Haley and Trump Battle for Future of GOP in New Hampshire

SALEM, New Hampshire — Nikki Haley, the business-friendly moderate, insisted that in America, coronations are out of character, while Donald Trump, the billionaire populist, prepared for one, arguing that Republicans must unify around him and his inevitable return to the White House.

Even Chris Sununu admitted things had gotten confusing.

“It is really a role reversal,” said the New Hampshire governor who has led Haley on a whirlwind tour of his state. On the eve of the first in the nation primary, Sununu told MSNBC that Trump “was supposed to be the anti-establishment guy, but no, now Nikki is. She is the one bucking the trends.”

Sitting across from Sununu, Jen Psaki, President Biden’s former press secretary turned talk show host, nodded along. Welcome to the topsy-turvy realignment of the Republican presidential primary. It could end in the next 24 hours. For Haley, New Hampshire may very well be “do or die.”

She is the last rival standing to the political and cultural phenomenon that is Trump. He has largely remade the GOP in his own image such that he can pack stadiums with adoring fans while also corralling party brass from across the country to stump on his behalf. In New Hampshire alone, his procession has included old-guard governors, new-right firebrands, and even the ranking member of the Senate Banking Committee. A stop on Sunday at the Rochester Opera House was literally packed to the rafters.

Allegations of elitism flew back and forth between the former president and his former ambassador to the United Nations.

“What I will say to Donald Trump,” Haley said inside the chic Artisan Hotel in Salem, “is if you have that political elite, you can keep them because that’s never who I wanted to work for.” At her last stop of the day, she told a crowd of more than 700 supporters that she “always wanted to serve the people.”

An hour north, at the Margate Resort in Laconia, Trump accused Haley of making “an unholy alliance with RINOs, Never Trumpers … globalists and radical left communists to get liberals and Biden supporters to vote for her in the Republican primary.”

Whomever New Hampshire voters believe could determine the nomination and direction of the country. Analysts and allies agree that if Haley is to mount a real challenge, it must start in the Granite State. She trails in the RealClearPolitics Average by more than 18%. Regardless, Greg Moore reported that “the vibe is good.”

State director of Americans for Prosperity, a libertarian group founded by the billionaire Koch brothers, Moore told RCP that public polling in New Hampshire “has been terrible” of late. More than 100 doorknockers from AFP have fanned out across the state in support of Haley, and Moore insists the state is winnable. “From a demographic perspective,” he said, “it is essentially a white-collar suburb.”

Trump enjoys his strongest support in rural America, Moore said, noting his double-digit win in Iowa. But he traditionally lags in suburban areas like New Hampshire, he added of the state whose electorate is made up of as much as 40% independent voters. The state, Moore concluded, “magnifies the effects of where he underperforms.”

Ohio Sen. JD Vance told RCP that the contest boils down to whether Republicans want to return to “the party of Dick Cheney,” the former vice president, or the economic and foreign policy populism of Trump. A venture capitalist and author of the best-selling memoir “Hillbilly Elegy” before politics, Vance said that the GOP old guard, particularly in the Senate, “have presided over the decline of the country.” A U.S. Marine and graduate of Harvard Law School, Vance is also reportedly on the short list for VP.

Vance said that Trump forces the GOP establishment “to recognize that if the old way of doing politics had worked for the average Republican voter, then Jeb Bush would have won in 2016.” Fresh off a tour of New Hampshire in support of the former president, he added that if conservatism wasn’t in need of an update, “Nikki Haley would be winning in 2024, but that is not working.” He chalked up lingering resistance to Trump to the fact that for established Republicans, “it is hard to admit failure.”

Failure is a favorite topic of Sununu as he travels the state. Republicans can’t whip inflation, reduce gas prices, and get mortgage rates under control, the Haley campaign regularly argues, if they lose to Biden again. “We lost in 2018 and in 2020,” the governor bellowed in Salem, laying those electoral failures at the feet of the former president. “We were going to get that ‘big red wave’ in ’22. Hey Donald Trump, where the F is the red wave? Give me a break!”

