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      Why New Hampshire Thinks It’s Smarter Than Iowa

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      Now that the Republican presidential primary race has moved to New Hampshire from Iowa, a few things will change.The evangelical Christian social conservatism that dominates Iowa’s Republican politics is out, replaced by fiscal hawkishness and a libertarian streak rooted in the Granite State’s “Live Free or Die” ethos.With Iowa fully in the rearview mirror, expect to hear a variation on the phrase “Iowa picks corn, New Hampshire picks presidents,” a favorite local slogan that aggrandizes the state’s role in the nominating process. Still, ask Pat Buchanan and John McCain about how winning New Hampshire in 1996 and 2000 catapulted them to the White House.One thing is clear: New Hampshire Republicans think their attention to federal spending and the national debt makes them a lot smarter than their Iowa brethren, for whom abortion and transgender issues have been atop the agenda.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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      Major poll gives Trump 16-point lead in New Hampshire days before primary

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      Donald Trump continues to dominate the race for the Republican presidential nomination, enjoying a 16-point lead in New Hampshire days before it becomes the second state to vote, according to a major new poll.Suffolk University, the Boston Globe and NBC found the former president at 50% support in New Hampshire, to 34% for the former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley. Ron DeSantis, the hard-right governor of Florida, who edged out Haley for second in Iowa this week, was a distant third at 5%.In New Hampshire, undeclared voters can take part in state or presidential primaries. Many observers think such voters will have an outsized effect on the Republican primary this year, given the lack of real Democratic contest because Joe Biden is president.In the new poll, Trump dominated among registered Republicans and voters who called themselves conservatives. Haley led among moderates and independents.David Paleologos, director of the Suffolk University Political Research Center in Boston, told the Globe: “Haley’s had a tough week: underperforming in Iowa, trying to answer Trump’s attacks on her positions on social security and immigration, and the recent [Vivek] Ramaswamy endorsement of Trump helping him with younger GOP voters.”Ramaswamy, a brash biotech entrepreneur with whom Haley frequently clashed in debates, dropped out after finishing fourth in Iowa.For Haley, Paleologos said, there was still time “to at least close the gap with undecided voters or even with some Trump voters, and pull Trump below 50”.Other recent polls have shown Haley closing the gap in New Hampshire. On Wednesday, the American Research Group had Haley and Trump tied at 40% each.Not all polls are created equal. The polling analysis site FiveThirtyEight.com gives the American Research Group a C+ rating. Suffolk University gets an A-.After New Hampshire, the next state to vote will be Haley’s own. The FiveThirtyEight average for South Carolina puts Trump at 55%, Haley at 25% and DeSantis at 12%. Nationally, the site puts Trump at 63%, and Haley and DeSantis both 41 points behind.With Trump displaying such dominance despite facing unprecedented legal jeopardy – 91 criminal charges, various civil suits and attempts to keep him off the ballot for inciting an insurrection – most observers think Haley must win in New Hampshire if the primary is to present anything like a meaningful contest.Seeking to present a straight choice between her and Trump, Haley said she would not take part in New Hampshire debates planned for Thursday (to be hosted by ABC) and Sunday (CNN). As Trump has skipped all debates so far, that left DeSantis the only contender willing to appear.Both debates were scrapped. CNN said: “We will continue to pursue other opportunities as the campaign season progresses through 2024, including candidate town halls this week with Ron DeSantis and Nikki Haley.”Haley told CNN that Trump was “who I’m running against, that’s who I want. At the end of the day, he’s the frontrunner … There is nobody else I need to debate.”But on Wednesday Trump was more than 250 miles south of New Hampshire, in court in New York City in a defamation suit brought by the writer E Jean Carroll, whose claim that Trump raped her has already been deemed “substantially true” by the judge.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionClaiming Haley was “terrified of getting smoked” on the debate stage, the DeSantis campaign posted Iowa remarks in which Haley said of Trump: “You can’t have an election and not appear on a debate stage in front of the people who are gonna be voting for you. That’s an arrogant approach to think you don’t have to do that.”Haley and DeSantis were campaigning in New Hampshire on Tuesday but DeSantis was reportedly preparing to switch focus to South Carolina. Once a fundraising juggernaut, the DeSantis campaign has seen donations fall in line with polling results.“It’s a pretty sober conversation in terms of how much more the campaign can raise in this environment,” an unnamed source told the Washington Post. Elsewhere, the DeSantis-supporting Super Pac Never Back Down began laying off staff.DeSantis sought to sound a warning to voters, telling CNN that should Trump be the Republican nominee, the presidential election “will revolve around all these legal issues, his trials, perhaps convictions … and about things like January 6” – the deadly attack on Congress Trump incited as he attempted to overturn his 2020 defeat.Republicans, DeSantis said, would “lose if voters are making a decision based on that. We don’t want it to be a referendum on those issues.”Many agree. Digesting the result in Iowa, JB Pritzker, the Democratic governor of Illinois and a Biden surrogate, told MSNBC: “Almost half of the base of the Republican party showing up for this caucus voted against Donald Trump.“Think about that. I think that is telling. It tells you the weakness of Donald Trump and also the opportunity for Democrats because in the end … if the base doesn’t turn out for Donald Trump in the general election enthusiastically and Democrats turn out [their] base, this is all about independents – and independents don’t like Donald Trump.” More

