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      Haley, Asked About the Cause of the Civil War, Avoids Mentioning Slavery

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      A pointed question, at a town hall in New Hampshire, raises a complicated topic for Nikki Haley, who as governor of South Carolina wrestled with issues stemming from the Confederacy.Nikki Haley, the Republican presidential candidate and former governor of South Carolina who for years has wrestled with how to approach issues of race, slavery and the Confederacy, found herself again confronted with those subjects at a town hall event on Wednesday in New Hampshire, hundreds of miles north of the Mason-Dixon line.Her answer to a simple yet loaded question by an audience member in the city of Berlin — “What was the cause of the United States Civil War?” — showed just how much she continues to struggle with such topics.“I mean, I think it always comes down to the role of government and what the rights of the people are,” she said eventually, arguing that government should not tell people how to live their lives or “what you can and can’t do.”“I will always stand by the fact that I think government was intended to secure the rights and freedoms of the people,” she said. “It was never meant to be all things to all people.”Notably missing from her answer was slavery, which most mainstream historians agree was at the root of the United States’ bloodiest conflict — specifically the economics and political control behind slavery. Democrats were quick to jump on her answer, with President Biden’s re-election campaign team and others spreading video of the exchange on social media.After a quick back and forth with the questioner, she said, “What do you want me to say about slavery? Next question.”“I am disgusted, but I’m not surprised — this is what Black South Carolinians have come to expect from Nikki Haley, and now the rest of the country is getting to see her for who she is,” Jaime Harrison, chairman of the Democratic National Committee, said in a statement.How much it matters, if at all, in the Republican primary race is yet to be seen. Former President Donald J. Trump, the front-runner in the race, has been ramping up the temperature on his own divisive rhetoric, not lowering it. Ms. Haley is looking to tap into some of his supporters. But as she looks to New Hampshire’s first-in-the-nation primary on Jan. 23, she is counting on moderate Republicans and independents — who may vote in the contest — to give her a strong showing.Her latest remarks were in keeping with the way she and most of her Republican rivals have toed the line on race and racism on the 2024 presidential trail, downplaying the nation’s sordid racial history and portraying structural racism and prejudice as challenges of the past. The remarks also are in line with her campaign message, which has included pledges to reduce the size of the federal government and leave it up to the states to decide how to handle major issues like abortion.A Haley spokeswoman did not immediately respond to a request for a comment on Wednesday night.Ms. Haley, who governed a state at the heart of the Confederacy, has a particularly complicated record on issues of race.She drew national acclaim when she signed legislation to take down the Confederate battle flag at the South Carolina State House, after a white supremacist shot and killed nine Black parishioners in Charleston in 2015, including a state senator. On the trail, she recalls the experience to significant effect, casting herself as a new generational leader in the Republican Party capable of bridging differences.But as she ran for election in 2010 and then re-election in 2014, she rejected talk of removing the flag. In a 2010 interview with Confederate heritage group leaders, a major political force in her state, she argued that the Confederate flag was “not something racist” but about tradition and heritage. She said that she could leverage her identity as a minority woman to fend off calls to boycott the flag. “You know for those groups that come in and say they have issues with the Confederate flag, I will work to talk to them about it,” she said.After the 2015 attack shook South Carolina, Ms. Haley seized on efforts from state lawmakers to remove the flag.In response to the audience member on Wednesday, Ms. Haley argued that the United States needed to have capitalism and economic freedom and to ensure “freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom to do or be anything they want to be without government getting in the way.”The audience member said it was “astonishing” that Ms. Haley had answered his question without saying the word slavery. More

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      Nikki Haley’s Bold Strategy to Beat Trump: Play It Safe

