of Iowa. (Johnson is the one county where Trump trails as of now.) Those are all the sorts of places that have moved away from the GOP in the Trump years.
Also noteworthy was voters’ response to an entrance-poll question about whether they would still consider Trump fit for the presidency if he was convicted of a crime. Nearly two-thirds said yes, which speaks to his strength within the Republican Party. But about three in 10 said no, which speaks to possible problems in a general election. That result was consistent with the findings in a wide array of polls that somewhere between one-fifth and one-third of GOP partisans believe that Trump’s actions after the 2020 election were a threat to democracy or illegal. How many of those Republican-leaning voters would ultimately support him will be crucial to his viability if he wins the nomination. On that front, it may be worth filing away that more than four in 10 college graduates who participated in the caucus said they would not view Trump as fit for the presidency if he’s convicted of a crime, the entrance poll found.
Those are problems Trump will need to confront on another day, if he wins the nomination. For now, he has delivered an imposing show of strength within a party that he has reshaped in his belligerent, conspiratorial image. The winter gloom in Iowa may not be any bleaker than the spirits tonight of the dwindling band of those in the GOP hoping to loosen Trump’s iron grip on the party.
The arctic chill that upended the final weekend of the Iowa Republican caucus provided a fitting end to a contest that has seemed frozen in place for months.
This caucus has felt unusually lifeless, not only because former President Donald Trump has maintained an imposing and seemingly unshakable lead in the polls. That advantage was confirmed late Saturday night when the Des Moines Register, NBC, and Mediacom Iowa released their highly anticipated final pre-caucus poll showing Trump at 48 percent and, in a distant battle for second place, Nikki Haley at 20 percent and Ron DeSantis at 16 percent.
The caucus has also lacked energy because Trump’s shrinking field of rivals has never appeared to have the heart for making an all-out case against him. “I think there was actually a decent electorate that had supported Trump in the past but were interested in looking for somebody else,” Douglas Gross, a longtime GOP activist who chaired Mitt Romney’s 2012 campaign in Iowa, told me. But neither DeSantis nor Haley, he adds, found a message that dislodged nearly enough of them from the front-runner. “Trump has run as an incumbent, if you will, and dominated the media so skillfully that it took a lot of the energy out of the race,” Gross said.
In retrospect, the constrictive boundaries for the GOP race were established when the candidates gathered for their first debate last August (without Trump, who has refused to attend any debate). The crucial moment came when Bret Baier, from Fox News Channel, asked the contenders whether they would support Trump as the nominee even if he was convicted of a crime “in a court of law.” All the contenders onstage raised their hand to indicate they would, except for Chris Christie and Asa Hutchinson, two long shots at the periphery of the race. With that declaration, the candidates effectively placed the question of whether Trump is fit to be president again—the most important issue facing Republicans in 2024—out of bounds.
That collective failure led to Christie’s withering moral judgment on the field when he quit the race last week: “Anyone who is unwilling to say that he is unfit to be president of the United States is unfit themselves to be president of the United States.” But even in practical political terms, the choice not to directly address Trump’s fitness left his principal rivals scrambling to find an alternative way to contrast with the front-runner.
Over time, DeSantis has built a coherent critique of Trump, though a very idiosyncratic one. DeSantis runs at Trump from the right, insisting that the man who devised and articulated the “America First” agenda can no longer be trusted to advance it. In his final appearances across Iowa, his CNN debate with Haley last week, and a Fox town hall, DeSantis criticized Trump’s presidential record and 2024 agenda as insufficiently conservative on abortion, LGBTQ rights, federal spending, confronting the bureaucracy, and shutting down the country during the pandemic. He has even accused Trump of failing to deport enough undocumented immigrants and failing to construct enough of his signature border wall.
On issues where politicians in the center or left charge Trump with extremism, DeSantis inverts the accusation: The problem, he argues, is that Trump wasn’t extreme enough. The moment that best encapsulated DeSantis’s approach came in last week’s CNN debate. At one point, the moderators asked him about the claim from Trump’s lawyer that he cannot be prosecuted for any presidential action—including ordering the assassination of a political rival—unless he was first impeached and convicted. DeSantis insisted the problem was that in office, Trump was too restrained in using unilateral presidential authority. He complained that Trump failed to call in the National Guard over the objections of local officials to squelch civil unrest in the Black Lives Matter protests following the 2020 murder of George Floyd. When DeSantis visited campaign volunteers last Friday, he indignantly complained “it’s just not true” that he has gone easy on Trump in these final days. “If you watched the debate,” DeSantis told reporters, “I hit on BLM, not building the wall, the debt, not draining the swamp, Fauci, all those things.”