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      CNN and ABC Cancel Republican Debates Ahead of New Hampshire Primary

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      Neither of the two Republican debates planned for the days before the New Hampshire primary will be happening.CNN canceled the debate it was set to host because only one candidate agreed to participate, the network said on Wednesday, a day after ABC News did the same.The CNN debate had been scheduled for Sunday, and the ABC News/WMUR debate for Thursday. CNN said it would host a town-hall event with Ms. Haley on Thursday instead, after hosting one with Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida on Tuesday.Only Mr. DeSantis, who finished second in the Iowa caucuses, had said he would debate. Former President Donald J. Trump, who won Iowa overwhelmingly, has skipped every debate throughout the campaign. And Nikki Haley, the third-place finisher in Iowa, said on Tuesday that she would not do any more unless Mr. Trump participated.“We’ve had five great debates in this campaign. Unfortunately, Donald Trump has ducked all of them,” Ms. Haley said on X. “He has nowhere left to hide. The next debate I do will either be with Donald Trump or with Joe Biden. I look forward to it.”Ms. Haley is trying to present the race as a two-person contest between her and Mr. Trump despite her third-place showing in Iowa. Her campaign has noted that Mr. DeSantis focused on Iowa largely to the exclusion of other states. He is polling far behind Ms. Haley in New Hampshire, which holds its primary on Jan. 23, and in South Carolina, where Republicans vote on Feb. 24.Mr. Trump, who is far ahead in polls of both states, has been uninterested in debating either of them. He has cast the race as over and himself as the inevitable nominee. More

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      Even if Nikki Haley Shocks Trump in New Hampshire, It Won’t Matter

