Haley: this vote is ‘not a coronation’ for Trump
Campaigning last night, Nikki Haley insisted that today’s vote was “not a coronation” for Donald Trump as the Republican nominee.
Interviewed by Leland Vittert, Haley said viewing her performance in New Hampshire as make or break for her campaign had never been fair. She told him:
It has never been fair. I said I needed to be strong in Iowa. We started at 2%. We ended at 20%. I need to be stronger in New Hampshire. I think we’ll do that tomorrow. And then I need to be stronger than that in South Carolina.
The one thing we have to remember is Donald Trump only won with one and a half percent of the vote in Iowa, 56,000 people voted for him out of a state of three million people. That is not representative of the country.
And you’ve got the political class saying, ‘Oh, it’s got to be him. No. This is not a coronation. This is an election.
You go state by state. You are trying to get representation of real normal people. And that is what we are focused on. We’re going to take it one step at a time.
The South Carolina primary, in Haley’s home state, is scheduled for 24 February.
Key events
Lauren Gambino
In the final hours before polls opened, Nikki Haley held a rally with supporters at a swanky new hotel in Salem, a Boston suburb in New Hampshire.
“We’ve got a lot on the line here,” Haley told the crowd, which packed a chandeliered ballroom, and spilled into the lobby. Making her closing pitch, she told supporters:
If you go to the polls tomorrow – and take five people with you – and you commit to getting us back on track, I will spend every single day proving to you that you made a good decision.
In her remarks, Haley attempted to showcase the breadth of her appeal, pushing back on Donald Trump’s accusations that she’s relying on moderates and liberals to boost her campaign.
She pointed into the crowd at Don Bolduc, a combat veteran who backed Haley after losing a Trump-endorsed bid for Senate in 2022 during which he claimed the 2020 election had been stolen. He later tried to reverse those claims in the general election, but it was seen as a factor in his loss to Democratic senator, Maggie Hassan.
“He’s as conservative as they get,” Haley beamed. And then she pointed to the state’s Republican governor, Chris Sununu, who has escorted her across the state for the last week. He’s a “moderate,” she noted. Left unsaid was that he is one of Trump’s few prominent Republican critics.
Introducing Haley in Salem, Sununu reminded the crowd that since Trump was elected in 2016, Republicans had lost the House, Senate and the White House. He said New Hampshire Republicans had fared poorly too, with several of Trump’s allies in the state losing their elections in the 2022 midterms.
“Hey Donald Trump, where the F is the ‘red wave,’” he said. “Give me a break.”
Why Biden’s name isn’t on the New Hampshire primary ballot
While Donald Trump and Nikki Haley might draw focus, a shadow presidential primary is taking place in New Hampshire, where Joe Biden could stumble at the first hurdle of his bid to run for president again in 2024 following an internal Democratic party feud.
As a consequence of the party scrap, Biden’s name will not even appear on the ballot in the Granite state on Tuesday. While the president remains the favorite to win his party’s overall nomination, his absence here has opened a window for Dean Phillips, a Democratic congressman from Minnesota, and Marianne Williamson, an author and self-help guru who ran for president in 2020, to mount longshot presidential bids.
The unusual situation stems from the Democratic national committee’s decision to ditch decades of tradition this year in designating South Carolina, a much more racially diverse state, to host the first presidential primary. The decision outraged New Hampshire Democrats, who insisted they would not go along with the national party’s plan to rob them of their “first-in-the-nation” status. As a result, the New Hampshire Democratic party decided to hold its primary the same day as the Republican primary, in defiance of the DNC’s decision.
The DNC has criticized the New Hampshire primary as a sham, calling on the state party to “educate the public” that the contest “is a non-binding presidential preference event and is meaningless”. The New Hampshire attorney general, Republican John Formella, in turn sent a cease-and-desist letter to the DNC to compel the organization to stop making “false, deceptive and misleading” claims about the primary.
Biden might be absent from the state, but a movement has emerged encouraging people to write his name on voting slips, and in a sign that the Biden campaign sees the potential for embarrassment, a series of high-profile Biden supporters have been dispatched to New Hampshire in recent weeks.
Voters are queueing up at polling places across New Hampshire this morning for the first-in-the nation primary.
Most polling sites in the state will close at 7pm ET, with results beginning to come shortly after that, but some will be open until 8pm.
Dean Philips isn’t backing down from challenging Biden
Dean Phillips, the long-shot Democratic challenger to Joe Biden, has refused to back down from attacking the president as he vowed to stay in the race “as long as it takes to get a head-to-head matchup with Donald Trump.”