Perhaps the prospect of impending defeat has concentrated the mind, but DeSantis in his closing trek across Iowa has offered perceptive explanations for why these attacks against Trump have sputtered. One is that Trump stifled the debates by refusing to participate in them. “It’s different for me to just be doing that to a camera versus him being right there,” DeSantis told reporters. “When you have a clash, then you guys have to cover it, and it becomes something that people start to talk about.” The other problem, he maintained, was that conservative media like Fox News act as “a praetorian guard” that suppresses criticism of Trump, even from the right.
Those are compelling observations, but incomplete as an explanation. DeSantis’s larger problem may be that the universe of voters that wants Trumpism but doesn’t think Trump can be relied on to deliver it is much smaller than the Florida governor had hoped. One top Trump adviser told me that the fights Trump engaged in as president make it almost impossible to convince conservatives he’s not really one of them. Bob Vander Plaats, a prominent Iowa evangelical leader who has endorsed DeSantis, likewise told me that amid all of Trump’s battles with the left, it’s easier to try to convince evangelical conservatives that the former president can’t win in November than that he has abandoned their causes.
The analogy I’ve used for DeSantis’s strategy is that Trump is like a Mack truck barreling down the far-right lane of American politics, and that rather than trying to pass in all the space he’s left in the center of the road, DeSantis has tried to squeeze past him on the right shoulder. There’s just not a lot of room there.
Even so, DeSantis’s complaints about Trump look like a closing argument from Perry Mason compared with the muffled, gauzy case that Haley has presented against him. DeSantis’s choice to run to Trump’s right created a vacuum that Haley, largely through effective performances at the early debates, has filled with the elements of the GOP coalition that have always been most dubious of Trump: moderates, suburbanites, college-educated voters. But that isn’t a coalition nearly big enough to win. And she has walked on eggshells in trying to reach beyond that universe to the Republican voters who are generally favorable toward Trump but began the race possibly open to an alternative—what the veteran GOP pollster Whit Ayres calls the “maybe Trump” constituency.
The most notable thing in how Haley talks about Trump is that she almost always avoids value judgments. It’s time for generational change, she will say, or I will be a stronger general-election candidate who will sweep in more Republican candidates up and down the ballot.
At last week’s CNN debate, Haley turned up the dial when she that said of course Trump lost the 2020 election; that January 6 was a “terrible day”; and that Trump’s claims of absolute immunity were “ridiculous.” Those pointed comments probably offered a momentary glimpse of what she actually thinks about him. But in the crucial days before the caucus, Haley has reverted to her careful, values-free dissents. At one town hall conducted over telephone late last week, she said the “hard truths” Republicans had to face were that, although “President Trump was the right president at the right time” and “I agree with a lot of his policies,” the fact remained that “rightly or wrongly, chaos follows him.” Talk about taking off the gloves.
Jennifer Horn, the former Republican Party chair in New Hampshire who has become a fierce Trump critic, told me, “There’s no moral or ethical judgment against Trump from her. From anyone, really, but we’re talking about her. She says chaos follows him ‘rightly or wrongly.’ Who cares? Nobody cares about chaos. That’s not the issue with Trump. He’s crooked; he’s criminal; he incited an insurrection. That’s the case against Trump. And if his so-called strongest opponent won’t make the case against Trump, why should voters?”
Gross, the longtime GOP activist, is supporting Haley, but even he is perplexed by her reluctance to articulate a stronger critique of the front-runner. “I don’t know what her argument is,” Gross told me. “I guess it’s: Get rid of the chaos. She’s got to make a strong case about why she’s the alternative, and it’s got to include some element of judgment.”
