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      Republican Chris Christie suspends presidential bid

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      The former New Jersey governor Chris Christie has suspended his campaign for the Republican presidential nomination, he announced on Wednesday evening.“It is clear to me tonight that there is not a path to win the nomination,” he said at a town hall in Windham, New Hampshire.The former New Jersey governor, who also ran unsuccessfully for the presidency in 2016, when he lost out to Donald Trump, has been struggling in the polls for weeks and had failed to qualify for the last GOP debate before Monday’s Iowa caucuses kick off the nominating contest of the 2024 race for the White House.He had always stood out as the Republican candidate with the most overtly critical viewpoint of the policies and character of Donald Trump.He has yet to endorse a rival and was heard publicly on an apparent inadvertent “hot mic” before he took the stage in New Hampshire predicting that one, almost certainly Nikki Haley, will “get smoked” in the race for the nomination and that a “petrified” Ron DeSantis, the Florida governor, had called him, while a person he was talking to was heard predicting that the struggling DeSantis would not last beyond next week’s Iowa caucuses. Haley and DeSantis are the closest contenders behind the solid frontrunner, Trump.The hot-mic comments were widely heard on a YouTube audio livestream before Christie’s event began, with the audio being cut abruptly after a few seconds.Appearing before a subdued crowd at the town hall event a few moments later, Christie said: “This race has always been bigger than me.” And he warned the US against re-electing Donald Trump to a second term.“If we put him back behind the desk at the Oval Office, and a choice is needed to be made about whether to put himself first or you [the public] first, how much more evidence do you need? He will put himself first,” Christie said.He had earlier said that if Trump had been president when Islamist terrorists attacked the US on 9/11, “he would have [gone] to the bunker” instead of taking charge to protect the country.Christie said that “this is a fight for the soul of our party” and – echoing a campaign message Joe Biden, the Democratic president, has said many times – he added “and the soul of our country.”He said that if Trump ultimately becomes the Republican nominee, the moment that was going to happen could be traced back to the GOP debate in Milwaukee last August when all the other candidates present – Trump was absent – except Christie himself raised their hands when asked if they would still nominate someone if they had a criminal conviction.If Trump became president again, the US “will remain angry … remain divided”, Christie said.Christie’s exit removes from the race the only candidate willing to base his campaign on attacking Donald Trump, the former president who faces 91 criminal charges arising from his conduct since entering politics, including his attempt to overturn the 2020 election, as well as provoking multiple civil cases and moves to remove him from the ballot in states including Colorado and Maine.A longtime Trump ally and adviser since endorsing him in 2016, Christie stayed loyal even after Trump nearly killed him with Covid-19, only to turn after Trump incited the deadly attack on Congress of 6 January 2021.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionIn a recent campaign ad, Christie said: “Eight years ago when I decided to endorse Donald Trump for president, I did it because he was winning, and I did it because I thought I could make him a better candidate and a better president. Well, I was wrong, I made a mistake.”On the campaign trail, Christie focused on attacking Trump from the debate stage and on campaigning in New Hampshire.Long seen as suspect by hardline Republican voters, largely over his past as governor of an east coast, predominantly Democratic state, he could not make much of an impact.Christie’s failed presidential campaign in 2016 and scandal-tainted record in office – in 2013, he became embroiled in the Bridgegate scandal over political payback – also worked against him.In further details of the apparent hot-mic incident, which was widely reported on social media and in US news outlets, Christie was heard saying to an unknown individual: “She’s going to get smoked, and you and I both know it … She’s not up to this.”He was assumed to be referring to Haley as he then mentioned fundraising numbers that resemble Haley’s. She is the former governor of South Carolina and formerly the Trump-appointed US ambassador to the United Nations.Christie could then be heard saying “DeSantis called me, petrified” and an unknown person responding that DeSantis is “probably getting out after Iowa”.Christie had not, immediately after announcing his campaign suspension, commented on the hot-mic incident. More

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      How Iowa and New Hampshire Democrats Have Reacted to Getting Pushed Back