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      Nikki Haley did well enough in the Iowa caucuses Monday night to keep her supporters’ hopes alive. But her third-place showing, on the heels of Ron DeSantis and a mile behind Donald Trump, was also just disappointing enough to raise doubts about her candidacy.Her plan coming out of Iowa is a classic underdog strategy: Use strong early results to upend expectations in the contests to come, reshaping the dynamic of the race one upset victory at a time. So, the thinking goes, her solid-enough performance in Iowa will propel her higher in New Hampshire, where she holds a strong second place in the polls.It’s possible. But even if Ms. Haley does well in New Hampshire, it won’t matter. That’s because Ms. Haley is starkly out of step with the evolution of her party over the past decade.The shape of today’s Republican electorate can be seen most clearly in national polling of Republican voters, where Mr. Trump has led by a substantial margin for months. Even in the unlikely event that all the voters who have told pollsters in recent weeks that they support Mr. DeSantis, Chris Christie and the former Arkansas governor Asa Hutchinson switched over to Ms. Haley, she would reach only the high 20s, placing her more than 30 points behind Mr. Trump, who sits at around 60 percent. (The voters who have said they support Vivek Ramaswamy, who dropped out of the race on Monday night, would likely switch to Mr. Trump.)Sure, Ms. Haley might peel off some of those Trump voters if she manages to puncture his air of inevitability by knocking him sideways in New Hampshire. But imagining that she could wrest the nomination from him ignores the fact that, if he were to suffer a humiliating setback in New Hampshire, Mr. Trump would be guaranteed to attack her with a viciousness he has so far reserved primarily for Mr. DeSantis. In December, as she climbed in the polls, MAGA loyalists like Tucker Carlson and Steve Bannon offered a preview of these sort of slashing attacks (referring to her as a “hologram” sent by donors or as potentially worse than “Judas Pence”).More important, though, the fulfillment of the Haley campaign’s hopes would require a wholesale shift in preferences among millions of Republican voters.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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      Trump doubled his voting base in Iowa. Here’s who voted for him

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      Iowa Republicans showed up on 15 January in force for Donald Trump, voting overwhelmingly in the nation’s first primary for the former president, whose grip on his party has only deepened as he weathers numerous lawsuits and 91 felony charges relating to his business dealings and involvement in attempts to overturn the 2020 election. The Iowa caucuses confirmed polls that have consistently shown Trump carrying a comfortable lead ahead of the remaining Republican challengers.Before the caucuses, the Florida governor, Ron DeSantis, repeatedly reminded voters and the press that he had toured all of Iowa’s 99 counties. Trump won 98 of them. With the exception of college graduates and voters under 30, who for the most part caucused for DeSantis or the former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley, most other demographic groups reported strong support for Trump this year.Even young Republican voters favored Trump slightly more strongly this year than in the 2016 Iowa caucuses: CNN entrance polls showed a modest 3% jump in caucus-goers under 30 who support Trump, while his share of supporters over the age of 30 nearly doubled across the board.Since 2016, Trump has consolidated support among evangelical Christian voters, a key block in Iowa. Just over 20% of Trump’s Iowa supporters in 2016 self-reported as evangelicals or born-again Christians; evangelicals made up 53% of his supporters in 2024 Iowa polling.Support for Trump among evangelical Christians can be chalked up to “transactional politics” said Anne Nelson, author of Shadow Network: Media, Money, and the Secret Hub of the Radical Right.Their support may be puzzling on the surface – Trump, a philandering and corrupt adulterer twice divorced who is not particularly religious, would seem an unlikely candidate for wide support from the devout. But behind the scenes, leaders in the evangelical movement, including influential members of the Southern Baptist church, struck a deal with Trump in 2016. In exchange for the support and endorsements of church leaders, Trump would afford evangelicals institutional power in his administration. Through an evangelical advisory board, they would help set social policy and do whatever they could to end the legal right to abortion.Leaders in the church, in exchange, crafted a message that would make Trump more palatable to members.To evangelicals, “Trump was not a man of God,” said Nelson. “He was an instrument of God, like King Cyrus, the Persian king in the Bible.”The bargain held: Trump won the support of evangelical voters and then delivered to them a supreme court that overturned Roe v Wade, erasing nearly 50 years of legal precedent that guaranteed the right to abortion.And despite political divisions among prominent pastors in Iowa, support for Trump among evangelical voters increased this year.The Iowa primary may be a reasonable bellwether for evangelical support for him – and as far as it served as a litmus test for Republican party polling, the polling held up. But Iowa’s primary is atypical.Iowa is more racially homogeneous than the rest of the US – more than 85% of Iowans identify as white, and Black people make up only about 4% of the population, compared with the national average of 71% and 12%. While Black men across the US have increasingly reported supporting Trump in polling, there were so few non-white Republican caucus-goers that entrance polling did not register them as a statistically significant bloc.The Republican caucuses are also party meetings, requiring party membership to participate and consisting of an exclusively in-person vote.The time commitment, the fact that caucuses also involve Republican party business, and even the extreme cold in Iowa this week probably affected turnout, which was estimated at 110,000 voters, significantly lower than 2016.“The proportion of rank-and-file Republicans who are going to participate in the caucuses would be fewer than in a typical primary,” said Barbara Trish, a professor of political science at Grinnell College in Iowa.“The smaller the core of participants, the more likely they are to be more ideologically extreme, or more, on average, experienced and active in the party.”The next stop to test the strength and growth of Trump’s base is New Hampshire, which is also demographically less diverse than most of the country and thus not representative of what the US election as a whole will look like. Even so, Trump is predicted to win the state, further cement his monopoly of the party, and box out those who threaten it. More