A central plank of the Haley pitch is that she is best positioned to win outright, thus sparing Republicans another “nail-biter of an election.” According to the RealClearPolitics Average, Trump beats Biden in a theoretical head-to-head matchup by two points.Haley, in a similar contest, leads the president by a little more than a point. Another unmentioned factor: Trump’s legal troubles. A recent Ipsos/Reuters poll, meanwhile, found that more than half of Americans, 58%, would not vote for Trump if he were convicted of a crime by a jury.

Haley insisted at the last stop that she was the one building a coalition to last. Retired Army Brig. Gen. Don Bolduc, a veteran of 10 tours in Afghanistan, who ran unsuccessfully for the Senate in 2020 with Trump’s support, has endorsed Haley and was seated in the Artisan Hotel audience. “He’s as conservative as they get,” she said. “And then you have Chris Sununu, who’s a moderate,” she continued, “but the point is, we’ve got everybody.”

Trump has his own big tent, and it includes established MAGA royalty, none more prominent than his namesake. Inside a quaint winery outside the town of Hollis, Donald Trump Jr. told an at-capacity crowd that as the son of a billionaire, he was “very self-aware.” He still sees how expensive it is to buy groceries or fast food. “And if I see that,” he continued, “what’s going to happen to a hard-working American family, who makes maybe 50, 60, or $75,000 a year? They’re getting crushed. It’s disgusting.” He repeated his father’s calls to “unify” and not “drag out” the primary, a contest he called “basically over.”

A cabal of donors and globalists, the younger Trump said, don’t care whether Biden or Haley occupies the Oval Office. “For them, it doesn’t matter,” and he added, “They have their dancing monkey, they’ll wind the strings.” There was no difference between the other Republican in the race, he continued, and the Democrat his father defeated on his way to the White House: “Haley is basically Hillary dressed up as a conservative for Halloween with the added benefit of wanting to send all your children to die in every war imaginable.”

Trump has split his time between the courtroom and the campaign trail. When RCP asked if his father could win a general election if convicted, the eldest Trump son replied of his father’s legal challenges, “The American people aren’t stupid. They understand that they’ve been lied to for years. And they understand exactly what’s going on now and why, and I think they’re smart enough to see through it.”

Haley makes a similar calculation about the discernment of Americans, albeit when it comes to political arguments, not legal ones. She told the Salem crowd that she had seen Trump’s claims that she opposed the border wall, wanted to cut Social Security, and supported tax increases. “I want to tell you every single one of those commercials by Donald Trump is a lie,” she said. “Check the fact-checkers.”

“He can say it all he wants,” she continued, zeroing in on one line of attack stemming from her support for U.S. military aid to Ukraine. “I am not a war monger. You are not the wife of a combat veteran,” she said, referencing her husband who is currently deployed overseas with the South Carolina National Guard, “and someone who wants war – we are the opposite; we don’t want war.”

 “If you have got to lie to win,” she concluded, “you don’t deserve to win. It’s that simple.”

While barbs about who is cozying up to the political elite, and who is being dishonest about their ties to the actual establishment, flew back and forth, outside the last Haley stop of the day, Michael Shea felt very much like the forgotten man.

Undecided but leaning toward Trump, Shea came to the event on his day off to deliver a simple message: He and many others are “barely surviving.” It would have been fertile ground for Haley, who regularly warns that American parents increasingly worry they won’t be able to leave their children better off. He believes that will be the case “unless this election goes the Republican way.”

But the event wrapped up without questions, disappointing the Army veteran who now works in law enforcement. Shea doesn’t care much for rhetoric. “I care about what affects me,” he said. “What affected me is that I paid three bills today for my children, and it cost me $843.” He clarified that he meant “regular bills: a heating bill, a water bill, and groceries to get us to Friday.”

Shea does not hold out for hope from Washington. “I’ve been told, you don’t matter, you don’t matter, you don’t matter,” the father of four said as he headed for the exit.

This article was originally published by RealClearPolitics and made available via RealClearWire.