Haley vows to stay in the race regardless of the outcome in New Hampshire

Nikki Haley, in her final appearance before polls close in New Hampshire on Tuesday night, rejected claims that Republican voters had already united firmly behind former President Donald J. Trump and vowed not to end her 2024 presidential bid, how the first attempt of the state would also expire. turned out to be a national first.

“I didn't get here because of luck,” she said at a polling place in Hampton, N.H., as she was flanked by supporters including Gov. Chris Sununu, her top surrogate in the state. “I came here because I outsmarted and outwitted the rest of those guys. So I'm taking on Donald Trump, and I'm not going to talk about an obituary.”

Asked about her reaction to Trump's comments at his rally a day earlier in which he suggested she would likely drop out after New Hampshire, she smiled.

“I don't do what he tells me to do,” she said. “I never did what he told me.”

In her closing speech to voters, Ms. Haley, the former governor of South Carolina and ambassador to the United Nations under Trump, cast herself as an underdog who has come from behind and is willing to take on her own party's political class. . Her supporters and allies have projected confidence.

“I'm not concerned because I've seen this movie before,” Katon Dawson, a former chairman of the South Carolina Republican Party and now an adviser to Haley's campaign in that state, said in an interview.

But the forces that brought her to the Governor's Mansion in 2010 as a deeply conservative and anti-establishment Tea Party candidate are now squarely behind Trump, and the former president has remade the Republican Party in his image.

Polls continue to show his dominance in New Hampshire and nationally. The latest Suffolk University/NBC10 Boston/Boston Globe A poll showed he had only widened his lead in the state since Florida Governor Ron DeSantis suspended his presidential campaign on Sunday. The survey found that Trump received 60 percent of voters' support, while Ms. Haley received 38 percent. (The margin of error was 4.4 percent.)

During his own visit to a polling station on Tuesday, Mr Trump rejected the idea that Ms Haley posed a threat to his rise to the nomination. “She can stay in,” he said of her campaign memo that said she would not be deterred from continuing to fight.

On Tuesday, Ms. Haley was expected to visit a number of polling places before her watch party at her state headquarters in Concord, N.H.

At Winnacunnet High School in Hampton, N.H., during her first site visit on Tuesday morning, at least a half-dozen signs near the entrance promoted Mr. Trump and appeared to insult Ms. Haley, including signs reading “Secure Borders” and “No Wars .' His campaign has portrayed her as a warmonger and attacked her reputation as governor, especially on immigration. Most of the volunteers standing outside cheering on voters were from the Trump and Biden campaigns.

Mrs. Haley arrived at high school with her own calvary. Her supporters engaged in a battle of chants with the Trump campaign as competing chants of “Trump, Trump” and “Nikki, Nikki” filled the air. In attendance were her two top surrogates in the state, Mr. Sununu and Don Bolduc, a retired Army brigadier general who ran unsuccessfully for Senate in 2022.

At a news conference, Ms. Haley rejected claims that Trump had put her campaign on the defensive in the crucial final days of the race. But just days after sharply questioning the former president's mental acuity, she once again declared him “mentally fit.” “The problem is: Do you want two 80-year-olds running for president?” she asked.

She argued that it was not Republican voters who rallied behind the former president, but her party's “political elite.”

“That's not what Americans want,” she said of a second Trump presidency. “The political class got us into this mess.”

Ms. Haley and Mr. Sununu pointed to her victory in the midnight election in Dixville Notch, N.H. (where she rallied all six registered voters) and predictions of record turnout as harbingers of a strong showing today. But even if she doesn't win New Hampshire, Ms. Haley told reporters, she plans to move on to South Carolina, her home state, where her campaign has already placed an ad buy.

“This has always been a marathon,” she says. “It has never been a sprint.”

As he left the polling place in Hampton, N.H., Daniel Hamilton, 67, a former business controller who described himself as a moderate Republican, echoed Ms. Haley's sentiments and said he did not want four more years of President Biden or Trump.

“I think she would do well,” Mr. Hamilton said. “She is qualified, and I want to move forward with the Biden-Trump deal.”

Michael Gold reporting contributed.