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      In Iowa, Democrats politely accepted President Biden’s decision to push them back on the presidential nominating calendar. In New Hampshire, they’re fighting it with live-free-or-die stubbornness.A caucus location at Drake Fieldhouse in Des Moines in February 2020.Todd Heisler/The New York TimesVoters casting their ballots in a primary election in Hancock, N.H., in February 2020.Tamir Kalifa for The New York TimesWhen President Biden shook up his party’s presidential nominating calendar, Democrats in the two states that were bounced from the front of the line reacted in far different ways.New Hampshire Democrats are going down kicking and screaming, insisting on holding a primary as if they hadn’t just lost their opening spot.Iowa Democrats, ashamed by a 2020 fiasco that included a dayslong wait for results that were nonetheless riddled with errors, have meekly accepted their fate as primary season also-rans.In what is perhaps a case study in Iowa nice versus live-free-or-die New Hampshire stubbornness, one state is showing that it views its quadrennial parade of visiting presidential candidates as a political birthright, while the other appears to see that spectacle more as a lost perk.“The Iowa Democrats have made a mistake,” said David Scanlan, the New Hampshire secretary of state, a position that has long been the ex officio guardian of the state’s first-in-the-nation primary status. “They’ve lost it for this year, and now the chain is broken.”Mr. Scanlan’s flinty resistance to changing New Hampshire’s primary date to suit party bosses in Washington has bipartisan appeal in the Granite State. Anyone involved in politics there can cite the 1975 state law requiring the state to hold the nation’s first presidential primary contest, codifying what is now a century-old tradition.New Hampshire and the Democratic National Committee are still quarreling over the state’s refusal to move its primary back. On Friday, the national party wrote to New Hampshire Democrats saying that the state’s “meaningless” primary could “disenfranchise and confuse voters.” The New Hampshire attorney general replied on Monday with a cease-and-desist letter saying the D.N.C.’s “meaningless” categorization violated the state’s voter suppression laws.Iowa has a much shorter history of going first, starting in the 1970s: The first president to owe his victory to the state was Jimmy Carter in 1976.Mr. Biden has little political loyalty to either state. In 2020, he placed fourth in Iowa’s caucuses and fifth in the New Hampshire primary. It was a victory in South Carolina, which he has now moved to the front of the Democratic calendar, that propelled him to the party’s nomination and ultimately to the White House.This year, New Hampshire is holding an early primary anyway, with 21 Democrats on its presidential ballot on Jan. 23 — but not Mr. Biden, who skipped the state. Rule-following Iowa Democrats, by contrast, will hold a mail-in primary and have until March to return their ballots.“As soon as Biden became the nominee, the writing was on the wall,” said Pete D’Alessandro, who was a senior Iowa aide for Senator Bernie Sanders’s two presidential campaigns. “The grieving process had a little longer to go through, so we’re probably at a later stage than New Hampshire.”Pete D’Alessandro, who was a senior Iowa aide for Senator Bernie Sanders’s two presidential campaigns, said he had long expected President Biden to push back the state in the primary calendar.Jordan Gale for The New York TimesIowa Democrats have long suspected that their time as a presidential proving ground was up. Even before the 2020 caucus-night meltdown, there were grumblings from inside and outside Iowa about how a nearly all-white state had such influence over how a racially diverse party picked its presidential nominees.While some old-timers cling to a hope that Iowa can regain the first spot in the 2028 cycle, a belief is growing among younger Democrats that the caucuses are a distraction from local organizing work, and that the party’s 2020 presidential candidates presented a left-wing vision of Democrats that helped lead to wipeout Republican victories in the state that year and again in 2022.“Iowa Democrats are really disappointed,” said Tom Miller, a former Iowa attorney general who was one of the first elected officials in the state to endorse Barack Obama in 2008, and then backed Gov. Steve Bullock of Montana in the 2020 caucuses. “The future is certainly not good.”New Hampshire’s opposition has paid off with a series of visits from ambitious Democrats. Gov. J.B. Pritzker of Illinois, Gov. Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania, Representative Ro Khanna of California, Representative Hakeem Jeffries of New York and others have trekked to New Hampshire in recent months to address voters — just in case it might be useful down the road.The path to Iowa has been less traveled, with Gov. Tim Walz of neighboring Minnesota making a couple of trips, including for last summer’s Iowa State Fair.New Hampshire Democrats argue that it is obvious to future presidential candidates that the road to the White House still runs through the state’s town halls and diners. Mr. Scanlan on Monday pronounced himself unimpressed with South Carolina’s anointed spot at the front of the Democratic primary calendar.“I did a Google search for what kind of activity is occurring in South Carolina, and there really isn’t a lot of news there,” he said in an interview on Monday that took place at the exact moment Mr. Biden was delivering a campaign speech in South Carolina. “The only real action is in New Hampshire.”David Scanlan, left, New Hampshire’s secretary of state, with Representative Dean Phillips of Minnesota, as the congressman presented his candidacy form for the Democratic presidential primary race in Concord, N.H., in October. Mr. Phillips, unlike Mr. Biden, will be on the state’s primary ballot.Gaelen Morse/Getty ImagesDemocrats in both Iowa and New Hampshire harbor dreams — most likely to be unrequited with Mr. Biden in the White House — that when the rules for the next presidential primary process are set, they will regain their spots.Ray Buckley, the chairman of the New Hampshire Democratic Party, predicted that the state’s fight for its place on the 2028 calendar would be much more intense than it was for 2024, with Mr. Biden’s renomination viewed by most of the party as an academic exercise.New Hampshire’s plan to win over D.N.C. members in the next cycle, Mr. Buckley said, would involve rallying the party’s progressive members, who remember that Senator Sanders won the state’s primary twice — even though he did not go on to win the nomination either time.