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      Nikki Haley Looks to New Hampshire Primary With a Focus on Independents

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      The former South Carolina governor has banked her campaign on the state, buoyed by an influx of cash and an advertising blitz as she looks to rebound from Iowa.Former President Donald J. Trump’s resounding victory in Iowa significantly raises the stakes of next week’s New Hampshire primary for Nikki Haley and the increasingly desperate contingent of Republicans who want to move on from Mr. Trump.While Iowa was largely a foregone conclusion at the top, with a spirited battle only for second place, a small but ever narrowing path still exists for Ms. Haley, the former governor of South Carolina, to beat Mr. Trump in New Hampshire. It relies heavily on tens of thousands of independent voters expected to participate in the Republican primary.Ms. Haley, who got a late start in Iowa, has from the beginning banked her campaign on a strong showing in New Hampshire, and has recently been buoyed by an influx of cash from the super PAC supporting her. The demographic makeup of the state is also much more favorable to her than the more rural and conservative Iowa. She has invested significant money and time here — holding 80 events in the state — and has the support of some its top Republicans, including the popular governor, Chris Sununu.“She’s on the ground, she’s in the diner, she’s doing the town halls,” Mr. Sununu said. “She’s answering anybody’s questions. Trump’s not doing that. You’re lucky to get him to fly in once a week to do a rally and then get the heck out of there.”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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      ABC News Cancels G.O.P. Debate After Haley Demands Trump Appear, Too

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      ABC News canceled a Republican presidential debate scheduled for Thursday in New Hampshire, after Ron DeSantis was the only candidate who had agreed to participate.Hours earlier, Nikki Haley said she would not participate in future debates unless either Donald J. Trump or President Biden also participated, after a lower-than-expected result placing third in the Iowa caucuses.Ms. Haley’s statement also cast uncertainty over another upcoming Republican debate in New Hampshire, hosted by CNN and scheduled for Sunday.ABC News said in a statement that it and WMUR-TV had given Mr. Trump and Ms. Haley until 5 p.m. to “commit” to participate. They canceled the debate minutes after the deadline.Mr. Trump has refused to participate in any debates so far.Ms. Haley, a former ambassador to the United Nations under Mr. Trump and a former South Carolina governor, finished third in the Iowa caucuses on Monday just behind Mr. DeSantis, the Florida governor. After failing to overtake Mr. DeSantis in Iowa, Ms. Haley faces heightened pressure in New Hampshire, where polls have shown her within striking distance of Mr. Trump, who dominated in Iowa. The state holds its primary on Jan. 23.Ms. Haley has increasingly come under attack in recent debates as she has risen in the polls, including from Mr. DeSantis and Vivek Ramaswamy, another rival who dropped out of the race after the caucuses and endorsed Mr. Trump.She has accused Mr. Trump of ducking his opponents.“He has nowhere left to hide,” Ms. Haley said in a statement on Tuesday. “The next debate I do will either be with Donald Trump or with Joe Biden. I look forward to it.”The Trump campaign on Tuesday called Ms. Haley “desperate” and said the only voters casting ballots for her were Democrats “trying to interfere in a Republican primary.”Mr. DeSantis, who has ratcheted up his criticism of Ms. Haley at recent debates, including a one-on-one matchup on CNN last week in Iowa, assailed her on Tuesday on social media. He said she was afraid of scrutiny of her time as a Boeing board member after leaving the governor’s office.“The reality is that she is not running for the nomination, she’s running to be Trump’s VP,” Mr. DeSantis wrote. “I won’t snub New Hampshire voters like both Nikki Haley and Donald Trump, and plan to honor my commitments.”Later in the day, Mr. DeSantis went after Ms. Haley for not taking more questions from reporters and voters, calling her campaign “hermetically sealed.” “She will not do what I’m doing right here,” he said as he addressed reporters. More