The reluctance of DeSantis and Haley to fully confront the former president has created an utterly asymmetrical campaign battlefield because Trump has displayed no hesitation about attacking either of them. The super PAC associated with Trump’s campaign spent months pounding DeSantis on issues including supporting statehood for Puerto Rico and backing cuts in Social Security, and in recent weeks, Trump’s camp has run ads accusing Haley of raising taxes and being weak on immigration. In response, DeSantis and Haley have spent significantly more money attacking each other than criticizing, or even rebutting, Trump. Rob Pyers, an analyst with the nonpartisan California Target Book, has calculated that the principal super PAC supporting Trump has spent $32 million combined in ads against Haley and DeSantis; they have pummeled each other with a combined $38 million in negative ads from the super PACs associated with their campaigns. Meanwhile, the Haley and DeSantis super PACs have spent only a little more than $1 million in ads targeting Trump, who is leading them by as much as 50 points in national polls.
Haley’s sharpest retort to any of Trump’s attacks has been to say he’s misrepresenting her record. During the CNN debate, Haley metronomically touted a website called DeSantislies.com, but if she has a similar page up about Trump, she hasn’t mentioned it. (Her campaign didn’t respond to a query about whether it plans to establish such a site.)
“Calling him a liar right now is her strongest pushback, but I just don’t think GOP voters care about liars,” Horn told me. “If she engaged in a real battle with him for these last days [before New Hampshire], that would be fascinating to see. The fact that she’s not pushing back, the fact that she’s not running the strongest possible campaign as she’s coming down the stretch here, makes me wonder if she is as uncertain of her ability to win as I am.”
Some Republican strategists are sympathetic to this careful approach to Trump, especially from Haley. A former top aide to one of Trump’s main rivals in the 2016 race told me that “nobody has found a message you can put on TV that makes Republicans like Trump less.” Some other veterans of earlier GOP contests believe that Haley and DeSantis were justified in initially trying to eclipse the other and create a one-on-one race with Trump. And for Haley, there’s also at least some argument for preserving her strongest case against Trump for the January 23 New Hampshire primary, where a more moderate electorate may be more receptive than the conservative, heavily evangelical population that usually turns out for the caucus.
“She has to draw much sharper contrasts,” Gross told me. “And to be fair to her, once she gets out of here, maybe she will. What she strikes me as is incredibly disciplined and calculating. So, I do think you’re going to see modulation.”
DeSantis has the most to lose in Iowa, because a poor showing will almost certainly end his campaign, even if he tries to insist otherwise for a few weeks. For Haley, the results aren’t as important because whatever happens here, she will have another opportunity to create momentum in New Hampshire, where polls have shown her rising even as DeSantis craters. Still, if Haley is unable or unwilling to deliver a more persuasive argument against Trump, she too will quickly find herself with no realistic hope of overtaking the front-runner, whose lead in national polls of Republican voters continues to grow. That’s one thing common to winter in both Iowa and New Hampshire: It gets dark early.
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N
ikki Haley was standing a few feet in front of me on a warm December night in New Hampshire. She had just finished a town-hall event at a Manchester ski lodge, from which no snow was visible for miles except the manufactured white stuff coating a sad little hill outside.
Presidential candidates often try to conjure a sense of momentum around their campaign, and Haley’s had been accumulating the key elements: rising poll numbers, crowd sizes, and fundraising sums. Her ascendancy began around Thanksgiving, an unofficial benchmark for when voters supposedly tune in to primary campaigns. Among many of them, the former South Carolina governor and United Nations ambassador had become a source of intrigue: Could she actually win? Or was she merely the latest contender to lead a post–Donald Trump Republican Party that never arrives?
I was in New Hampshire to gauge the extent of this apparent upsurge. Of all the campaign events in the past year—except Trump’s, which occupy their own category—Haley’s have been the most commanding. She has run the best race against Trump out of a motley bunch of Republicans—far better than former Vice President Mike Pence and South Carolina Senator Tim Scott, both long gone; Vivek Ramaswamy, whose yapping provocations gained him early notoriety but grated fast; and especially Florida GovernorRon DeSantis, who squandered his early status as Trump’s main challenger—and massive amounts of cash—by turning out to be a colossal dud of a candidate. (“Like a wounded bird falling from the sky,” Trump said of DeSantis, an overlooked but fascinatingly poetic assessment.)
On this night in Manchester, I watched Haley pound out a stump speech about how, among other things, her main achievement as UN ambassador was to take “the kick-me sign off of our backs.” And how “our kids need to know to love America.” And how she was determined to “humanize” the fractious issue of abortion and, rest assured, “the days of demonizing that issue are over.”