“It’s not a secret that the establishment was very angry with New Hampshire for Bernie Sanders winning in 2016 and 2020,” Mr. Buckley said. “I think you’ll see a response from the progressive community across the country.”Iowa’s comeback plan is, as one might expect, a bit more polite.The Iowa Democratic chairwoman, Rita Hart, said she believed there would be “a level playing field” when it came to bidding for the early primaries in 2028. She said she did not expect Mr. Biden to put his thumb on the scale for South Carolina at Iowa’s expense.“We’ve had some really tough conversations with the D.N.C.,” she said. “We would not be where we are right now if we had not gotten reassurance that in 2028 we’ll have every opportunity to get back into the first tier.”Scott Brennan, a former Iowa Democratic Party chairman who was involved in the party’s losing bid to retain its early slot in 2024, said that unlike New Hampshire Democrats, if Iowa Democrats did not get their first-in-the-nation slot back, they would accept that decision.“I think we’ve earned the right to be there,” Mr. Brennan said. “If for nothing else, because the process gave us Barack Obama as president twice.” More

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      Field of bad dreams: Biden rival makes quip after no one turns up to 2024 event

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      Contemplating a New Hampshire campaign event to which not one voter showed up, the Minnesota congressman and Democratic presidential hopeful Dean Phillips told reporters on Tuesday: “Sometimes, if you build it, they don’t come.”He was alluding to a famous line from Field of Dreams, a 1989 film in which an Iowa farmer played by Kevin Costner builds a baseball field, thereby attracting the ghosts of famous players.Phillips is widely held to have a ghost of a chance of succeeding in his quest to deny a sitting president, Joe Biden, the Democratic presidential nomination. Nonetheless, the 54-year-old centrist, who is self-funding his campaign, insists Biden is too old at 81 to mount a meaningful fight against Donald Trump, the likely Republican nominee.In Manchester, New Hampshire, on Tuesday, Phillips parked his “Government Repair Truck” – a tested campaign prop – outside a Hilton hotel, planning to talk to voters while handing out Dunkin’ Donuts coffee, a staple for New Englanders, notably including Ben Affleck.Unfortunately, reports of sparsely or non-attended campaign events are a staple of presidential primary campaigns.According to NBC News, no one showed up to chat with Phillips in part because the temperature was below freezing, thereby sending drivers to an underground parking garage from which they could enter the hotel.Phillips “ended up pouring coffee for the staffers who were there”, NBC said, adding that the candidate made his Field of Dreams quip to reporters.Biden is not on the ballot in New Hampshire, thanks to a dispute between the state and national Democrats who reconfigured their primary to start in South Carolina.The focus of the Republican race will switch to New Hampshire next week, after Monday’s Iowa caucuses. Trump leads in the north-eastern state, though the former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley has eaten into his advantage.Elsewhere on Tuesday, Reuters published an interview in which Phillips once again rejected the contention that he risks damaging Biden and thereby boosting Trump.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionHe also declined to rule out a third-party run for president, notionally on a ticket with Liz Cheney, the former Wyoming congresswoman whose opposition to Trump cost her a seat in the House.“I wouldn’t say that’s even discussed right now,” Phillips said. “But I never say never.“I mean, this is about preservation of democracy. We are certainly different, politically. But we do have the same principle. And that is protecting the constitution, ensuring our systems of governance work and restoring some degree of sensibility and common sense to Washington. So I want to help her do that. And I think she wants to help me.” More

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      For Anti-Trump Republicans, It All Might Come Down to New Hampshire

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      With the Iowa caucuses likely to be a battle for second place, the next nominating state appears to offer the best chance of an upset defeat of Donald Trump.With his usual bluntness, Chris Christie used a recent event in New Hampshire to lay out why he thought the state’s primary election was more important than the Iowa caucuses — and what he saw as its tremendous stakes.“It’s pretty clear that the caucus system is going to renominate the former president, but that’s not what happens here in New Hampshire,” Mr. Christie, the former governor of New Jersey, said at a diner in Amherst, N.H. “It seems to me that the people from the Live Free or Die State would be the last people who would want to nominate someone who’s going to be a dictator.”As former President Donald J. Trump’s stranglehold on Iowa Republicans shows no sign of lessening, New Hampshire has become the most critical state for Nikki Haley, Mr. Christie and the small, increasingly desperate contingent of the Republican Party that wants to cast aside Mr. Trump.It is the only state where polling shows Ms. Haley within striking distance of the former president, and the only place where Mr. Christie has gained any sort of foothold. While Iowa’s caucuses on Monday are likely to be a slugfest for second place, New Hampshire’s primary on Jan. 23 has an outside chance of serving up an upset victory for Ms. Haley.Such an outcome would be the first sign of vulnerability for Mr. Trump and could serve as electoral rocket fuel for Ms. Haley, the former governor of South Carolina. But a drubbing for her in New Hampshire would probably end her pitch as a viable alternative to Mr. Trump. Mr. Christie, for his part, has already said he will drop out if he does not have a strong showing there.The state has large numbers of independent-minded voters and a penchant for delivering surprises, reinvigorating the flagging bids of presidential candidates including Bill Clinton in 1992 and John McCain in 2008. Not since 1976 has a Republican contender in an open, competitive primary race won Iowa and gone on to carry New Hampshire as well.