Haley vows to fight on despite Trump win in New Hampshire

This is The Guardian.

The results are in and Donald Trump has won the first-in-the-nation primary contest here in New Hampshire, making it almost inevitable that we are poised for a Trump-Biden rematch in November, the first time that's happened since Eisenhower and Stevenson fought each other twice in the 1950s. And Donald Trump, for one, cannot wait. The reason we have support is because they are so bad at what they're doing and so evil, and they're destroying our country. Despite coming second in a two-person race, Nikki Haley sounded upbeat at her election night event here in Concord.

New Hampshire is first in the nation. It is not the last in the nation.

So, in our final episode of this special three-part series from New Hampshire, I'm wondering, is Nikki Haley right to say we're just getting started or is she finished? Is she admirably determined or delusional? I'm Jonathan Friedland, columnist at The Guardian, and this is Politics Weekly America.

He is beloved by Republican voters in a way that he wasn't eight years ago. He's lost a little bit of support from 2020, but not that much. If you look at the exit polling on, when people made their minds up, everyone who made their minds up before the last couple of weeks, not everybody, he won them by 20 points. And you found that if you talk to voters around the state, even outside his rallies,

Yeah. So that brings the next question, Lauren, to you, which is sort of why he did win. Why did she, it's the same question, but from the other end, why did Nikki Haley not win?

I think she always had an uphill challenge because even with the independents who decided to pull a Republican ballot today, you know, she's still overcoming Trump's huge margins among Republicans, you know, conservative, the base voters. I think there's a lot of different elements to it. You know, I talked to some veterans of New Hampshire presidential campaigns who thought she should have done more barnstorming. She did that in the last few days, but they were pretty critical of how she started the week and, you know, not having a bigger footprint in the state. They were also wanted to hear more anti-Trump messaging from her, which she didn't really lean into until later.

Yeah. I mean, we'll get into all of these different aspects of it. It's amazing that after a year, really, of campaigning, Nikki Haley came here a year ago and all that's happened in the last months and then weeks, in the end, it happened very quickly. Just after eight o'clock in the polls, all the polls were closed. It happened so fast that we actually shocked one supporter here because it ended up being me breaking the news to her that Nikki Haley had lost.

I don't know if you were in there and you heard her speech.

No.

Oh, you didn't know that. OK, so she has now accepted. she didn't win and your face looks very disappointed. That's a picture of disappointment. I did not see that.

That's why everyone's going now, yeah. Oh, wow.

OK, then.

Yeah, I didn't know that. So, now that you do know that, how do you feel that she did lose this race?

I don't know.

You know, some people obviously just reeling from it. Nevertheless, in the room tonight, they were sort of bouncing up and down and celebrating as if it was some kind of win. Yeah, so I'm still extremely positive.

You know, I want to. I was hoping for the race to be close and it is close, especially given.

the last minute dropout from Ron DeSantis.

You know, it was you didn't know how people were going to swing with that. But I'm feeling very optimistic and that I'm happy. she's going to continue on and I'm going to follow her until I can.

And Nikki Haley said her message was, you know, we're just getting started and that we're going to fight on.

They won an election.

And we're going to give them one.

Is that true, David? Michael, do you think she's going to?

She has enough resources to continue campaigning. What the Trump campaign is trying to do, and they started in New Hampshire, is roll out all the supporters they have in South Carolina and say there is no point in you campaigning. the governor, who Trump, has joked about appointing Haley in order to put in office the lieutenant governor. He elevated to that role. Governor, supports him.

Yeah, I mean, I did wonder, Lauren, that if she can't win here, just to mangle the old Frank Sinatra song, if she can't make it here, she can't make it anywhere. Because this is the one place that was really favorable for her. because of what we just heard from Dave about how independents could cross over and undeclared voters. And even the Republicans, some of them were quite Trump skeptical. South Carolina is going to be a really steep hill to climb.

Absolutely. And, you know, the religious element, it does make a difference, because here she didn't, she wasn't up against that. And she was, yeah, she was appealing to people who, you know, were at least open to her message, just more moderate electorate. So I just, yeah, it's hard to see how she does this going forward. But at the same time, because it is her home state, because she's been elected twice, she can keep saying that.

And we and I, too, actually talking to people after this, came across. people absolutely lifted and cheered by that, as if they weren't going to have to go home thinking about defeat and disappointment, but instead very upbeat. I'm not disappointed at all.

What do you mean? disappointed?

Well, because Mickey didn't win in New Hampshire.

Oh, my God,

Well, we should know that it's much nicer in South Carolina this time of year than New Hampshire.

Maybe that's why all these New Hampshire people were telling us they're going to get in their cars and go down to South Carolina. They fancy a bit of winter sun. Actually, I have an RV and I've got it all gas stop.

I just checked and we got the magnets on the side and we're driving through South Carolina.

and helping support her campaign. I mean, it's good to hear people wanting to stay engaged and obviously not feel as if their hopes have been crushed. But, Dave, I do wonder, is it sort of delusional even for them to be thinking that, or is there something that we should be alive to, which is that Nikki Haley has this track record of beating the establishment. She's mentioned that. She was the underdog when she first became governor, took on a whole lot of the fellas, as she always puts it.

Yeah, that's a very flexible term. One thing I'd add, though, about Haley winning in 2010, her victory. she talks about overcoming the attorney general, the now governor, all these better known Republicans in the primary, is she was the Tea Party candidate. She had Sarah Palin's endorsement. She put together what became a big chunk of the Trump coalition, which she cannot win.