Haley is a gifted political performer, particularly in a certain kind of room. This was one of those, a politely boisterous gathering of a few hundred people, serious and professional, many still dressed for work. She came off as reasonable and solicitous, holding the same authority as she did at the various Trumpless debates she has rated so well in. You can see how Haley could rise to the level she has, the most formidable alternative to Trump or (if you prefer) first among the Republican also-rans.
After completing her set remarks to a standing ovation, Haley took audience questions, greeted a 30-minute lineup of supporters, and satisfied their various selfie and autograph needs, nailing eye contact, small talk, and drive-by rapport. “She understands that kind of customer-service approach,” New Hampshire Governor Chris Sununu raved to me after telling the Manchester crowd that he was endorsing Haley. (“You bet your ass I am!”)
At the end of the night, Sununu stood to Haley’s left as she faced a clot of television cameras and microphones and shouted questions from reporters. She is good at this too—parrying pointed inquiries with self-assurance, then moving on before anyone can really reflect on what she said, or didn’t say.
But Haley’s sturdy pronouncements belie a certain wobbliness. Wait, what did she say exactly?
Nikki Haley supporters at a town hall in Manchester, New Hampshire, in December
New Hampshire Governor Chris Sununu, who endorsed Haley at the Manchester event
Beyond her expertly rendered deliveries, Haley’s actual answers can be mushy or even nonsensical, with strange constructions and frequent malaprops. In Manchester, Haley praised Sununu for having his “pulse to the ground” in his state and boasted that her campaign already had momentum before his endorsement “just gave it a speed bump.” At a November debate, she ordered Ramaswamy to “leave my daughter out of your voice” (as opposed to her daughter’s name out of his mouth). “We have to deal with the cancer that is mental health,” she declares in her town halls when the subject arises (mental health, not cancer).
Later in the session, a reporter asked Haley about Trump’s then-most-recent flare-up, his statement to Sean Hannity that he would be a dictator “on day one,” long since overshadowed by Trump’s “rot in Hell” Christmas message and his claim that immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country.” In the moment, the “dictator” comment did feel germane, as did the question to Haley about whether that should perhaps preclude him from leading the world’s most powerful democracy.
“First of all, that’s for the voters to decide,” Haley declared, “if they want a dictator on day one.”
Yes, unquestionably. But what about Haley, the candidate we were speaking to—what did she decide?
“I’m not going to be a dictator on day one,” she assured everyone, not answering.
“I’ve always spoken in hard truths” is one of Haley’s trademark claims. In reality, the bluntness she discharges is reserved mostly for easy targets: the media, President Joe Biden, and “Kamala” (first name only, per GOP style). When it comes to speaking the hardest Republican truths of all—about Trump—Haley’s words fall feebly (wounded-bird-like), and her voice acquires a slightly halting tone and slower cadence.
Her preferred pose is one of pronounced exasperation. “Anti-Trumpers don’t think I hate him enough; pro-Trumpers don’t think I love him enough,” Haley said at the press gaggle. She shook her head and flashed a Man, I just can’t win look before escaping into a smoke screen of platitudes (“at the end of the day, I just put my truths out there and let the chips fall where they may”).
For all her cultivated brashness, Haley, whose campaign declined my requests to interview her, can also convey an impression of being terrified—of saying the wrong thing, of offending too many MAGA or MAGA-adjacent voters, or certainly of Trump himself.
The most excruciating example of this occurred a few days after Christmas, when a New Hampshire voter asked Haley to explain why the Civil War was fought. She provided a stem-winder of vague conservative assertions (“government doesn’t need to tell you how to live your life”) while omitting the obvious cause: slavery. She appeared to be sensitive to the fact that some Americans might be sick of being reminded about the nation’s shameful, bloody history. Haley, who as governor removed the Confederate flag from the South Carolina statehouse, has said that as president she would not play into the “national self-loathing” that she is always lamenting, “this idea that America is bad, or rotten, or racist.”
But trying to talk about the Civil War without mentioning slavery is like trying to run for the Republican nomination in 2024 while barely touching the all-encompassing, front-running figure at the center of it all.
One of Haley’s niftier moves occurs later in her stump speech, when she builds to a seemingly dramatic revelation.