“The race will tighten in the last few weeks,” said Chris Ager, the chairman of the New Hampshire Republican Party. “We’re one week after Iowa, so a lot of people just wait until Iowa happens. And you don’t have to decide early here,” he added, “because the candidates are going to be here.”He noted that Mr. Trump was “essentially the incumbent” in the race, but that Ms. Haley and others had strong support in the state. “You just never know what’s going to happen,” Mr. Ager said.As she tries to make the race a two-person contest, Ms. Haley has started to criticize Mr. Trump more.Joseph Prezioso/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesPolls in New Hampshire have offered little clarity about just how competitive the race might be. A CNN/University of New Hampshire poll released Tuesday found Mr. Trump leading Ms. Haley, 39 percent to 32 percent — but a USA Today/Boston Globe/Suffolk University poll released the same day showed him up 46 percent to 26 percent. Mr. Christie drew 12 percent support in both polls.New Hampshire’s pivotal position has resulted in a windfall of advertising dollars and a blizzard of campaigning. Nearly $55 million worth of ads has blanketed the airwaves in the past six months, according to AdImpact, a media tracking firm. Roughly 40 percent of that has come from Ms. Haley and the super PAC backing her, SFA Fund Inc.Indeed, while Ms. Haley has recently spent most of her time in Iowa, her campaign has poured resources into New Hampshire, successfully courting two powerful new allies in the state: the popular governor, Chris Sununu, and the vast political network run by Americans for Prosperity Action, the conservative group backed by the megadonor Koch family.As she tries to make the race a two-person contest, Ms. Haley has started to criticize Mr. Trump more.“Chaos follows him,” she said last week in the coastal town of Rye. “And we can’t be a country in disarray and a world on fire and go through four more years of chaos, because we won’t survive it. You don’t fix Democrat chaos with Republican chaos.”Americans for Prosperity Action, which says it has never before endorsed a candidate in a presidential primary race, has dispatched dozens of canvassers and spent millions on ads and mailers for Ms. Haley in the state. Greg Moore, the group’s New Hampshire state director, said he expected more than 100 staff members to fly into New Hampshire after the Iowa caucuses for an all-out blitz.Mr. Moore said that Ms. Haley’s argument about being the most electable Republican — several polls show her beating President Biden in a general election — resonated particularly in New Hampshire, which Mr. Trump lost in both the 2016 and 2020 general elections.That pitch was evident as the group fanned out across the state this week. On Monday morning, Justin Wilson, one of the organization’s grass-roots engagement directors, plodded through more than a foot of fresh snow in the upscale neighborhoods of north Manchester to knock on doors in support of Ms. Haley.One voter, who would give his name only as Kevin, paused while shoveling his driveway and explained why he was torn between Ms. Haley and Mr. Trump.“It’s about electability when it comes to the general election,” Kevin said, saying he wanted a candidate who could beat Mr. Biden. Mr. Wilson agreed, trying to nudge him toward Ms. Haley by noting that she was “less controversial” than Mr. Trump.Mr. Moore said his group’s internal polling had found that a little more than a third of the people who say they are supporting Mr. Trump are open to considering another candidate.“Particularly as we’re talking about people who are less and less engaged, in some cases they’re supporting President Trump because that’s the guy they know,” Mr. Moore said. “And it’s up to these other campaigns to build that momentum and that name ID that really helps them change voters’ minds.”Internal polling from Americans for Prosperity Action, conducted last month, found Mr. Trump with a lead of 12 percentage points over Ms. Haley and the rest of the field. But in a two-person, head-to-head matchup, the poll showed them statistically tied.Calls for Mr. Christie to drop out of the race began to intensify in December, mostly from Republicans hoping to stop Mr. Trump. On New Year’s Eve, Mr. Sununu said the Christie campaign was “at an absolute dead end” and suggested that he should drop out.Mr. Christie has defiantly rejected that idea, and has begun drawing starker contrasts with Ms. Haley. In Amherst, he criticized her for saying that she would pardon Mr. Trump if he were convicted of a crime and that she would still vote for him if he were the nominee. In Keene, he accused her of changing her stance on issues like abortion to keep her future options open.