by Alexis Simendinger | The Hill
Former President Trump’s formidable lock among Republicans may outpace challenger Nikki Haley’s appeal among independent voters and moderates, seen as a smaller population heading into the GOP New Hampshire primary Tuesday, polls and political analysts suggest.
But the long-shot, two-person race Haley sought against Trump ahead of February’s South Carolina primary came into focus with Sunday’s decision by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis to quit his presidential bid while endorsing the former president, whom the governor tried to surpass during an eight-month campaign that began with high expectations and ended with a lurch.
Do you want more of the same, or do you want something new?” Haley asked a Seabrook, N.H., crowd Sunday while boasting that all of the “fellas” are out of the Republican race except Trump.
▪ The Hill:Haley ramps up attacks in New Hampshire aimed at the former president.
▪ The Hill: Trump defends his cognitive abilities.
The former U.N. ambassador’s immediate challenge will be to turn out enough of New Hampshire’s “live free or die” voters to assemble a competitive claim on the nomination. She was a distant third-place finisher behind Trump a week ago in the Iowa caucuses, where evangelical conservatives dominate in the GOP — the type of terrain she’ll confront again in her home state of South Carolina next month, analysts point out.
A Suffolk University/Boston Globe/NBC-10 survey released Friday showed Trump with 52 percent support in New Hampshire, followed by Haley at 35 percent and DeSantis at 6 percent. DeSantis’s backers are most likely to shift to Trump in New Hampshire. The upshot from 56 polls averaged by Decision Desk HQ and The Hill showed a Trump lead of more than 11 percent in the Granite State before DeSantis’s exit. Trump had a 33 percent lead over Haley in South Carolina, averaged over 29 polls as of Sunday, according to Decision Desk HQ.
“It’s not impossible for her. If she overperforms expectations, I think she rolls into South Carolina with a lot of momentum,” former Maryland Republican Gov. Larry Hogan, a Trump critic who endorsed Haley last week, told ABC News’s “This Week” on Sunday while estimating her chances of capturing the GOP nomination.
▪ Insider NJ: Trump’s lead against Haley is 50 percent to 35 percent in New Hampshire, according to the final Emerson College/WHDH poll of likely primary voters, conducted Jan. 18-20 before DeSantis suspended his campaign.
▪ The Associated Press: Democratic leaders publicly and privately acknowledge a fear of Haley more than Trump as a GOP nominee against Biden.
WHAT ABOUT VOTERS? Only 110,298 people in Iowa and perhaps some absentee voters in New Hampshire have thus far cast ballots in the 2024 contest, but many Republican Party power brokers, including some former rivals and Trump detractors, have placed their bets on the pending nominee using a cascade of endorsements. Trump’s strategy has been to knock out his GOP challengers within weeks and concentrate his firepower on President Biden.
Trump has endorsements from both of South Carolina’s senators, GOP Gov. Henry McMaster and three of the state’s six Republican House members. Haley, the former governor of the state, points to support from just one of South Carolina’s members of Congress, Republican Rep. Ralph Norman.
Some GOP senators fret that Trump is burning through his campaign war chest by pouring resources into legal defenses. They’re looking to New Hampshire to gauge voter turnout and project general election enthusiasm.
2028: DeSantis’s campaign collapsed under the weight of mistaken assumptions, inexperience, missteps and Trump’s resurgence, Politico reports. In 2019, the governor “ousted people who knew where the skeletons were and knew all his baggage,” said one Florida party member familiar with the history between DeSantis and Susie Wiles, the Florida political operative DeSantis fired, who was promptly hired by Trump. “Those were the people who orchestrated his takedown.”
GOP strategist and Trump campaign alum Brian Seitchik said, “The campaign really never offered a rationale for why [GOP voters] should leave Trump and move to DeSantis. … They should have taken the fight to Trump directly, and they never really did that.”
Some conservative voters suggest DeSantis should try again in 2028 when Trump won’t be a candidate. “He’s got a great reputation among conservatives,” New Hampshire voter Ken Coleman told NPR, speaking about DeSantis. “I think right now it’s just a little premature.”