“I think President Trump was the right president at the right time,” she reassures her audience. It is an imprecise and puzzling statement—what “time” exactly? (Charlottesville? COVID?) But Haley delivers the line with a force that sets a few heads bobbing in the crowd and leads her safely into her next credential. “I had a good working relationship with him when I was in his administration,” she further affirms.
“But …”
The words that follow this inevitable but are as fraught as any that a Republican candidate can utter. Say something like “He’s becoming crazier,” as former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie did of Trump last month, and you might win candor points but probably not any Republican primaries.
Haley’s next line barely deviates a word, speech to speech: “Rightly or wrongly, chaos follows him.” You could construct a tidy diagram to illustrate the perfect passivity she achieves here. Haley assigns no judgment (“rightly or wrongly”) and makes no suggestion that Trump might have ever said or done anything that actually caused this “chaos”—a euphemism for, say, the events of January 6 or whatever else is embedded in those 91 criminal counts. All of this “chaos” somehow comes randomly to rest upon the 45th president.
“Chaos follows him,” Haley said again at a December 14 town hall in the southern–New Hampshire town of Atkinson. “You know I’m right” was the extent of her elaboration.
“It just does.”
Haley’s soft landing at “chaos follows him” comes after a zig-zagging and sometimes turbulent journey with Trump. The odyssey began during the 2016 campaign, when Haley called him “scary” and the embodiment of “everything we teach our kids not to do in kindergarten.” She endorsed Senator Marco Rubio—like Haley, a child of immigrants—by saying she was excited to support a candidate who “was going to go and show my parents that the best decision they ever made was coming to America.”
Haley speaks at the Manchester town hall.
After Trump won the Republican nomination, Haley said, reluctantly, that she would vote for him. Trump asked her to serve as his ambassador to the United Nations reportedly as a favor to South Carolina’s lieutenant governor, Henry McMaster, a big Trump supporter, who wanted Haley out of the way so he could become governor. The UN job allowed Haley to burnish her foreign-policy résumé, and being in New York kept her removed from the daily discord of Trump’s White House. She served until 2018. “I got out of the administration without a tweet,” she likes to say.
Following Trump’s 2020 defeat and the January 6 insurrection, Haley sounded eager to bury her former boss and get on with her pursuit of his job. “His actions since Election Day will be judged harshly by history,” she declared in a January 7 speech at a Republican National Committee meeting. Haley said there was no chance Trump would ever run for federal office again. When those predictions proved premature, she reportedly tried to pay a quick make-up visit to Mar-a-Lago but was told by the proprietor not to bother. Less than three weeks after the insurrection, she told the Fox News host Laura Ingraham that everyone should “give the man a break.”
That April, Haley promised that she would support Trump if he ran for president again in 2024. And if he did, she said, she would not run herself.
Until … never mind.
As a candidate, Haley, whom Trump has taken to calling “Birdbrain,” frequently mentions how much better she would fare against Biden than Trump or DeSantis would. She often cites a Wall Street Journal poll from last month that shows her leading Biden by 17 points in a head-to-head matchup (Trump wins by four points). No doubt “electability” is a compelling argument, but this hypothetical Haley blowout is also premised on a dubious assumption—that Trump would be a gracious loser and urge his supporters to vote for their Republican standard-bearer, Ambassador Birdbrain.
When it comes to Trump’s indictments, Haley can’t bat away questions fast enough. “A lot of these cases have been politicized, we all know that,” she said in Manchester. Haley has promised to support the GOP nominee, whether it’s Trump or someone else. And in Plymouth, New Hampshire, at the end of December, she said that if she were elected president and Trump were convicted, she would likely pardon him “so that we can move on as a country and no longer talk about him.”
Such flaccid scolding is of course a big part of why Trump is still here. Appeasement has been the Republican business model since 2015. “It’s like what happened last time—nobody wanted to criticize Trump,” Mark Sanford, a former Republican representative from and governor of South Carolina, told me. Sanford, who declined to speak about Haley on the record, lost his 2018 House primary after becoming a strident Trump critic. “They figured he would go away,” Sanford said, referring to Trump’s Republican opponents over the years. “And they sort of waited and waited and waited, and he didn’t go away.”
Eight years later, Haley seems to be of a similarly passive mindset: put up tepid resistance to Trump, at least early on; stay alive; and hope that someone, or something, comes along to take care of the problem. “Maybe she catches a break from a jury,” Chip Felkel, a longtime Republican strategist in South Carolina told me, referring to the possibility of Trump being convicted in the coming months. Felkel, who is not affiliated with Haley’s campaign, says that he’s no fan of hers but that he’s hugely hostile to Trump, so he’ll support his former governor.