“She doesn’t want to offend people who are willing to vote for Trump, and not even that she thinks those people will vote for her this time,” Mr. Christie said. “She’s worried about next time.”Mr. Christie has held more than 60 events so far in New Hampshire, with 150 volunteers working on his long-shot effort.Mr. Christie has rejected calls to drop out of the race, and has stepped up his criticisms of Ms. Haley.Sophie Park for The New York TimesThe Trump campaign, believing that landslide victories in both Iowa and New Hampshire would essentially wrap up the nomination, has shifted to almost exclusively attacking Ms. Haley in New Hampshire.This month, the Trump campaign released an ad attacking Ms. Haley for criticizing his 2015 plan to ban immigrants from predominantly Muslim countries. (As a member of the Trump administration, she defended the policy when it was enacted.)MAGA Inc., a super PAC supporting Mr. Trump, has attacked Ms. Haley over her support for raising the gas tax when she was governor of South Carolina in 2015, though she also called for a corresponding income tax cut. The group has spent more than $2.5 million on the ad, running it exclusively in New Hampshire. Another ad from the group focuses on immigration. An official from the super PAC said that, in total, it would spend $1.3 million weekly through Primary Day.The negative advertising appears to be reaching some voters. Pete McGuire, 54, drove about 30 minutes to see Mr. Christie at the diner in Amherst. He said he was actively looking for a Trump alternative and was considering Mr. Christie over Ms. Haley.“You see all these commercials about her vote for the gas tax, saying, We’re never doing the gas tax, never! And then the next one she’s saying, Let’s do the gas tax,” Mr. McGuire said. “So she kind of shot herself in the foot.”From a headquarters in downtown Manchester far larger than the Trump campaign’s 2016 operation, the former president’s team has recruited more than 200 city or town captains and gathered more than 60 endorsements in the state. On Sunday, volunteers traipsed through the snowstorm to knock on doors.At his event in Amherst, Mr. Christie nodded to what seem to be the feelings of many American voters in 2024.“If you’re looking for the perfect candidate, believe me,” he said, “you’re going to be looking forever.”Jonathan Swan More

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      Haley Jokes That New Hampshire Primary Will ‘Correct’ the Result of the Iowa Caucuses

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      Campaigning in New Hampshire on Wednesday, former Gov. Nikki Haley of South Carolina said that voters there would “correct” the result of the Iowa caucuses — the night before she was scheduled to appear for events in Iowa.“You know Iowa starts it. You know that you correct it,” Ms. Haley said, prompting laughter from the crowd of New Hampshire voters. “And then my sweet state of South Carolina brings it home.”Local campaign surrogates for Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, who is vying with Ms. Haley for second place in Iowa polls for the Republican presidential nomination, seized upon the remark as dismissive of the state’s first-in-the-nation balloting, scheduled for Jan. 15.Gov. Kim Reynolds, who has endorsed Mr. DeSantis, said, “I trust Iowans to make their own decisions. No ‘corrections’ needed.” Bob Vander Plaats, the Iowa evangelical leader who has also thrown his support behind Mr. DeSantis, called Ms. Haley’s quip an “admission of getting beat in the Hawkeye State.”Mr. DeSantis and Ms. Haley are scheduled to participate in back-to-back town halls Thursday night in Iowa. The events, to be broadcast live on CNN, will be among the few remaining opportunities for the two candidates to draw away support from former President Donald J. Trump.Ms. Haley’s teasing remark also reflects her dim chances of a victory in Iowa, where Mr. Trump is the overwhelming favorite; he is polling around or slightly below 50 percent support. Ms. Haley and Mr. DeSantis are polling below 20 percent in Iowa in a virtual tie for second place.In contrast, Ms. Haley has decisively risen from the pack of Mr. Trump’s rivals in New Hampshire. Recent polls there have shown her in second place far above other candidates, except for Mr. Trump.Ms. Haley’s quip also reflects the perils of campaigning across state lines in quick succession: Remarks playing to the local crowd in one state can become a liability in the next. More

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      Donald Trump, Nikki Haley and Ron DeSantis Battle for Iowa

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      Patrick Healy: Katherine, the Iowa caucuses are 12 days away — the first chance some Americans will have to vote again for Donald Trump or decide if they want to go in a different direction. Trump has a lead of roughly 30 percentage points in several Iowa polls over Ron DeSantis and Nikki Haley. What do you see driving the race in Iowa right now? Can anything stop Trump?Katherine Miller: This is the part of an election cycle where the stakes and ideas really get tangled up with who voters think has the best shot of winning, polls, money and so forth. If a candidate runs out of money, for instance, it’s hard to campaign for president. If you zoom out and look at polling and the apparatus of support surrounding Donald Trump, it’s really much more likely than not he will be the Republican nominee. He’s polling extremely strongly nationally, but also in Iowa, where his campaign has built what looks like a real operation to make sure he wins.Patrick: He looks like an incumbent president running for re-election, driving the conversation in the party about immigration, security, Biden’s flaws — and treating rivals like protest candidates he wouldn’t deign to debate.Katherine: A lot of Republican voters also just support Trump and what he’s promised: The Des Moines Register published polling before Christmas showing that, on the subject of his grim commentary about immigration or when he compares people to “vermin,” many likely caucusgoers either said that those remarks made them more likely to vote for Trump or that they did not matter.Patrick: A lot of Republicans really like Trump as he is — they already know he will do and say Trumpy things and don’t punish him for it.Katherine: Still: There really is still time for another candidate to seriously challenge Trump. It’s not inevitable. In January of presidential election years, each week starts to feel a lot longer and the result of each caucus or primary can really shape the ones that follow. If you look at national polling, he’s dominating the Republican field. But if you look at New Hampshire’s polling, it’s a much tighter race, and if an “inevitable” front-runner loses one of the first two contests, that can change how voters elsewhere view a race and the choices in front of them.Patrick: It definitely did for Hillary Clinton in 2008 and Howard Dean in 2004.Katherine: There are some people who feel Haley and DeSantis can lose Iowa and the Jan. 23 New Hampshire primary and still win the nomination — I am not one of them. The argument I’ve heard around this relates to the possibility that Trump will be convicted in the federal Jan. 6 trial, or that those trials would depress enthusiasm for him as the trials went on. I am a little skeptical that the party would actually switch gears over the summer even if both those things happened. What happened in 2020 with Joe Biden, where he lost the first two contests, was pretty unusual. Nikki Haley, for instance, really needs to prove quickly this is real and she can actually beat Trump.Patrick: The political question I heard most over the holidays was, “can she do it?” — can Haley beat expectations in Iowa and New Hampshire and have a shot to beat Trump for the G.O.P. nomination? But then came her answer about the cause of the Civil War, where she didn’t mention slavery. You’ve been watching her — before we discuss the Civil War, I’m curious how you see Haley’s chances?Katherine: I’ve been wildly wrong before, but I do think Haley needs to win New Hampshire and then somehow hang on in South Carolina. If both of those things happened, that’s a very different race.Patrick: That reminds me of John Kerry in 2004. The Massachusetts senator needed a big combo victory too — more than just winning the next-door New Hampshire primary. Kerry won Iowa and New Hampshire, and it gave him momentum he needed to triumph over Dean.Katherine: Right. So with this in mind, I think Haley needs to come in second in Iowa, presumably behind Trump, and she would need that second-place result to be “better than expected.” What does “better than expected” mean? That’s kind of nebulous. She can’t just narrowly beat Ron DeSantis by a point or something, though; she’d want something where she’d be able to get on TV that night and frame the New Hampshire primary to voters and the media as a “Trump vs. Haley” one-on-one race, with an actual choice in vision and approach that she’s offering.Haley has tried to imply contrasts — that she is more temperate, that she is more “electable” against Biden — and some of it is about policy. Her viewpoint involves a much more expansive American foreign policy than Trump wants, and a return to the fiscal austerity of the 2010s, in addition to a more kitchen-table approach. That austerity ended up being pretty unpopular during the 2012 election, and populism on the right and a return to more assertive liberalism about the value of government has really changed that conversation — but perhaps inflation has changed how voters view fiscal matters. She has not been especially critical of Trump beyond a generational or electability critique, versus, for instance, his trying to overturn the 2020 election. How do you see the expectations for her in Iowa?Patrick: I’m a little torn, and this is why: Second place for Haley in Iowa would give her momentum and knock against the image that she has only narrow appeal with moderates and independents. But if DeSantis comes in a humiliating third place in Iowa, I could see him dropping out a day or two later — and a lot of his support in New Hampshire could move to Trump, who is already ahead in the New Hampshire polls. In the final analysis, though, a second-place surprise upset is better for Haley. Can she pull that off, though?Katherine: Her campaign and the affiliated groups have spent a lot of money the last few weeks on TV ads in Iowa and in New Hampshire, and are reserving more; she’s also campaigning a lot.Patrick: Iowa is famous for late surges — Kerry 2004, Obama ’08 and Mike Huckabee ’08, Rick Santorum ’12, Cruz ’16.Katherine: Only two of those people won the nomination, though. But go on…Patrick: True. And right now, the odds are long that Haley will win the nomination. I am curious to see if Republican voters will be affected by Haley’s comments about the Civil War. I doubt that any large numbers of voters will move away from her simply because she didn’t say right away that the cause of the war was slavery — most Republicans aren’t making up their minds on Haley based on one gaffe in an otherwise pretty gaffe-free campaign. Her answer did remind me of the university presidents who couldn’t say that genocide against Jews was bad, unacceptable, wouldn’t be tolerated. What I do know is she has disrupted a good moment for herself with a bad moment. You?Katherine: I don’t know, it was just a depressing, bad answer. The cleanup also had some confusing parts about freedom in it, as well; she should have just stopped at, “By the grace of God, we did the right thing and slavery is no more.” Maybe it’s partly a reflexive impulse from the days when she was running for governor and people believed she had to say she wouldn’t take the Confederate flag down at the state capitol in order to win, but that’s also