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      Trump’s 30-point Iowa lead boosts his confidence for New Hampshire win

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      Donald Trump will continue on to the New Hampshire primaries more confident than ever about capturing the Republican nomination after the former president secured a 30-point win in the Iowa caucuses on Monday.Trump won 51% of the vote in Iowa, giving him the largest margin of victory in the history of the state’s Republican caucuses, further securing his position as the Republican frontrunner who will face President Joe Biden in November. Ron DeSantis, the Florida governor, secured a distant second-place finish with 21% of the vote, while Nikki Haley, a former South Carolina governor and UN ambassador, trailed in third place with 19%. The entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy, who came in fourth, dropped out of the race following his disappointing performance, as did the former Arkansas governor Asa Hutchinson.As he delivered his victory speech in Des Moines on Monday night, Trump complimented his opponents as “very smart people, very capable people”, and he appeared to already be turning his attention to a potential general election rematch against Joe Biden.“We’re going to come together. It’s going to happen soon,” Trump told the crowd.Trump’s history-making victory in Iowa intensified skepticism that any of his opponents will be able to overtake him in the Republican primary. Despite the 91 felony counts against him, Trump has maintained a consistent and significant lead in the 2024 US race, and the Iowa results underscored his enduring popularity with the Republican base.Even so, DeSantis voiced optimism as he addressed supporters on Monday night, dismissing any possibility of withdrawing from the race.“Because of your support, in spite of all of that they threw at us, everyone against us, we’ve got our ticket punched out of Iowa,” DeSantis said.Haley also remained undaunted after Trump’s runaway victory. Even though she failed to capture second place, Haley boldly declared that the primary was now “a two-person race” between her and Trump, given her momentum in the next voting state of New Hampshire. According to the FiveThirtyEight average of New Hampshire polls, Haley is now roughly 11 points behind Trump, having cut his lead in half over the past month.“Tonight, I will be back in the great state of New Hampshire,” Haley told supporters in West Des Moines on Monday. “And the question before Americans is now very clear: do you want more of the same, or do you want a new generation of conservative leadership?”The results of the Iowa caucuses indicate Republicans may be quite happy with more of the same.While Haley is looking to New Hampshire for a campaign boost, she also suggested she may not participate in the two upcoming debates in the state this week.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“We’ve had five great debates in this campaign. Unfortunately, Donald Trump has ducked all of them. He has nowhere left to hide,” Haley posted to social media on Tuesday morning. “The next debate I do will either be with Donald Trump or with Joe Biden. I look forward to it.”DeSantis responded that he will remain committed to those debates despite his dismal poll numbers in the state.Meanwhile, some Democrats are playing Trump’s decisive hold on the party as a boon for their party. “If it is Donald Trump, we’ve beat him before and we’ll beat him again,” the vice-president, Kamala Harris, said in an interview with ABC news the night of the Iowa caucus. More