Chris Christie offers a different specimen of Trump alternative: a former friend and longtime ally of the 45th president whose unambiguous denunciations were the centerpiece of his campaign. Christie has held back little, calling Trump a “coward,” a “fool,” and a “self-centered, self-possessed, self-consumed, angry old man.”
In other words, Christie has been the rare candidate willing to tell actual hard truths about Trump. He will also not be the Republican nominee: He suspended his campaign last night.
Will Haley be the nominee? Are her pillowy “attacks” on the front-runner simply the undignified price of Republican viability today? Has this approach at least given her the best shot of any Republican to defeat Trump—an extremely long shot, but a shot nonetheless?
Her theory of the race is straightforward enough: Beat DeSantis for second in Iowa; be competitive with Trump in New Hampshire, where she’s gained in recent polls but still trails by double digits in most; and then parlay that momentum into defeating Trump in her home state (where the former president also remains well ahead).
Both Christie and Haley are pragmatic former governors who appeal to independents and college-educated moderates. Polling this past fall showed that a significant portion of his backers in New Hampshire would migrate to Haley if he bowed out of the race before the state’s January 23 primary.
A week before Christmas, Christie faced growing public pressure, much of it from people backing Haley, to drop out in the name of stopping Trump. The former New Jersey governor had made a sustained and effective case against Trump over several months, but struggled to boost his support into the teens and was strongly considering it.
But he held off for a few weeks. Christie has been frustrated, even appalled, by Haley’s unwillingness to say how she really feels about Trump, according to sources close to Christie. He has become less and less shy about expressing his dissatisfaction with her in public. He has taunted Haley for not ruling out a role as Trump’s running mate, as he and DeSantis have. “I don’t play for second” has been Haley’s standard answer to the vice-presidential question, an emphatic non-denial. “That’s why she’s not saying strong things against Donald Trump,” Christie said on Face the Nation.
His reaction to Haley’s slavery misadventure was especially pointed. “She’s unwilling to offend anyone by telling the truth,” he said in Epping, New Hampshire. “It’s worse to be able to be dishonest with people, and that’s what’s happening here.”
Now that Christie’s out of the primary, Haley will surely get some of his voters, though an endorsement seems unlikely anytime soon. Shortly before Christie announced his exit last night, at a town hall in New Hampshire, a hot mic caught him saying of Haley: “She’s gonna get smoked … She’s not up to this.”
Christie’s quandary over Haley is one that many Trump-skeptical Republicans identify with. “It’s the Nikki Haley dilemma,” Mike Murphy, a longtime Republican media consultant who has deep loathing for Trump and would love to see him lose, told me. He finds Haley’s cynicism depressing and is disgusted by her willingness to pander to “the latest insipid GOP crowd-pleasing trope,” as he recently wrote on Substack.
“Still, compared to Trump, she’s Gandhi,” Murphy continued. And he thinks she has a real chance to beat Trump in New Hampshire, where Murphy helped John McCain upset George W. Bush in 2000. “If I lived in New Hampshire, I’d vote for Haley in a heartbeat,” he told me.
Left: Haley signs an autograph. Right: Supporters leave after the town hall.
Haley’s knack for connecting one-on-one with voters does not always extend to political peers. On the contrary, her career has featured an array of disposable alliances, stubborn grudges, and a sense of paranoia about opponents, as my colleague Tim Alberta, then of Politico, documented in a 2021 profile of Haley. “She cut me off,” Sanford told Alberta. “This is systematic with Nikki,” he continued. “She cuts off people who have contributed to her success. It’s almost like there’s some weird psychological thing where she needs to pretend it’s self-made.”
“I don’t trust, because I’ve never been given a reason to trust,” Haley told Alberta. “Friend,” she added, “is a loose term.” She is fond of saying she wears heels not as a fashion statement but “for ammunition.”
No doubt Haley comes to this worldview honestly, having grown up as an Indian American in the Deep South of the 1970s and ’80s. She has faced discrimination, racism, sexism, and smears—not subtle ones, either. When she ran for governor, in 2010, a South Carolina political blogger and a lobbyist working for one of Haley’s rivals in the race both claimed to have had affairs with Haley (she denied them), and a Republican state senator called her a “raghead.”