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      Ms. Haley still trails far behind the former president in polls. Yet she is not deviating from the cautious approach that has led her this far.At a packed community center in southwestern Iowa, Nikki Haley broke from her usual remarks this month to offer a warning to her top Republican presidential rivals, Donald J. Trump and Ron DeSantis, deploying a favorite line: “If they punch me, I punch back — and I punch back harder.”But in that Dec. 18 appearance and over the next few days, Ms. Haley, the former governor of South Carolina, did not exactly pummel her opponents as promised. Her jabs were instead surgical, dry and policy-driven.“He went into D.C. saying that he was going to stop the spending and instead, he voted to raise the debt limit,” Ms. Haley said of Mr. DeSantis, a former congressman, in Treynor, near the Nebraska border. At that same stop, she also defended herself against his attack ads and criticized Mr. DeSantis, the Florida governor, over offshore drilling and fracking, and questioned his choice of a political surrogate in Iowa.She was even more careful about going after Mr. Trump, continuing to draw only indirect contrasts and noting pointedly that his allied super PAC had begun running anti-Haley ads.“He said two days ago I wasn’t surging,” she said, but now had “attack ads going up against me.”With under three weeks left until the Iowa caucuses, Ms. Haley is treading cautiously as she enters the crucial final stretch of her campaign to shake the Republican Party loose from the clutches of Mr. Trump. Even as the former president maintains a vast lead in polls, Ms. Haley has insistently played it safe, betting that an approach that has left her as the only non-Trump candidate with any sort of momentum can eventually prevail as primary season unfolds.On the trail, she rarely takes questions from reporters. She hardly deviates from her stump speech or generates headlines. And she keeps walking a fine line on her greatest obstacle to the Republican nomination — Mr. Trump.“Anti-Trumpers don’t think I hate him enough,” she told reporters this month in New Hampshire, where she picked up the endorsement of Chris Sununu, the state’s popular Republican governor. “Pro-Trumpers don’t think I love him enough.”Ms. Haley’s consistent strategy has enabled her team to build a reputation as lean and stable where other campaigns have faltered: As Mr. DeSantis’s support has dipped and turmoil has overtaken his allied super PAC, even some of his advisers are privately signaling they believe hope is lost.“I keep coming back to the word ‘disciplined,’” said Jim Merrill, a Republican strategist in New Hampshire who served on Senator Marco Rubio’s 2016 presidential campaign and Mitt Romney’s 2008 and 2012 bids. “She has run an extraordinarily disciplined campaign.”This month, Ms. Haley secured the endorsement of Gov. Chris Sununu of New Hampshire, right. Sophie Park/Getty ImagesYet Mr. Trump remains the heavy favorite for the nomination despite facing dozens of criminal charges, as well as legal challenges that aim to kick him off the ballot in several states.Ms. Haley’s apparent reluctance to attack her rival even in the face of what would seem to be political setbacks for him has raised questions from voters and other Republican competitors — most notably, former Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey — about whether she can win while passing up crucial opportunities to derail her most significant opponent.“A lot of the people in this field are running against Trump without doing very much to take him on,” said Adolphus Belk, a political analyst and professor of political science at Winthrop University in Rock Hill, S.C., Ms. Haley’s home state. “If you are running to be president of the United States, it seems like it would be an imperative to take on the person who has the biggest lead.”A recent poll from The New York Times and Siena College found Mr. Trump leading his Republican rivals by more than 50 percentage points nationally, a staggering margin.The poll offered a sliver of hope for Ms. Haley: Nearly a quarter of Mr. Trump’s supporters said he should not be the Republican nominee if he were found guilty of a crime. But 62 percent of Republicans said that if the former president won the primary, he should remain the nominee — even if subsequently convicted.The challenge for Ms. Haley is peeling away more of his support from the Republican Party’s white, working-class base. The Times/Siena poll found that she garnered 28 percent support from white voters with a bachelor’s degree or higher, but just 3 percent from those without a degree.As she barnstorms through Iowa and New Hampshire, Ms. Haley has remained committed to a calibrated approach that aims to speak to all