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      Nikki Haley Vows to Fight On Against Trump After New Hampshire Loss

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      Former Gov. Nikki Haley of South Carolina on Tuesday defied calls to drop out of the race for the Republican nomination, vowing to fight on after a second straight defeat at the hands of former President Donald J. Trump.In rousing remarks, Ms. Haley looked ahead to the coming primary contest in South Carolina, where she is lagging far behind Mr. Trump in polls despite a home-state advantage.“New Hampshire is first in the nation. It is not the last in the nation. This race is far from over,” Ms. Haley said, adding, “We’re going home to South Carolina.”Borrowing signature lines from her stump speeches, Ms. Haley noted how far she had come since the race first opened, when she was polling at just over 2 percent, declaring herself “a fighter.”“And I’m scrappy. And now we’re the last ones standing next to Donald Trump,” she added.Ms. Haley also turned up the heat on Mr. Trump, the dominant front-runner in the Republican race who is fighting 91 felony charges, criticizing him as equally bad for the country as another four years of President Biden. She also took another dig at Mr. Trump’s mental fitness and his 77 years of age.“With Donald Trump you have one bout of chaos after another,” she said. “This court case, that controversy, this tweet, that senior moment. You can’t fix Joe Biden’s chaos with Republican chaos.”In her final Granite State appearances before polls closed, Ms. Haley had rejected claims that Republican voters had already solidly united behind the former president, and pledged not to end her bid no matter the result.“I didn’t get here because of luck,” she said at a polling site in Hampton, N.H., while flanked by supporters, including Gov. Chris Sununu, her top surrogate in the state. “I got here because I outworked and outsmarted all the rest of those fellas. So I’m running against Donald Trump, and I’m not going to talk about an obituary.”Mr. Trump, speaking to supporters at his victory party, mocked Ms. Haley for speaking “like she won.” But “she didn’t win — she lost,” he added.On Wednesday morning, Ms. Haley is expected to speak during a Republican State Committee meeting in the Virgin Islands, which holds its contest on Feb. 8. She is then anticipated at a homecoming rally in Charleston, S.C.A number of people close to Ms. Haley are encouraging her to keep going, many who are deeply opposed to Mr. Trump’s becoming the nominee again.Betsy Ankney, her campaign manager, released a memo early Tuesday morning shooting down suggestions that Mr. Trump’s path to the nomination was inevitable. She pointed to the 11 of the 16 states that vote on Super Tuesday that have “open or semi-open primaries” that can include independent voters and are “fertile ground for Nikki.”Nevada will host a Republican caucus on Feb. 8, but Ms. Haley is not competing in that contest, instead participating in a Republican primary in the state two days earlier that awards no delegates.Her campaign has bought over $1 million in television advertising from Tuesday through Feb. 6, according to AdImpact, a media-tracking firm.And officials at her allied super PAC, Stand for America, said they, too, planned to forge ahead.Mark Harris, the lead strategist for the PAC, said it was prepping television, mail and digital advertising in a get-out-the-vote effort that would look similar to the programs it took on in Iowa and New Hampshire, though as of Tuesday it had not yet made those investments.“We’re running the outsider candidacy, so this was never going to happen all magically in one day, and so we’re going to keep pushing ahead,” Mr. Harris said.Since the summer, Ms. Haley has predicted that the Republican nominating contest would result in a showdown between herself and Mr. Trump in her home state. Her outward confidence in that scenario has not faltered — not after she failed to place second in Iowa, not after her top rival for No. 2, Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, dropped out and endorsed Mr. Trump, not after a slate of South Carolina legislators this week joined Mr. Trump on the stump in the final days of the New Hampshire race.Her message to his allies and the news media: She has been here before.“I won South Carolina twice as governor,” she told reporters Friday at a retro diner in Amherst. “I think I know what favorable territory is in South Carolina.”Maggie Haberman More

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      Did No One Tell Ron DeSantis That Trump Was Running, Too?