“Every South Carolina politician here has been through that, all of us,” Katon Dawson, the former chair of the South Carolina GOP and a Haley supporter, told me. “We’re from South Carolina, and it is a bare-knuckled brawl.”
For Haley to win, Felkel, the South Carolina strategist, said he thinks she will have to channel some of that South Carolina pugilism and “open up a can of whoop-ass” on Trump. “We need to see more stiletto weaponry from her, and less ‘bless your heart,’” Felkel said.
In recent days, Haley has taken a somewhat more combative tack against Trump, after a pro-Trump super PAC released a campaign ad in New Hampshire that accused her of supporting a gas-tax increase in South Carolina and dubbed her “‘High Tax’ Haley.” (Haley had backed a gas-tax hike coupled with an income-tax cut.) “In his commercials and in his temper tantrums, every single thing that he’s said has been a lie,” she told an audience at a January 2 town hall on the New Hampshire coast.
“So if he’s gonna lie about me,” Haley went on, “I’m gonna tell you the truth about him.” The line drew the biggest applause of the event. Haley delivered it slowly, clearly, and with authority—like a candidate to be reckoned with, who might just be willing to escalate things.
But wasn’t Haley supposedly telling “hard truths” all along? Isn’t that kind of her signature thing? “She’s admitting that her retaliation to Trump’s lying about her is that she will stop lying about him,” Jonathan V. Last wrote in TheBulwark. Last dubbed Haley’s line “the most complete exposure to a politician’s subconscious I’ve ever seen.”
Or maybe this was always Haley’s conscious plan—to gradually parcel out her clever “hard truths” if convenient and when openings arise, and impress the right people and donors while doing so. Perhaps Haley already views this foray as a success. Even if she never seriously threatens Trump, she’s likely to perform respectably in the early states, win a second place or two, outlast DeSantis, and land some breezy swipes at Trump. Then, when his nomination becomes inevitable again, she can safely endorse her old boss (they always had a good working relationship!) and move on to her next campaign, to be Trump’s vice president or to try again in 2028.
Related Podcast
Listen to Mark Leibovich discuss Nikki Haley on Radio Atlantic:
Many people view Donald Trumpas a major threat to democracy, mostly on account of the fact that he incited an insurrection when things didn’t go his way during the last presidential election—and has been pretty explicit about his plans to rule as an authoritarian should he get a second term in office. But you know who the true threat to democracy is, at least in Democratic primary hopeful Dean Phillips’s eyes? Current White House inhabitant and guy who has the distinction of never having incited an insurrection, Joe Biden.
Yes, appearing at a debate in New Hampshire with self-help author and fellow candidate Marianne Williamson, Phillips claimed, to a “crowd of seventh graders and adults,” that Biden is a “risk to democracy” because “he is knowingly going into an election which his approval numbers and his poll numbers make it almost impossible to win,” according to Politico. “I know Marianne feels the same way,” Phillips said, adding: “We are the only two in the United States of America on the Democratic side of the aisle to stand up and tell you the truth: He’s going to lose, he’s going to lose.”
During the same event, Phillips criticized Biden for campaigning in South Carolina, saying, “Joe Biden should have been right here with us. He is taking the Granite State for granted, he is taking this election for granted, and he is taking every single one of you and this entire country for granted,” Phillips said. (Williamson told the crowd she agreed.) They also both accused the Democratic Party of effectively engaging in voter suppression by not counting the New Hampshire primary because Biden and other Dems have opted for South Carolina to vote first, and argued that voters must not make the president the nominee—or disaster will strike come next November.
Unfortunately for the duo, that appears unlikely to happen, with one recent poll showing Biden with a 40-point lead in New Hampshire—as a write-in candidate—over his competition. That situation was seemingly underscored on Tuesday, when no one showed up to a meet and greet with Phillips, despite the apparent promise of Dunkin’ Donuts:
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Lou is heading home after a long week of fact-checking in New Hampshire. (Ellen Hine/PolitiFact)
Staff Writer Maria Ramirez Uribe, left joined me and Senior Correspondent Amy Sherman on Friday in Manchester., N.H. (Ellen Hine/PolitiFact)
Thanks for coming along on this journey with me, readers! (Ellen Hine/PolitiFact)