Yeah. I mean, this comes back to the problem that she is reliant outside New Hampshire on Republican voters. And the trouble is, Republicans don't really vote for her. I mean, the numbers here in New Hampshire among Republicans, not all the undeclared, and so on. She's just massively behind there.

So, I mean, Haley tried here. She really played up her endorsement from Don Bolduc, who lost his Senate bid after denying the legitimacy of the 2020 election. He had Trump's backing. And in the general, he tried to say that he tried to reverse his claims on the election. So he was someone who went all in on Trump and it cost him.

Let's just talk about the speeches both candidates have made. That's always part of election night. And you wait in these hotel ballrooms for the candidates to come in. We heard Nikki Haley here in Concord. But Donald Trump is still on his feet talking as we're all talking because he goes long.

And she was up and I said, wow, she's doing like a speech like she won. She didn't win.

She lost. For saying that she will be under investigation and then saying Ron DeSantis would have been too. But he got out in time, as if if he makes it to the White House, he is going to turn, you know, the federal criminal justice system against her. And at one point said, I don't get angry. I get even.

Yes. And maybe that was a preview of what would happen in South Carolina, because he has been. he's never had a problem in elevating a fringe story or something that maybe wouldn't pass muster by a newspaper that cares about libel. For example, he has attacked her over her birth name, which is not Nikki. It's Nimrata, something that she has.

Yeah, because he does not like it if people don't fall in line. And I know there were some people in the Haley camp who were almost hoping that would happen, that they could provoke him because he shows that sort of uglier side and maybe turns off some voters. She said, Lauren, tonight that I'm a fighter and I'm scrappy.

And today we got close to half of the vote.

We still have a ways to go, but we keep moving up.

And I wondered if a lot of people that probably you and I have both been meeting across the state, they felt she wasn't scrappy enough. She wasn't enough of a fighter. She didn't really go for Donald Trump's throat the way he would if he was in her position. And I noticed, even when she's still going with this, stuff about chaos follows him as if it's like bad luck, nothing to do with him. She got it in her to be more of a fighter, because it sounds like, from what we're hearing, she needs to be.

She based her whole campaign on this idea of telling hard truths. And yet the truths that she tells aren't really that hard. They're kind of just facts that she packages around. being tough. She'll say, here's my hard truth.

I suppose the problem is there is an anti-Trump vote out there in the country, but it's not inside the Republican Party in enough numbers to win the Republican nomination. And maybe that was sinking in a little bit with some of the voters who we spoke to tonight, big Nikki Haley supporters who, despite the upbeat message from the candidate themselves, left feeling rather downcast.

And yet the American people say they don't want 80-year-olds running.

But you know what? This is the deal.

The number one and two bestselling books are cookbooks and diet books. You know, I mean, that's the thing. That's, it's a. it's a problem.

So we're talking obviously tonight all about the Republican race and whether or not Donald Trump has locked it up. There was a contest on the other side among Democrats. It was the lowest sort, of most muted contest possible. Just tell us, first of all, why it was a muted contest and what we should read into the numbers that did come out of it.

Yes, it was muted because of the president's decision, backed by the Democratic National Committee, to push the calendar around to have South Carolina vote first because it's a majority black state, because Biden won it on his way to presidency. New Hampshire has a law that requires it to hold the first primary. And so it kept it. Biden decided not to compete in it officially. And Dean Phillips, the congressman from from Minnesota, who is just now getting known, point he made in his concession tonight is that he'd been in this 10 weeks.

There were some usherings on what they did. If Joe Biden got somehow below 50 percent, everyone would start making the historical point that Dave just made about Lyndon Johnson. Actually, Joe Biden, despite really taking a risk by dissing New Hampshire by moving their primary, not campaigning, not having his name on the ballot. He comes out unscathed.

That's how it's looking like. I mean, he. yeah, I talked to some voters today who are holding the right in science at the at different polling places around the state. And, you know, a few of them said, like, we're sad, we don't have the fun primary. That was the quote, the fun primary.

Now, tell me if I'm being succumbing to Nikki Haley style delusion. But the one thought that did strike me actually in the ballroom, as she was giving her sort of pseudo victory speech, was maybe one of the winners tonight is Joe Biden. And I don't mean because he won his primary, but rather because this whole exercise, and the longer she stays in, shows that there are a lot of people, in fact, a majority, who are anti-Trump, because there's a good chunk within the Republican Party. And obviously, there's all the Democrats on the other side. The longer this goes on, the more you see that there is a body of opinion, maybe small.

It is. And we could get into all the reasons that he is suffering in the polling right now. Every image from Ukraine or Gaza emphasizes that there are conflicts that didn't exist when Trump was president. That's a big problem for Biden. But what Democrats will tell you is they wanted to get to a point where, if he is frozen in people's minds as the likely nominee, does that mean more attention on the oddball things he says on True Social?

Of course, though, I would say the big X factor are these third-party candidates. And I spoke to so many people today who said that they would look at third-party candidates if it was Trump v. Biden. And of course, I think there is that element of when it actually becomes Trump, then you think differently. But as of right now, there was just real dislike and disbelief that it might be a Trump-Biden rematch in 2024..

And then we're going to be debating all year about who that hurts most, Trump, Biden. It will depend on which third-party candidate. There is going to be so much to talk about that. As it stands now, it does look as if a Trump-Biden rematch is on for November 2024.. And in a way, the voters of New Hampshire have made that much more likely.

Thank you very much.

Thank you for having me.

So, after really a year of focusing on this Republican contest, it comes down to the battle that we sort of always knew was looming, which is a rerun of that bitter contest in November 2020.

This is The Guardian.