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      Despite the early enthusiasm for his policies and political persona in various corners of the conservative media, it was easy to see from the start that Ron DeSantis would not — and clearly does not — have the juice to defeat or supplant Donald Trump in a Republican presidential primary.Part of this was the Florida governor’s soft skills or rather lack thereof. He is not a people person. He does not excel at the task of retail politics. He is not, to put it gently, strong on the stump, and he has a bad habit of speaking in the esoteric and jargon-filled language of online conservatives.Consider his first major performance in Iowa last year, in front of an audience of likely Republican caucusgoers. “We say very clearly in the state of Florida that we will fight the woke in the Legislature,” DeSantis said, as he tried to rouse the crowd to applause. “We will fight the woke in education, we will fight the woke in the businesses, we will never ever surrender to the woke mob. Our state is where woke goes to die.”There is a relatively small group of people for whom this is a resonant message. For everyone else, it is basically static. It doesn’t speak to the animating concerns of the blue-collar voters who will make or break a campaign in the Republican primary. DeSantis’s inability to craft a compelling message, however, may not have been fatal to his campaign if he had been able to distance or distinguish himself from Trump in any meaningful way. The opportunities were there. DeSantis could have used the multiple criminal indictments against the former president to make the practical case that Trump would not win if he was in jail.But DeSantis chose to run as Trump’s heir apparent and treated him as though he wasn’t actually in the race. He could not turn on the former president without undermining the premise of his own campaign. And so DeSantis sat silent or even defended Trump against legal accountability for his actions in office. “Washington, D.C. is a ‘swamp’ and it is unfair to have to stand trial before a jury that is reflective of the swamp mentality,” DeSantis wrote on the website formerly known as Twitter after Trump was charged with four felony counts by a federal grand jury in connection with his effort to overturn the 2020 election. “One of the reasons our country is in decline is the politicization of the rule of law. No more excuses — I will end the weaponization of the federal government.”To the extent that DeSantis tried to differentiate himself from the former president, it was by running to Trump’s political right. The Florida governor in this view would be a more competent Trump — the Trump who gets things done. It was a good pitch for the conservative intellectuals who wanted to support a Trump-like figure without embracing Trump himself. But it was a terrible pitch to the Republican electorate, which did not nominate Trump in 2016 — or turn out in 2020 — because of Trump’s ability to clear a checklist of agenda items.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

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      Nikki Haley Memo Ahead of New Hampshire: ‘We Aren’t Going Anywhere’

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      Nikki Haley’s campaign has a message for all those who are declaring her presidential candidacy all but over should she lose in New Hampshire to Donald J. Trump on Tuesday. “We aren’t going anywhere,” wrote Ms. Haley’s campaign manager, Betsy Ankney, in a memo about the path forward for Ms. Haley, which was provided first to The New York Times.In the memo, Ms. Ankney described how Ms. Haley, the former governor of South Carolina and former United Nations ambassador, outlasted all the other candidates for her one-on-one shot at Mr. Trump and would not be dissuaded from fighting on, even if “members of Congress, the press, and many of the weak-kneed fellas who ran for president are giving up and giving in.”Read the documentIn a memo, Nikki Haley’s campaign manager wrote that “We aren’t going anywhere.”Read DocumentThe memo reads as something of a direct response to the Trump campaign’s ongoing efforts to make her departure from the race feel inevitable, if not immediate.Ms. Haley herself, in an appearance on Tuesday on Fox News, said she was staying in regardless of the outcome.“No, I don’t get out if I lose today,” Ms. Haley said. “Again, I’m going to say this, we’ve had 56,000 people vote for Donald Trump, and you’re going to say that’s what the country wants? That’s not what the country wants.”In the memo, Ms. Ankney attempted to push back on the argument, as she put it, that “New Hampshire is ‘the best it’s going to get’ for Nikki due to independents and unaffiliated voters being able to vote in the Republican primary.”After New Hampshire, where voting is underway, the next major collision for the two candidates would be in South Carolina in a month, on Feb. 24, after a tiny battle for delegates in the U.S. Virgin Islands on Feb. 8.Ms. Ankney noted that in South Carolina there is no party registration, meaning anyone who does not vote in the Democratic primary on Feb. 3 could vote in the Republican one later in the month. More significantly, she pointed out that 11 of the 16 states that vote on Super Tuesday have “open or semi-open primaries” that can include independent voters and are “fertile ground for Nikki.”“Until then, everyone should take a deep breath,” Ms. Ankney wrote. “The campaign has not even begun in any of these states yet. No ads have been aired and candidates aren’t hustling on the ground. A month in politics is a lifetime. We’re watching democracy in action. We’re letting the people have a voice. That’s how this is supposed to work.”Ms Ankney cited Virginia, Texas, Maine, Massachusetts, Minnesota, North Carolina and Vermont as Super Tuesday states with “favorable demographics,” and noted that Michigan, which votes after South Carolina, is also an open-primary state.“After Super Tuesday, we will have a very good picture of where this race stands,” she wrote.Of course, all campaigns say they are pushing on — until they aren’t. Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida had scheduled an event in New Hampshire on Sunday that he only canceled after withdrawing from the race in a video recorded in Florida.Ms. Haley has scheduled a number of fund-raisers in the coming weeks in California, Florida, New York and Texas, and has already booked a $4 million television buy in South Carolina.Mr. Trump’s campaign has been ratcheting up the pressure on Ms. Haley to exit the race if she has a poor showing.The Trump campaign’s top two advisers, Chris LaCivita and Susie Wiles, put out a memo on Sunday, after Mr. DeSantis ended his campaign, arguing that Ms. Haley “must win New Hampshire” in order to remain viable.If she remains in the race through her home state of South Carolina, they warned, she would be “absolutely DEMOLISHED and EMBARRASSED,” using capital letters for emphasis.Ms. Ankney appeared to respond in her missive, using her own capitals to make one final point about the choice for the G.O.P.: “DO REPUBLICANS WANT TO WIN?”“See y’all in South Carolina,” the memo ends. More

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      What’s a Never-Trump Conservative to Do?

