POTUS 45 Donald Trump might have crushed Nikki Haley in New Hampshire, but the former South Carolina governess insists that she hasn’t yet lost the race to become the GOP presidential nominee.
The debacles in the Iowa caucuses and now the Granite State primary suggest that Republicans just don’t want Haley, and not just because Trump beat her by more than 30,000 votes both times. The result in New Hampshire shows that most of Haley’s voters weren’t Republicans. A CNN exit poll showed that 70 percent of them weren’t registered with the GOP.
Besides that, she’ll receive zero delegates in next-up Nevada’s Republican caucuses on February 8 because she’s not on the ballot, and the polls show that she heads into her home state primary on February 24 choking on Trump’s dust.
She seems to be the only one who doesn’t know the race is over.
The Numbers
The numbers tell the tale. Trump pulled 169,276 voters in New Hampshire against Haley’s 134,615, a 54.4-43.3 margin of victory. He earned 12 delegates to Haley’s nine.
That brings Trump’s total to 32. Haley has 17.
Trump defeated Haley in last week’s Iowa caucuses by a similar margin.
Again, Haley doesn’t appear on the ballot for Nevada’s GOP caucuses, which means Trump could receive all 26 of the state’s delegates. His only opponent is Ryan Binkley.
The next contest, South Carolina’s on February 24, offers 50 delegates; 29 at-large, and 21 allotted to the state’s seven congressional districts. But Haley’s prospects even in her own state don’t look good. The RealClearPolitics (RCP) average of primary polls gives Trump a 30.2-point lead, 52-21.8.
And that margin could well widen given that Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, who wisely dropped out of the race after the beating he took in Iowa, has endorsed Trump.
Republicans Don’t Want Haley
That doesn’t seem to matter to Haley, a Deep State Uniparty candidate who thinks Big Business and the Chamber of Commerce should decide how much wage-busting cheap foreign labor to import, and who, with Conservatism, Inc., wants to waste more money on Ukraine’s losing war against Russia and go to war against North Korea.
Rank-and-file Republicans don’t agree, as the latest RCP average of national polls shows.
Trump leads Haley by 55.1 points, 66.4 to 11.3.
But beyond that, CNN reported, registered Republicans didn’t vote for Haley in New Hampshire.
“Roughly 7 in 10 of the New Hampshire voters backing Trump said they were registered as Republicans,” CNN reported of its exit polls:
And about 8 in 10 of Trump’s voters denied the legitimacy of President Joe Biden’s election win in 2020, highlighting the election denialism that remains widespread among his supporters.… Haley’s backers present a near mirror image: about 7 in 10 said they were registered as undeclared prior to Tuesday, and the vast majority acknowledged the results of the 2020 election.
She Persists
After Trump thumped her in New Hampshire, Haley remained enthused.
“What a great night, God is so good,” she said after the defeat:
Thank you, New Hampshire for … a great night here tonight.…
Now you’ve all heard the chatter among the political class. They’re falling all over themselves saying this race is over. Well, I have news for all of them. New Hampshire is first in the nation. It is not the last in the nation. This race is far from over.
There are dozens of states left to go. And the next one is my sweet state of South Carolina. At one point in this campaign, there were 14 of us running. And we were at 2 percent in the polls. Well, I’m a fighter … and now we’re the last one standing next to Donald Trump. And today we got close to half the votes. We have a ways to go, but we keep moving up.
Haley said she voted for Trump twice, was proud to serve in his Cabinet, and agrees with many of his policies. But “it’s time to put the negativity and chaos behind us.” Noting that Republicans have lost every election since Trump took over the GOP, Haley said that Democrats are eager to run against him because he “is the only Republican in the country who Joe Biden can defeat.”
“A Trump nomination is a Biden win and a Kamala Harris presidency,” she continued. “I defeat Biden handily.” With Trump, “you have one bout of chaos after another,” she continued:
This court case, that controversy, this tweet, that senior moment. You can’t fix Joe Biden’s chaos with Republican chaos.
She then accused Trump of being senile and afraid to debate her. Trump, she said, is too old to serve. “Most Americans do not want a rematch between Biden and Trump,” she continued:
The first party to retire its 80-year-old candidate is going to be the party that wins this election.
Republican voters don’t agree that she defeats Biden “handily.”
The latest RCP average of polls pitting Haley against Biden show her ahead by a razor-thin 1.1 points, and she lost to him in three of the last six polls.
Trump is ahead of Biden by 3.8 points, and prevailed in four of the last five polls.
