New Hampshire Primary in Context
Donald Trump’s victory in New Hampshire raises two painful questions for the future of Nikki Haley’s drive for the presidency.
Most obviously, the candidate must be asking herself whether to continue to campaign when the upcoming primary battles—beginning with Haley’s home state of South Carolina a month from now—will unfold in venues less hospitable for her brand of Republican politics than the relatively well-educated, independent-minded and middle-of-the-road electorate in New Hampshire. Skeptical pundits predict ongoing frustration for the former ambassador and her backers: If she can’t prevail in the Granite State, where can she actually expect to beat Trump and begin to undermine his status as the unassailable frontrunner?
The second question involves the funding of her continuing candidacy. After her also-ran efforts in both Iowa and New Hampshire, why should even her most enthusiastic supporters continue to pour more money into a long-shot cause with scant prospect of ultimate success? That challenge becomes especially acute as the campaign calendar approaches Super Tuesday with its 16 simultaneous primaries on March 5, when any contender would need tens of millions of dollars to compete credibly.
Despite these daunting obstacles to the survival of her campaign, several under-played factors indicate that Ambassador Haley is right in her announced intention to keep fighting to catch up to the frontrunner, while offering her donors a potentially meaningful return for their continued contributions.
First of all, the New Hampshire vote amounted to an underwhelming triumph for Team Trump and provided a few reasons for encouragement for Haley and her helpers. On the most obvious level, Nikki more than doubled her percentage of the vote from eight days ago in Iowa—from 19% to 43%, while capturing at least nine delegates for the Republican convention (compared to the MAGA Man’s twelve). Meanwhile, Trump’s percentage of the vote barely increased—from 51% in Iowa (where he faced three very active opponents) to only 54% against his single surviving rival in New Hampshire.
More importantly, The Donald’s court room calendar makes it much more likely that he will lose momentum in the next few weeks rather than building his campaign into an implacable juggernaut. A fascinating question in the New Hampshire exit polls (as reported on CBS News) highlighted some of the potentially mortal dangers presented by Trump’s ongoing legal entanglements. The election day survey asked all voters who participated in the GOP primary: “Is Trump fit to be President if he is convicted of a crime?” In response, 47% of those who took part in today’s voting offered a resounding NO. Even more surprising, a full 11% of those who voted for Trump also answered NO—which equates to a big YES as to his unsuitability for high office. In other words, if those primary supporters who backed Trump but thought he’d be unfit with a conviction, had declined to vote for him in the nation’s first primary, Haley, not Trump, would have emerged with a victory. In Iowa, by the way, nearly a third of caucus-goers (many of them Christian Evangelicals) told pollsters that a conviction of any kind would render Trump inappropriate for the presidency.
No one paying attention to the multiple court cases consuming so much of the former president’s attention can rule out the very real possibility of one—or several—legal setbacks for the candidate between now and Super Tuesday. As the only remaining opponent to a complicated and compromised candidacy, Nikki Haley’s continuing campaigning would leave her in an obvious position to benefit from any such plausible problem.
These considerations bring us to the second and immediately pressing dilemma for discouraged donors to the Haley campaign who may feel reluctant to continue funding a seemingly lost cause. But that logic only applies if you define the purpose of that cause as installing Nikki Haley as President of the United States. In truth, many of the candidate’s most generous and dedicated backers are less concerned about giving her the keys to presidential power, than they are determined to keep Donald Trump from reoccupying his former residence on Pennsylvania Avenue.
So far in her campaign, Haley has drawn considerable criticism for going easy on her Trump attacks, and staying away from obvious questions about character, integrity and temperament concerning her opponent. In her remarks on Primary Night in New Hampshire, she all but announced her intention to expose and emphasize these vulnerabilities as her campaign continues. Such a change in course may not enable Nikki to win the nomination, but it would certainly weaken Trump for the general election, and help Biden in that November contest. Though Haley herself continues to insist that she would back Trump if he became the GOP nominee, that doesn’t apply to all of her prominent backers, some of whom care more deeply about keeping the MAGA Man away from the White House than they yearn to place Nikki Haley behind the Resolute Desk.
These considerations all underline the sensibility of Haley’s apparent decision to keep going with a campaign in which she’s already invested time, effort and considerable credibility. If the next two months bring Trump nothing but exoneration in the courtrooms he’ll be visiting, and if a negative campaign focusing on his aging, instability and eccentricity fails to stick, she will always have a chance to suspend her candidacy. It would be difficult to re-start an abandoned campaign that’s already taken her so far, but if the situation demands it, and Trump earns an unequivocal success, there’s always time for his one remaining opponent to call it quits.