factions of the Republican Party.Her stump speech highlights her background as the daughter of immigrants and her upbringing in a small and rural South Carolina town, but in generic terms. She nods to her status as the only woman in the Republican primary field and the potentially historic nature of her bid, but only in subtle ways.Even as she has risen in the polls and consolidated significant anti-Trump support among donors and prominent Republicans, she has continued to cast herself as an underestimated underdog, with a message tightly focused on debt and spending, national security and the crisis at the border.And she has not strayed from her broad calls for a “consensus” on abortion, even though some conservatives say she is not going far enough in backing new restrictions. At the same time, Democrats are looking to hit her from the other direction: The Democratic National Committee last week put up billboards in Davenport, Iowa, where she was campaigning, accusing her of wanting “extreme abortion bans.”Still, Ms. Haley has evolved on some fronts. In recent weeks, she has more aggressively made the case that she is the most electable Republican candidate — an argument that polls show has some merit — and ramped up her critiques of what she describes as a dysfunctional Washington.This month, after Republicans blocked an emergency spending bill to fund support for Ukraine, demanding strict new border restrictions in return, she accused both President Biden and some Republicans of creating a false choice among those priorities, as well as aid to Israel, which the legislation also included.“And now what are you hearing coming out of D.C. — do we support Ukraine or do we support Israel?” she said at an event in Burlington, Iowa. “Do we support Israel or do we secure the border? Don’t let them lie to you like that.”Ms. Haley has kept her message tightly focused on debt and spending, national security and the crisis at the border.Scott Olson/Getty ImagesShe has ramped up her criticism of Mr. Trump on his tone, leadership style and what she describes as his lack of follow-through on policy, hitting him for increasing the national debt, proposing to raise the federal gasoline tax and “praising dictators.”But when confronted with tougher questions from voters over Mr. Trump’s potential danger to the nation’s democracy or why she indicated at the first debate that she would support him as the nominee even if he were convicted of criminal charges, she tends to fall back on a familiar response. She says she thinks that “he was the right president for the right time” but that “rightly or wrongly, chaos follows him.”“The thing is, normal people aren’t obsessed with Trump like you guys are,” she told Jonathan Karl of ABC News this month, taking a swipe at the news media when asked for her thoughts on how Mr. Trump is campaigning on the idea of “retribution” against his political enemies.Such attempts to avoid alienating Trump supporters have helped generate interest, if not always commitment.Before her event in Treynor, Iowa, Keith Denton, 77, a retired farmer and longtime Republican, said he stood with Mr. Trump “100 percent,” and had come to watch Ms. Haley only because his wife was debating whether to support her. But after Ms. Haley wrapped up, he tracked down a reporter to acknowledge that he was now seriously considering her.“I have to eat my words,” he said, adding that Ms. Haley had said “some things that changed my mind.” For one, he said, “I thought she was more of a warmonger, but now I can see she is against war.”But at an Osceola distilling company the next day, Jim Kimball, 84, a retired doctor, veteran and anti-Trump Republican, elicited nervous laughter from the audience when he asked Ms. Haley a couple of bold questions regarding the Capitol riot on Jan. 6, 2021: “Did Mr. Trump trample or defend the Constitution? And is he running for president or emperor?”As usual, Ms. Haley weighed her words. She said that the courts would “decide whether President Trump did something wrong” and that he had a right to defend himself against the legal charges he faces, but she expressed disappointment that when he had the chance to stop the Capitol attack, he did not.“My goal is not to worry about him being president forever — that is why I’m going to win,” she finished to loud applause.But afterward, Mr. Kimball said that he wished she would have said that Mr. Trump is unfit to be president and that he was still deliberating whether to caucus for her or for Mr. Christie.“I wish she had the courage of Liz Cheney,” he said, referring to the congresswoman pushed out of Republican leadership in Congress and then her Wyoming seat by pro-Trump forces in the party. “But she doesn’t want to end up like Liz Cheney, so you get the answer you get.”Ruth Igielnik More