depressing in and of itself.Patrick: Then there’s Ron DeSantis, who has really thrown himself into Iowa, visiting all 99 counties. Last spring, he started off in the Iowa polling at around 28 percent, according to the Real Clear Polling average; today, he’s around 19 percent. He seems like the example of, “The more you get to know him, the less you like him.” You’ve been on the trail with him a few times this year — why didn’t he catch fire? Why didn’t he “wear well” with more voters, as they say?Katherine: I think it’s still a little unclear what exactly the problem is. On a pure affect level, he’s definitely intense in person, he speaks at a pretty relentless pace, and he’s not a politician with a natural affinity for mixing it up with voters.Our colleagues in the newsroom mentioned in a story last month how, in Iowa over the summer, he interrupted a 15-year-old who was asking about mental health and the military by making a joke about her age. I was actually there for that exchange. The voter had self-deprecatingly mentioned that maybe her question didn’t matter because she was too young to vote, then he cut in to make a joke that this didn’t stop the Democrats from trying to let her vote, just as she was saying she has depression and anxiety, and started asking a thoughtful question about mental health and military recruitment. Mental health for young people and military recruitment are huge problems! But he started talking about how the military has requirements for a reason, before finally saying that in his experience people were still able to serve well and he’d take a look at the issue. In my notes, I just wrote “BAD ANSWER.”Patrick: All caps. I know you — you’ve seen a lot over the years — that’s bad.Katherine: So I think the persona is probably part of it. But I also really wonder about the policy platform itself. The idea is supposed to be “getting all the meat off the bone,” as DeSantis puts it, and turning all the stuff Trump talks about into a reality. I think there’s a theory of the case that people just don’t like the idea of stuff being banned by the government, whether that’s about abortion or books or choices for their kids — even if a voter, for instance, might disapprove of abortion as a practice. If DeSantis were in this chat, I’m sure he’d dispute the idea that there’s book banning in Florida, but that’s its own kind of issue in campaigns — if you’re explaining and defending in lawyerly ways, that’s not always what a voter wants to hear.Or maybe it’s that people who love Trump love Trump and don’t need an alternative. What do you think?Patrick: DeSantis has a high opinion of himself and started off the race amid great expectations for his candidacy, and I think he’s sort of the classic candidate who doesn’t live up to the billing. He won a big re-election victory in 2022 against a very weak Democratic opponent, and looked like a guy who relished picking fights and winning ruthlessly (Disney, educators, pro-choice people, gay and trans kids). Then he got in the race and quickly showed himself to be stiff and awkward and, perhaps worst of all for his brand, a wimp in the face of Trump’s attacks. He got trolled by that plane at the Iowa State Fair; he would say benign things about Trump while Trump would basically label him as a pedophile in high heels. He kept up that weird grin and little feints as Trump executed brass-knuckles, full-Jeb takedowns.In our most recent Times Opinion focus group, two voters said they were interested in DeSantis early on but found him too conservative and too stilted in the end. Now maybe Iowa Republican caucusgoers will surprise us, but DeSantis came in wanting to beat Trump and now is trying to hang on against Haley.Katherine: With DeSantis, the perception that he’s too conservative, when in many ways he’s promising almost exactly what Trump promises is this weird feature of politics right now — there’s very little daylight between them, for instance, in their actual approaches on foreign policy, or the idea of an administrative/deep state, or immigration, or trans rights. Abortion policy is an exception, and that can’t be discounted as a perception of “conservatism,” but in a lot of ways, DeSantis is offering similar policy to Trump. Maybe it’s purely about those voters just liking Trump.The thing is, there clearly was some space for a challenger to make a run at Trump. Who knows: Maybe we’re about to witness a stunning last-minute surge by DeSantis. The hard part was and is, candidates needed to be critical of Trump in a way that meant something to voters, that also created a choice for them vs. Trump, and for that criticism of Trump to not become their entire political identity. DeSantis clearly wanted to evade Trump’s attacks, but that didn’t really work, and his main criticism of Trump is that he did not live up to his word as president. It’s just not clear that people really feel that Trump didn’t live up to his word, or that if they do think that, they really care.Patrick: See you next week in Iowa, Katherine!Patrick Healy is the deputy Opinion editor. Katherine Miller is a staff writer and editor in Opinion.Source photograph by Anna Moneymaker, via Getty Images.The 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, Instagram, TikTok, X and Threads. More

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      Haley’s Civil War Gaffe Complicates Her New Hampshire Push

