For the anti-Trump wing of the Republican Party, it all comes down to Tuesday

The nation's first primary could be the anti-Trump Republican's last stand.

Since 2016, a shrinking group of Republican strategists, retired lawmakers and donors have tried to oust Donald J. Trump from his leadership position in the party. And time and time again, through one Capitol riot, two impeachments, three presidential elections and four criminal indictments, they have failed to gain traction with voters.

Now, after years of legal, cultural and political crises that have upended American norms and expectations, what could be the anti-Trump Republicans' final battle will not be waged in Congress or in the courts, but in the crowded ski huts and the snowy city. halls of a state with 1.4 million inhabitants.

Ahead of Tuesday's New Hampshire primary, the Republican Party's old guard has rallied around Nikki Haley, viewing her bid as the last, best chance to finally pry the former president from the top of his party. Anything short of a very narrow end for her in the state, where moderate, independent voters make up 40 percent of the electorate, would send Trump on a near-unstoppable march to the nomination.

Trump's opposition is outnumbered and underemployed. The former president's polarizing style and hardline tactics have forced many Republicans who oppose him into early retirement and humiliating defeats, or even quit the party entirely. Yet their protracted war against him has helped frame the nominating contest around a central, and profound, tribal litmus test: loyalty to Mr. Trump.

Gordon J. Humphrey, a former senator from New Hampshire, was a conservative power broker during the Reagan era but left the party after Mr Trump won the presidential nomination in 2016. This year, he has produced anti-Trump Facebook videos aimed at encouraging students and independent voters who, polls show, are more likely to support Ms. Haley than Mr. Trump. Trump.

“The stakes are very high,” said Mr. Humphrey, 83 years old. “If he wins here, Trump will be unstoppable.”

Governor Chris Sununu of New Hampshire, a moderate Republican, campaigned for Ms. Haley across the state this week, arguing that the man who remade the party in his image is not the best standard-bearer.

“Trump does not represent the Republican Party,” Mr. Sununu said as he campaigned with Ms. Haley in a rustic event space in Hollis, N.H. “He does not represent the conservative movement. Trump is about Trump.”

Large numbers of Republicans disagree. Trump, who trailed in some primaries just a year ago, now has the support of nearly two-thirds of the party, according to an average of national polls from the data-driven news site FiveThirtyEight. In the Iowa caucuses on Monday, Trump demolished his rivals by nearly 30 percentage points, winning nearly every demographic, geographic region and other slice of the electorate.

Elected Republicans have sided with the former president. On Friday, Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina endorsed Mr. Trump at a rally in Concord, NH. Even Mr. Sununu — Ms. Haley's most powerful political backer in New Hampshire — has acknowledged that he would support Mr. Trump if he won the party's election. nominated for the third time.

Some of Trump's strongest opponents doubt whether they will be successful after so many defeats. Barbara Comstock, a longtime Republican official who was swept from her suburban Virginia congressional seat over the midterm backlash against Trump in 2018, said she believed the former president would win the nomination. The only way the party will finally get rid of Trump, she said, is if he loses in 2024, an outcome she said could cost Republicans dozens of congressional seats.

“He has to lose more people and drag them onto the ballot, and that's the only thing that will change that,” said Ms. Comstock, who is opposing Mr. Trump. “You lose, and it's bad, and you lost for the second time to a very weak man.”

Recent polls showing Ms. Haley trailing Trump by double digits in New Hampshire underscored her uphill battle on Tuesday. But even if Ms. Haley can overcome New Hampshire's difficulties, she faces the question of what's next.

A loss next month in a crucial contest in her home state of South Carolina, where she also trails by double digits, could undermine her momentum in March, when two-thirds of all Republican primaries are up for grabs.

But a win would give her momentum heading into the Super Tuesday elections on March 5. Twelve of the 16 Super Tuesday primaries will allow independent voters or other voters to participate, a dynamic that has kept Ms. Haley competitive in New Hampshire.

The extraordinary nature of this primary race could change these calculations. Some strategists say that if Ms. Haley does not win immediately, she will have to wait for the Supreme Court to decide whether Mr. Trump's name will appear on the ballot in Colorado, Maine and other states. Democrats and some election officials have argued that his role in overturning the 2020 election should disqualify him from running for office again.

