Before former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie ended his 2024 presidential campaign, a CNN/UNH poll found showed a competitive New Hampshire primary race.
Former President Donald Trump led his former United Nations Ambassador Nikki Haley by just 7 points. Trump was at 39% to Haley’s 32% with Christie still in the mix, taking 12%.
ELECTION 2024: FOLLOW LATEST COVERAGE
With Christie gone and Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) still siphoning off some potential Trump voters, Haley had an opening to take Trump on more or less one-on-one.
That could still happen on Tuesday, but the two most recent New Hampshire polls ought to give her supporters pause. One by the Boston Globe and Suffolk University shows Trump leading 50% to 36%. St. Anselm followed up with a survey in which Trump took 52% to Haley’s 38%. Both are 14-point leads for the former president.
Such an outcome would probably still be good enough to set up a two-person race in South Carolina, though that is also where DeSantis has redoubled his efforts. But it wouldn’t give her much momentum.
Although Haley served as governor of South Carolina, she’ll need that momentum. Trump has a 30-point lead there, receiving 52% to Haley’s 21.8% in the RealClearPolitics polling average. The most recent poll included, taken before Trump won Iowa, shows the former president with 54% of the vote.
South Carolina has historically been the place where Republican voters have circled the wagons around the front-runner, often ending the competitive phase of the race: Ronald Reagan in 1980, George H.W. Bush in 1988, Bob Dole in 1996, George W. Bush in 2000, John McCain in 2008, and Trump in 2016.
The only significant recent exception was Newt Gingrich’s win in 2012, after the former House speaker turned a tough debate question back on the moderator and rode a wave of liberal media-bashing to a first-place finish that didn’t reflect his overall standing in the race.
Trump has the support of South Carolina’s sitting governor and sitting senator. He delivered the keynote address at the state GOP’s fundraising dinner last year and said Haley was “afraid to show up.”
“You’ve got to show up at these events, Nikki,” Trump said, standing at a podium adorned with the state Republican insignia with multiple GOP elected officials sitting in the audience. “Oooh, did I say that?”
That’s why New Hampshire matters so much. A strong showing there would give Haley a little over a month to rebuild her standing in her home state. She could try to bait Trump into debating her, which has clearly been part of her post-Iowa strategy.
The New Hampshire debates have all been canceled because Haley has said she will only participate in them if Trump is also on the stage.
“At the end of the day, [Trump] is the front-runner. He’s the one that I’m 7 points away from,” she said on CNN earlier this week. “He’s the one that we’re fighting against. There is nobody else I need to debate. I have had five strong debates and have done plenty of them. He can’t hide forever. At some point he’s got to get on a debate stage.”
That argument will have some persuasive force if Haley comes out of New Hampshire with a win. At that point, she and Trump will have each won one state apiece and split the first two nominating contests.
Even that’s no guarantee. After McCain’s stunning 18-point triumph over Bush in the 2000 New Hampshire primary, Bush posted a nearly 12-point win in South Carolina. But it would create the appearance of the real race the political press, and at least some Republican voters, want.
If Haley suffers a double-digit loss, her calls for Trump to debate her will surely fall on deaf ears and it is not clear he will pay any political price for continuing to spurn his competitors. It will also be much more difficult for her or any other GOP candidate to turn this into a genuinely competitive nomination fight rather than a Trump coronation.
Perhaps the recent New Hampshire polling isn’t capturing the infusion of independent voters who could put Haley over the top, though the late polling averages have been pretty good at predicting the GOP primary’s winner dating back to at least 2008.
There will be attempts to frame a Trump performance in the low 50s or less as a moral victory for his opponents even if he finishes first. That argument was heard after a 30-point Trump win in Iowa that nevertheless left him with 51% of the overall caucus vote.
Yet Trump does not have to reduce Haley and DeSantis to the status of his 2020 primary challengers Bill Weld, Joe Walsh, and Mark Sanford to win the nomination. And once the race leaves the early states, it’s possible the vote breakdown could look closer to the national polls.
The latest RealClearPolitics national average has Trump leading by 51.3 points, with 63.1% of the vote to Haley’s 11.8% and DeSantis’s 10.3%. Those are closer to an incumbent’s margin.
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER
Haley’s best shot at avoiding this fate is winning New Hampshire.
The state’s slogan, Live Free or Die, may apply to GOP presidential campaigns too.
