Nikki Haley has held out hope that New Hampshire could be the spark that ignites a real race for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination.
As voters finally head to the polls on Tuesday, Donald Trump and his team are as confident as ever that they can snuff that flame out—putting an end to the primary competition before it can really even start.
Warming up the MAGA crowd at a primary eve rally in the New Hampshire town of Laconia, Sen. Tim Scott (R-SC)—the former 2024 candidate turned Trump endorser—was not subtle about what was possible on Tuesday.
“If you want the race to be over tomorrow,” Scott bellowed, “let me hear you scream!”
During his speech, Trump himself didn’t exactly tamper down expectations, tossing out polls of unspecified voters showing him with wide margins over Haley.
“The numbers will be higher even than what you’re seeing,” the former president said. “The margins are very important.” (“I’m hearing record-type numbers,” he said later.)
The day before, speaking to a crowd of supporters in Rochester, Trump himself predicted a win in New Hampshire on Tuesday that would force the 2024 GOP primary to a close.
“That should wrap it up,” he said.
The former South Carolina governor, the final candidate remaining in the field to challenge Trump, is approaching a make-or-break moment like the one that broke Ron DeSantis last week in Iowa.
The Florida governor, once seen as a candidate who could stop Trump, emptied the tank of his increasingly sputtering campaign on a strong performance in the first caucus state. After placing a distant second, 30 percentage points behind the former president, DeSantis had little choice but to end his campaign.
But Trump’s camp is eager to set Haley’s expectations in New Hampshire as a win-or-bust scenario, seeking to frame anything short of an upset victory as a primary-ending event as they anxiously await changing their focus to President Joe Biden and the November election.
“It’s like the Iowa moment for DeSantis,” a GOP strategist close to the Trump campaign told The Daily Beast. “It’s pretty simple. She lost in Iowa and came in third. If she loses in New Hampshire tomorrow, she really has no path.”
It’s unclear yet whether—or to what extent—Haley is emptying the tank for New Hampshire. While she criss-crossed the state in the days leading up to the primary, some observers had wondered if her cautious approach reflected the strategy of a candidate campaigning like they were ahead instead of behind.
But if Haley is able to perform well in any state, it’s this one, where the combination of a more independent-minded primary electorate and rules that allow non-GOP partisans to vote both work against Trump.
Earlier in January, some polls showed Haley pulling close to Trump in New Hampshire. But two polls released on Sunday and Monday—from Suffolk University/Boston Globe and Monmouth University/Washington Post—showed Haley trailing Trump by 18 and 19 points, respectively.
If Trump commands 55 percent of the vote and Haley 36, like the Suffolk poll indicated, it would represent a stronger performance than DeSantis in Iowa, but it’d hardly offer up the momentum Haley needs to sustain a campaign for another month.
On Monday, Haley once again sought to lower expectations, telling CBS News her goal for New Hampshire is simply to come out “stronger” than she did from Iowa.
On both Sunday and Monday, Haley told campaign trail crowds she plans on sticking in the race through South Carolina on Feb. 24 and Super Tuesday on March 5. Over the weekend, her team announced $4 million in TV ad reservations for South Carolina.
But Team Trump, it seems, can’t wait to seize on a second-place finish from Haley in New Hampshire in hopes of previewing the contest in her home state of South Carolina, where early polls show her badly trailing the former president.
“How do you embarrassingly lose your home state after losing the first four states by over double digits, and then argue to your donors and your supporters that you can keep going when the map becomes more friendly to Trump?” the Trump-aligned GOP strategist said, referring to the slate of MAGA-friendly Super Tuesday states. “At some point here, donors are gonna get turned off, her supporters are gonna get demoralized, and she’ll have to make a decision.”
The Trump campaign has been signaling this strategic push all week.
“The whole purpose of placing second in Iowa, according to the Nikki Haley campaign and its allies, was to position themselves as the ‘Alternative to Trump’ going INTO New Hampshire, where they knew DeSantis had virtually no presence, zero campaign activity, and no chance of winning,” top Trump advisers Chris LaCivita and Susie Wiles wrote in a campaign memo late Sunday afternoon.
LaCivita and Wiles presented Haley with two options. Option No. 1 is drop out and unite “behind President Trump, and commit to defeating Joe Biden.”
The other option was not very subtle. “Nikki Haley prepares to be absolutely DEMOLISHED and [sic.] EMBARASSED in her home state of South Carolina,” LaCivita and Wiles wrote.
Still, if Trump holds his roughly 40 point polling lead over Haley in South Carolina, the doldrums of the next month will indeed make it hard for the former U.N. ambassador’s campaign to stay afloat.
“She’s an idiot to think in a two-way race she’ll do better and defeat him when he’s already over 50 percent,” the Republican close to the Trump campaign said.
While Trump spent plenty of time attacking Haley during his primary eve rally in Laconia, it was clear he was preoccupied with defeating Biden.
One rival, he said, will be “gone tomorrow… the other, in November.”
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