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      New DeSantis Super PAC Revives Old Casey DeSantis Ad

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      The group emerged as Mr. DeSantis’s original super PAC began canceling its planned TV advertisements in Iowa and New Hampshire.A new super PAC that popped up in support of Gov. Ron DeSantis this week is preparing to air an ad that features Casey DeSantis, his wife, talking about her experience with cancer. The ad is nearly identical to one that was broadcast during his re-election campaign for governor last year, a video of the new spot shows. The group, Good Fight, was formed on Wednesday and soon began shipping copies of the ad to television stations. The Times obtained the ad from a person who received a copy of it, but who requested anonymity in order to share it. The narration of the ad is virtually the same as in the 2022 ad, but the new version features some new images and clips — of his children playing at the Field of Dreams in Iowa, for example — briefly spliced into the middle.Such a move could be considered “republication” of an ad, which the Federal Election Commission has regulations against. For instance, the super PAC supporting the 2012 Republican presidential nominee, Mitt Romney, later paid a fine related to republishing an ad from Mr. Romney’s 2008 presidential campaign. It is unclear whether those regulations would apply here, since the original spot is from a state campaign and not a federal one. The DeSantis ad features Ms. DeSantis trying to humanize her husband — who is often described as stiff on the campaign trail — as a father and a supportive husband when she faced breast cancer. The version that aired in 2022 had a logo that read “Ron DeSantis Florida Governor” in the upper-right corner; that logo is blurred out in the new spot sent to stations, which ends with a disclaimer that it was paid for by Good Fight.Craig Mareno, an accountant with Crosby Ottenhoff, a firm based in Birmingham, Ala., is listed on documents creating the group that were filed with the F.E.C. Reached by phone, Mr. Mareno declined to answer questions about the group or the ad, and asked for an email that he could forward to another official he said could answer questions. The DeSantis campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment.Adav Noti of Campaign Legal Center said it was unclear how the F.E.C. would view the use of the old DeSantis ad, since Mr. DeSantis was not a federal candidate at the time. “The entire DeSantis operation, including the campaign and all of the super PACs, have been pushing the legal envelope since the beginning, and this use of prior campaign material to put out presidential campaign ads is another example,” said Mr. Noti, whose group has already filed an F.E.C. complaint accusing Mr. DeSantis’s presidential campaign of coordinating illegally with the original DeSantis super PAC, Never Back Down.Good Fight emerged as Never Back Down, a deep-pocketed but embattled organization, began canceling $2.5 million in planned television advertisements in the early nominating states of Iowa and New Hampshire, according to AdImpact, a media tracking company.Campaigns are not allowed to coordinate directly with super PACs, but the move appears to align with the strategy suggested by the DeSantis campaign in a memo in late November.James Uthmeier, Mr. DeSantis’s campaign manager, wrote in the memo that a new super PAC formed to aid the governor, Fight Right, would air television ads, and Never Back Down would focus on its “field operation and ground game.”Never Back Down has poured millions into an ambitious door-knocking operation in early states, especially in Iowa. But that ground game has sputtered, with Mr. DeSantis’s poll numbers stagnating as former President Donald J. Trump remains far ahead both in Iowa and nationally. And the super PAC itself has been embroiled in turmoil, with a series of top executives and strategists departing over the past month.Fight Right, formed by people with ties to Mr. DeSantis, originated amid internal disagreements over strategy at Never Back Down, which struggled to meld veteran political strategists from a consulting firm with DeSantis loyalists. Mr. DeSantis had also been troubled by the group’s advertising strategy, as The Times previously reported. Fight Right began airing ads in late November attacking former Gov. Nikki Haley of South Carolina.In a statement, Scott Wagner, the chairman of Never Back Down, said the group was “laser focused on its core mission — running the most advanced grass-roots and political caucus operation in this race and helping deliver the G.O.P. nomination for Governor DeSantis.”“We are thrilled to have Fight Right and others covering the air for Governor DeSantis while we work the ground game in Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina and beyond,” Mr. Wagner added.Taryn Fenske, a spokeswoman for Fight Right, said the group was placing an advertising buy of more than $2.5 million starting Sunday, with $1.3 million behind an anti-Haley ad that is slated to start running in Iowa that day.Never Back Down previously transferred $1 million to Fight Right, which helped precipitate a major leadership shake-up at the original super PAC, where some officials questioned the move. Officials with Never Back Down and Fight Right would not directly answer questions about whether the canceled $2.5 million was being used to fund the new Fight Right ads. Both Fight Right and Good Fight are using the same firm, Digital Media Placement Services, to purchase airtime, according to AdImpact’s records. More

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      ‘He’s dog-whistling’: Trump denounced over anti-immigrant comment