The Minnesota Democrat, in an interview with CNN this morning, criticized his party for being “completely delusional”, adding that he has “a conviction that Joe Biden is going to lose”.
“I’m trying to shake it up,” Phillips said.
We need to. Donald Trump is going to win. Joe Biden is a fine man, but he’s going to lose.
Donald Trump was joined by three of his former GOP primary rivals last night at his final rally before the New Hampshire primary.
Vivek Ramaswamy, Tim Scott and Doug Burgum joined Trump onstage in Laconia, New Hampshire, where they briefly addressed the crowd to reiterate their support for the former president.
“That’s a group of great people,” Trump said. “You’ll be seeing a lot of them.”
The rally was interrupted several times by fossil fuel protesters, who shouted out “blood on his hands” and “oil sellout” before being kicked off the resort where the event was held.
Trump widens lead over Haley in New Hampshire poll
A tracking poll released this morning shows Donald Trump has widened his lead over Nikki Haley in recent days, following the withdrawal of Ron DeSantis from the GOP race.
The poll by NBC News, the Boston Globe and Suffolk University shows Trump at 60% among likely Republican primary voters, compared with Haley at 38%.
The results also show that most of likely New Hampshire voters have already made up their minds about who they’re voting for today. More than 89% said they are either “not at all likely” or “not very likely” to change their minds.
Here are some early risers in New Hampshire, already up and queueing to cast their votes today.
Adam Gabbatt
The state Democratic party in New Hampshire is plowing ahead with a primary, even though the national party has said it will not honor the results. There is a sense that politicians, journalists and voters could be witnessing the end of an era.
“New Hampshire is a very white area with an average age that’s a bit on the older side, so I do understand that it’s maybe not the best group of voters to represent the entire country,” said Jamie Setzler, 20, from New Boston, New Hampshire.
“But from a selfish standpoint it is disappointing. I used to be able to look forward, every four years, to something interesting.”
This graphic shows how the demographics in New Hampshire compares to the rest of the US.
The change to the calendar came after Joe Biden, who came fifth in the 2020 New Hampshire Democratic primary before reviving his campaign with a win in South Carolina, wrote to the DNC in 2022.
“For decades, Black voters in particular have been the backbone of the Democratic party but have been pushed to the back of the early primary process,” Biden wrote.
“We rely on these voters in elections but have not recognized their importance in our nominating calendar. It is time to stop taking these voters for granted, and time to give them a louder and earlier voice in the process.”
Read more from Adam Gabbatt in Manchester, New Hampshire here: ‘We’ve dug our heels in’ – is this the end of New Hampshire’s election clout?
One of the big questions today is if a big win for Donald Trump will effectively end the race to be the Republican nominee. Over at CNN Eric Bradner and Gregory Krieg write:
If Trump wins, he would make history: In modern presidential campaign history – since the Iowa caucuses began serving as the official kickoff, followed by the New Hampshire primary — no non-incumbent Republican has won both states.
And in doing so, he would make it much tougher for Haley to convince donors to pour money into her campaign and voters to stick with her for the month until the South Carolina primary. She’ll miss her only shot at another win before then because Haley filed to run in Nevada’s state-run primary, instead of competing in the state GOP-run caucuses. Delegates are awarded through the Nevada caucuses.
Some in the party are already eager to see the nominating race reach its end eight days after it started.
Biden still expected to win Democratic primary despite not being on ballot
Joan E Greve
Even without a formal campaign presence in New Hampshire, and without Biden’s name on the ballot paper, the US president is still expected to receive the most votes in the Democratic primary by a wide margin.
An Emerson College/WHDH poll conducted last week showed Biden winning the support of 61% of likely Democratic primary voters, compared to 16% for Phillips and 5% for Williamson.
But a disappointing performance could point to decreased enthusiasm among the Democratic base, which would be a worrisome sign for Biden heading into the general election. Polls already show Biden running neck and neck with Donald Trump, who is widely expected to win the Republican presidential nomination.
In an indication of Biden’s potential vulnerabilities, some of the president’s prominent allies, including congressman Ro Khanna of California, have spent time campaigning on his behalf in New Hampshire. Speaking at a house party in support of the write-in campaign on Saturday, Khanna predicted a “decisive win” for Biden in New Hampshire.
“That’s going to propel him to have a big win in November,” Khanna said. “At the end of the day, I am a believer that Americans love this country and love our democracy.”
Some voters, however, outraged over the war in Gaza, are expected to write in “ceasefire” to the ballot paper today to criticize US support for Israel’s military.