Haley looks at New Hampshire with a focus on independents
MANCHESTER, NH – Former President Donald J. Trump's resounding victory in Iowa significantly raises the stakes of next week's New Hampshire primary for Nikki Haley and the increasingly desperate contingent of Republicans looking to leave Trump behind.
While Iowa was largely a foregone conclusion at the top, with a spirited battle for just second place, there is still a small but narrowing path for Ms. Haley, the former governor of South Carolina, to defeat Mr. Trump in New Hampshire defeat. It relies heavily on tens of thousands of independent voters who are expected to participate in the Republican primaries.
Ms. Haley, who got a late start in Iowa, has based her campaign on a strong performance in New Hampshire from the start, and was recently buoyed by an influx of money from the super PAC that backed her. The state's demographic makeup is also much more favorable to her than more rural and conservative Iowa. She has invested a lot of money and time here — she has organized 80 events around the state — and has the support of some top Republicans, including popular Gov. Chris Sununu.
“She's on the floor, she's in the restaurant, she's doing the town halls,” Mr. Sununu said. 'She answers everyone's questions. Trump doesn't do that. You're lucky that he flies in once a week to do a rally and then leaves straight away.”
That will change this week: Mr. Trump is expected to be in New Hampshire on Tuesday, fresh off his victory in Iowa, and will hold a series of rallies there between now and Tuesday's primaries. He retains a firm grip on the party and many of the advantages of an incumbent.
New Hampshire is known to offset results in Iowa: No Republican in an open primary has won both elections since the states claimed their spots in the first two nominating contests in 1976. Ms Haley hopes that remains the case this year, but she faces an uphill climb to oust Mr Trump from the top spot, with the results in Iowa doing little to help her case.
To do so, she will need to win over a significant share of independents, including those who planned to support former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, who dropped out of the race this month.
And while Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida has stemmed Ms. Haley's late surge in Iowa, he is unlikely to play a major role in New Hampshire. He and his allies canceled all their advertising in the state in early November, more than two and a half months before voters were set to go to the polls. The result has been low single-digit polling for Mr. DeSantis in the state for months. Ms. Haley, however, is on the rise, standing at 32 percent, according to a CNN poll this month. trailing Mr. Trump by just seven points.
“I really think it's going to be a two-way race,” New Hampshire national party committee member Juliana Bergeron said in an interview Friday. She added: “We will see many more independents winning Republican ballots. So I think that will also bring about a change, because neither party can live on its own here in New Hampshire. We always need the independents to come with one of us.”
Ms. Haley has aggressively courted those voters, who make up more than 343,000 of all registered voters (there are about 268,000 registered Republican voters in New Hampshire), according to data from the State Secretary.
Ms. Haley has slowly built a base in New Hampshire, buoyed by more than $22 million in television advertising and by Americans' support for Prosperity Action, the well-funded super PAC backed by billionaires Charles and David Koch. The organization has contributed hundreds of hours of door knocking, phone banking and other contacts with voters on Ms. Haley's behalf.
Greg Moore, the New Hampshire director of Americans for Prosperity Action, said he saw an opportunity for Ms. Haley in the state's numerous white-collar neighborhoods, where Mr. Trump underperformed in the last two general elections. In Mr. Moore's town of Bedford, Mr. Trump did indeed lose to Mr. Biden in 2020, but Mr. Sununu carried the town with 72 percent of the vote.
“The general demographics of New Hampshire” are very favorable to Ms. Haley, Mr. Moore said in an interview last week. “If you look at much of the coastal region and a lot of the suburbs around Manchester and Nashua, they're very much white-collar suburban towns. And those are areas where I suspect Nikki Haley would do very well.
Mr. Christie's departure from the race has only deepened the resolve of the Haley campaign, which pointed to numerous polls, including one from CNNshowing that she was the first choice of the majority of Christie supporters in New Hampshire.
Internal polling by the Christie campaign also showed that a majority of his supporters were likely to go to Ms. Haley. Somewhat surprisingly, a small subset would likely switch to Mr. Trump. But it's unlikely to be a one-to-one switch.
“It's a fallacy to believe that you could stack the Christie voters on top of the Haley voters, and that's the new number,” said Mike DuHaime, a senior adviser to Mr. Christie. “There is a large portion that is looking for a place to go.”
Mr. DuHaime, Mr. Christie and other Republican strategists in New Hampshire have indicated that there could be Christie voters who were so fervently anti-Trump that they are unlikely to vote at all in the New Hampshire primary, given that both Ms. Haley as Mr. DeSantis believes he is not strident enough in his criticism of the Republican front-runner and former president.
“The way this race is shaping up is something I've never seen,” said Mike Dennehy, a veteran New Hampshire Republican who worked on Sen. John McCain's winning 2000 primary campaign in the state. “It's evolving into a Republican versus independent voter. . The Republicans are solidly behind Trump, but the independents appear to be solidly in favor of Nikki Haley.”
Although Ms. Haley has been particularly cautious in criticizing Mr. Trump during the campaign, her allied super PAC, SFA Fund Inc., has suddenly turned its entrenched guns on the former president. Over the past week, the organization has spent about $95,000 a day on ads targeting Mr. Trump in New Hampshire, according to data from AdImpact, a media tracking company.
While there but an advertisement Trump has been attacked in the last thirty days of the Iowa caucuses, there have been eleven in New Hampshire.
Such a change in the tone of advertising could, some Republican veterans say, impact the outcome in New Hampshire, where voters have been inundated with about $57 million in ads this year, according to AdImpact.
“At the very least, it will blunt Donald Trump's attacks on her Republican credentials, which are damaging to her,” Dennehy said, referring to Ms. Haley. “It's a smart move. But it can also be too much.”