Yet the fierce loyalty that Trump continues to command within his own party has seen Ms. Haley and her supporters make a careful and somewhat tortured case for her nomination. Ms. Haley has continued to tone down her attacks on Mr. Trump, framing her candidacy less as an existential choice about the future of democracy and more as a moment of generational change.

Speaking to reporters at a restaurant in Amherst, Ms. Haley was careful to draw a contrast between herself and Mr. Trump. “This is about: do you want more of the same? Or do you want something else?” she said.

The New Hampshire primary has a history of underdog candidates, including in 2000, when John McCain appealed to independents and defeated George W. Bush, who like Trump was the heavy favorite. A record 322,000 voters are expected to attend Tuesday's primary, according to New Hampshire's secretary of state. The increase could mark a spike in participation by independents, who could participate in the primaries. So-called “black voters” can participate by choosing a ballot from either party at the polling station.

Part of the problem facing the anti-Trump wing is a matter of simple math. A majority of the Republican Party remains staunchly supportive of the former president. But many of the moderate and independent voters who opposed Trump have voted for Democratic candidates in several election cycles, making them less likely to support another Republican candidate.

These changes have occurred along class lines, with college-educated voters and higher incomes largely flocking to the Democratic Party. Trump's populist appeals strengthened white working-class support for the Republicans.

“Many of the college-educated moderates who supported these kinds of strategies for people like McCain in New Hampshire have deported themselves from the Republican Party,” said Rep. Matt Gaetz, a staunch Trump supporter from Florida. “Like Nikki Haley's Republicans aren't even Republicans anymore.”

In a campaign memo earlier this month, top Trump strategists accused Ms. Haley of orchestrating a campaign “intended to co-opt and take over a GOP nominating contest featuring non-Republicans and Democrats.”

Trump has reiterated that message as he campaigned in New Hampshire in recent days.

“Nikki Haley is counting on Democrats and liberals to infiltrate your Republican primaries,” he said Wednesday evening in Portsmouth. Ms. Haley, he said, is supported by “all the RINOs, globalists, Never Trumpers and Crooked Joe Biden's biggest donors.”

Ms. Haley has responded that this is a lie, noting that Democrats have not been able to change their vote for months and cannot vote in a Republican primary. Any registered Democrat who wanted to vote in the Republican primary had to change his or her party affiliation by October 6. Nearly 4,000 voters did so before the deadline, according to the State Secretary for Foreign Affairs.

But Ms. Haley has also defended her appeal to a broad spectrum of voters.

“What I do is tell people what I'm for,” she said during her town hall on CNN Thursday evening. “If independent and conservative and moderate Republicans like that, then I think that's great. When conservative Democrats say, 'I want to go back home to the Republican Party,' because they left it, I want them back.”

In a room at the American Legion in Rochester, N.H., several former Republican voters who opposed Mr. Trump said they were no longer sure how to define their political beliefs.

“I'm not particularly happy with the direction the Republican Party is going,” said Kristi Carroll, 51, who described herself as a stay-at-home mother and who came to hear Ms. Haley. “I'm not sure I'm a Republican anymore. I'm trying to figure it out.”

Ms. Carroll supported Mr. Trump in 2016, but not in 2020. And she has no plans to support him in 2024 — even if the former president wins the party's nomination.

“After Iowa, I'm pretty nervous about the direction of the country, and I'm nervous that if Haley doesn't get the nomination, I'll vote for a Democrat, which is fine, as long as it's not Trump. Mrs. Carroll said. “Isn't that terrible? I hate to be like that, but that's the truth.”

A few rows behind her in the packed room, Chuck Collins, 62, a retired Navy captain and engineer from Alton Bay, N.H., said he always considered himself a Republican. After voting for Democrats in the last two presidential elections, he now calls himself an independent. Still, he believed that a moderate Republican wing would eventually emerge again.

“We need to have two healthy parties, whether you're Republican or Democrat,” Mr. Collins said. “You have to have two teams to play a match.”

Michael Gold contributed reporting from Portsmouth, NH