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      Her failure to mention slavery in response to a question about the causes of the Civil War has given Chris Christie fresh ammunition as they compete for the anti-Trump vote.Nikki Haley, the former South Carolina governor seeking the Republican Party’s presidential nomination, appears to have weathered a holiday-season gaffe on the causes of the Civil War, but the controversy over her answer, which neglected to mention slavery, was a gift to a rival, former Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey.And that fresh ammunition may be the most lasting fallout for her effort to catch former President Donald J. Trump in the nation’s first Republican primary in New Hampshire on Jan. 23.With less than two weeks before the Iowa caucuses, Ms. Haley is expected back in southern New Hampshire on Tuesday for a two-day campaign swing, working to maintain the momentum that has lifted her to second place in the state. But the final week of 2023 was a particularly rocky one. She flubbed the name of the Iowa Hawkeyes’ star basketball player Caitlin Clark, stirred anger and frustration among the independent and moderate factions of her base over her Civil War answer at a Berlin, N.H., town hall meeting, then potentially provoked the anti-Trump faction again when she said she would pardon Mr. Trump should he be convicted.Mr. Christie, who will be in the state on Thursday and Friday, has seized on Ms. Haley’s gaffe, and both of their campaigns are at a pivotal moment. They have long been on a collision course in New Hampshire, which Mr. Christie has made his do-or-die state and where Ms. Haley has been climbing.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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      Sununu Says Christie Should Drop Out Ahead of New Hampshire Primary

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      Mr. Sununu, the state’s governor, expressed concern that Mr. Christie would pull support from his preferred candidate, Nikki Haley.Just weeks before New Hampshire holds its Republican presidential primary, the state’s governor, Chris Sununu, said on Sunday that Chris Christie’s presidential bid was “at an absolute dead end” and suggested that he drop out to pave way for Mr. Sununu’s preferred candidate, Nikki Haley.Mr. Sununu, who this month endorsed Ms. Haley, the former governor of South Carolina and United Nations ambassador, told CNN that “the only person that wants Chris Christie to stay in the race is Donald Trump.”He framed the race as a “two-person contest” between Ms. Haley and Mr. Trump, whom she now trails in New Hampshire by an average of 20 percentage points.“There’s no doubt that if Christie stays in the race, the risk is that he takes her margin of the win,” Mr. Sununu said on CNN’s “State of the Union.” In a campaign ad last week, Mr. Christie, the former governor of New Jersey, explicitly addressed calls from some in the party for him to drop out to consolidate support around a non-Trump candidate. “Some people say I should drop out of this race,” he said. “Really? I’m the only one saying Donald Trump is a liar.”In response to Mr. Sununu’s remarks, a spokesman for Mr. Christie’s campaign doubled down on that message: “The events of the last few days fully solidifies the point that Christie has been making for six months: that the truth matters, and if you can’t answer the easy questions, you can’t fix the big problems.”Mr. Sununu’s comments were in response to questions from Dana Bash, the CNN anchor, about Ms. Haley’s recent gaffe involving the Civil War, for which she has faced significant criticism from Mr. Christie and others.Mr. Sununu endorsed Nikki Haley, the former governor of South Carolina and United Nations ambassador, in December.Sophie Park/Getty ImagesOn Wednesday, when she received a question at a New Hampshire town hall about the cause of the Civil War, Ms. Haley’s answer did not mention slavery. The next day, she walked back her remarks, telling a New Hampshire interviewer, “Of course the Civil War was about slavery.” She suggested that the question came from a “Democrat plant.”Mr. Sununu acknowledged that Ms. Haley had made a mistake in her remarks, but dismissed them as a “nonissue,” saying she had “cleared it right up and everyone’s moving on.”Mr. Christie and Ms. Haley have maintained a complicated relationship throughout the primary cycle. Mr. Christie defended Ms. Haley during the fourth Republican debate after she was attacked by Vivek Ramaswamy, the wealthy entrepreneur running for office. Yet earlier this month, in the first ad released by his campaign, Mr. Christie blasted Ms. Haley and Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida for attacking each other more than they do Mr. Trump.Ms. Haley has made headway in New Hampshire in recent weeks, climbing to a solid second place. (Mr. Christie is polling third in the state). But securing the nomination remains a daunting task: She continued to battle Mr. DeSantis for second place in Iowa, and remains behind Mr. Trump, her former boss, in national polls by around 50 points.While Ms. Haley was campaigning in Iowa over the weekend, an attendee at a town hall in Cedar Falls asked her why she was behind in polls in South Carolina, her home state. Ms. Haley said that her support there would grow, should she perform well in Iowa and New Hampshire, the first two states on the nomination schedule. “South Carolinians are the type that they want to see you earn it,” she explained.Her response did not directly address specifics — that Mr. Trump is immensely popular in the state and has received endorsements from many top officials, including Gov. Henry McMaster and Senator Lindsey Graham.On Sunday, Mr. Sununu also told CNN of his disapproval of the Maine secretary of state, Shenna Bellows, removing Mr. Trump from the state’s primary ballot last week. He called the decision “very politically motivated,” saying of Ms. Bellows, “This is a politician who I think has political aspirations down the road and is trying to make a little bit of a name for herself.”Mr. Sununu said that Mr. Trump’s removal would “only boost his opportunity to play that victim card down the road.” More