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      David French and Jillian Weinberger and Donald Trump is expected to win decisively in New Hampshire’s primary on Tuesday. For Republican voters who don’t want Trump as their nominee, what alternatives exist?In this audio interview, the deputy Opinion editor, Patrick Healy, talks with Opinion columnist David French about how a probable Trump nomination will “cement a significant change in two directions with the G.O.P.”(A full transcript of this audio essay will be available midday on the Times website.)Illustration by Akshita Chandra/The New York TimesThe Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow the New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, X (@NYTOpinion) and Instagram.This episode of “The Opinions” was produced by Jillian Weinberger with help from Vishakha Darbha. It was edited by Alison Bruzek and Annie-Rose Strasser. Mixing by Carole Sabouraud with engineering support from Isaac Jones. Original music by Sonia Herrero. Fact-checking by Kate Sinclair. Audience strategy by Kristina Samulewski. Source photograph by juliaf/Getty Images. More

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      Judge Judy Hits Campaign Trail for Nikki Haley

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      While former President Donald J. Trump enlists several former rivals to help him deliver a closing argument to New Hampshire primary voters, Nikki Haley, his last remaining Republican opponent, has approached a different kind of bench: Judge Judy.Television’s best known judge, whose real name is Judith Sheindlin, waded into the race on Sunday when she campaigned for Ms. Haley at rally in Exeter, N.H., albeit minus her trademark gavel and robe.It was a rare foray into presidential politics for Ms. Sheindlin, who told CNN on Sunday that Ms. Haley had made a strong impression on her.She pointed out that she was not supporting Ms. Haley, the former South Carolina governor and Mr. Trump’s ambassador to the United Nations, simply because she was a woman.“I would support her if she were a frog,” said Ms. Sheindlin, who supported Michael R. Bloomberg, the former New York City mayor, in his unsuccessful run in the 2020 Democratic primary.Ms. Sheindlin avoided attacking Mr. Trump, the Republican front-runner, but she said he had too many distractions with his criminal and civil cases to focus on governing.The television star argued that Mr. Trump and President Biden’s ages were catching up with them and that “they wouldn’t know a Houthi from a salami,” referring to the Iranian-backed militia in power in Yemen and a deli meat.She said that even she — at 81, the same age as Mr. Biden — hasn’t been able to turn back time.“I need a nap in the afternoon,” said Ms. Sheindlin. “So does Joe Biden, probably two.” More

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      Trump Rakes In Endorsements Before New Hampshire Primary Vote

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      Former President Donald J. Trump has received a flood of endorsements in the final countdown to New Hampshire’s primary, as his allies argue that the 2024 Republican nominating contest is all but over.After Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida backed Mr. Trump in his announcement Sunday that he was quitting the race, a number of his former supporters, including Representative Bob Good of Virginia and Ashley Moody, the Florida attorney general, followed suit.Representative Jeff Duncan of South Carolina, the only member of its congressional delegation who had not yet endorsed, also backed Mr. Trump — making him the seventh of the state’s eight Republican members of Congress to do so. Only one, Representative Ralph Norman, has backed Nikki Haley, the state’s former governor and Mr. Trump’s last remaining rival.Additional endorsements for Mr. Trump poured in on Monday from Republicans from statehouses to Congress. In Georgia, the agriculture commissioner and almost half of its Republican State Senate delegation announced their endorsements of Mr. Trump on Monday, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported.Mr. Trump’s earlier supporters have seized on Mr. DeSantis’s departure from the race to declare Mr. Trump the “presumptive nominee,” though only Iowa has voted so far. Mr. Trump already has the support of Speaker Mike Johnson and the majority of congressional Republicans. After Mr. Trump’s 30-point win in Iowa, Senator Ted Cruz of Texas joined the list of backers.Three of Mr. Trump’s former 2024 rivals for president — Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina; Gov. Doug Burgum of North Dakota; and Vivek Ramaswamy, the biotech entrepreneur — have also lined up behind him. In a closing show of unity among the rest of the G.O.P. field, all three of those men will appear alongside Mr. Trump on Monday night at a rally in Laconia, N.H., according to officials with the Trump campaign.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

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      New Hampshire Street Signs Tell the Story of the Republican Primary

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      This street corner tells the tale of the Republican primary.If you want to understand the New Hampshire primary, stand at the corner of West Broadway and Valley Street in Derry, N.H.There are two huge yard signs — one for Nikki Haley and one for Donald Trump — on adjacent houses. Perhaps a neighbor-on-neighbor feud?Not exactly: When my colleague Michael Bender headed there recently, neighbors told him that the pro-Haley house had been vacant for years, and that political campaigns often planted their signs there. And the pro-Trump house was actually owned by an absentee landlord who lives in Florida.It felt like one big metaphor for this campaign. The race looks like a real contest, with yard signs and all the usual campaign events. Yet when you dig a little deeper, there’s far less going on than it may seem.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More