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      Donald Trump is facing a backlash for repeating a remark at a political rally on Saturday where he said undocumented immigrants to the United States are “poisoning the blood of our country”.The former US president’s comments were the latest example of his campaign rhetoric that seemed to go beyond the lies and exaggerations that are a trademark of his stump speeches and instead go into territory of outright extremism or racism. In November he was widely condemned for calling his opponents “vermin”, language that echoed that used historically by dictators and authoritarians.Trump, who is the overwhelming favorite to be the Republican nominee for the 2024 race for the White House, made the comments at a rally in Durham, New Hampshire, attended by several thousand supporters. He added that immigrants were coming to the US from Asia and Africa in addition to South America. “All over the world they are pouring into our country,” he said.The White House hit back, saying that Joe Biden believes “our leaders have a responsibility to bring the country together around our shared values.”“Echoing the grotesque rhetoric of fascists and violent white supremacists and threatening to oppress those who disagree with the government are dangerous attacks on the dignity and rights of all Americans, on our democracy, and on public safety,” White House spokesperson Andrew Bates said in a statement.Trump’s comments come days after he warned that if he is re-elected next year he would act on immigration like a “dictator” – but only on the first day of his term. He has since floated the idea of sending potentially “hundreds of thousands” of US troops to secure the US-Mexico border, build a network of immigrant detention camps, and “begin the largest domestic deportation operation in American history”.“He’s disgusting,” former New Jersey governor and Republican presidential contender Chris Christie told CNN Sunday. “He’s dog-whistling to Americans who feel under stress and strain from the economy and conflicts around the world,” Christie said. “He’s dog-whistling to blame it on people from areas that don’t look like us.”Christie, who has emerged as Trump’s most outspoken counter-puncher on the Republican side, accused Republican politicians of being “robot true-believers” to Trump’s messaging, describing him as a “poison on our political system” who, predicted, would be convicted of crimes “worthy of jail this spring and that’s why he’s getting crazier every day”.On CNN Christie accused leading Republican nomination rival Nikki Haley of “enabling” Trump by saying he is fit to be president. “She’s part of the problem because she’s enabling him, but I’m saying it’s not okay to be saying these things.”Former Republican speaker of the house Paul Ryan called Trump an “authoritarian narcissist”.Denunciation of Trump’s comments come as the Biden administration attempts to secure increased military aid for Ukraine and Israel – packages that are now hooked to a political compromise on immigration controls. Progressives have warned that they will not support additional aid packages if the issues are linked.Trump’s comments also come as he is expected to easily win in Iowa’s vital first in the nation caucus next month, according to NBC News. But the latest CBS polls suggests he may face stronger opposition in New Hampshire in February, where he is running at 44% to Haley’s 29% among Republican voters.In a slew of recent polls Trump has also been ahead of Joe Biden nationally and in many key battleground states. That has led to widespread concern that Trump could return to the Oval Office and speculation that he would deeply erode or dismantle US democracy.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionAgainst the backdrop of Trump’s “poison” comments, the White House issued a statement Sunday on the 80th anniversary of the repeal of the 1882 Chinese Eexclusion Act which had imposed a 10-year immigration ban on Chinese laborers.That law, Biden said, had “weaponized our immigration system to discriminate against an entire ethnic group” and had been followed by further discrimination against Europeans and Asian groups.Biden noted that despite progress, “hate never goes away. It only hides”, adding pointedly: “Today, there are those who still demonize immigrants and fan the flames of intolerance. It’s wrong.”Asked for comment by Reuters on Saturday, Trump campaign spokesperson Steven Cheung, did not directly address the candidate’s inflammatory rhetoric which had not reportedly been included in Trump’s scripted remarks.Cheung, who has previously dismissed criticism of Trump’s language as “nonsensical”, turned instead to the controversy over how US colleges are managing campus protests, and accused the media and academia had given “safe haven for dangerous antisemitic and pro-Hamas rhetoric that is both dangerous and alarming”. More

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      Trump, Quoting Putin, Declares Indictments ‘Politically Motivated Persecution’

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      The former president cited comments by the Russian leader to argue the 91 felony charges he is facing undermine the United States’ claim to be the world leader on democracy.Former President Donald J. Trump on Saturday invoked Vladimir V. Putin to support his case that the four criminal indictments he is facing are political payback, quoting the Russian president saying that the charges undercut the argument that the United States is an example of democracy for the world.Mr. Trump made the comment during a campaign speech in Durham, N.H., in which he focused on pocketbook concerns of voters, hammered the state’s Republican governor, who endorsed one of his rivals, mocked his lower-polling competitors for not performing better and painted a dystopian vision of a country in “hell” under his successor, President Biden.“Even Vladimir Putin says that Biden’s — and this is a quote — politically motivated persecution of his political rival is very good for Russia, because it shows the rottenness of the American political system, which cannot pretend to teach others about democracy,” Mr. Trump said as he railed against the 91 criminal charges he is facing, citing Mr. Putin speaking in September.Mr. Trump added: “So, you know, we talk about democracy, but the whole world is watching the persecution of a political opponent that’s kicking his ass. It’s an amazing thing. And they’re all laughing at us.”There is no evidence that Mr. Biden has meddled in the prosecutions of Mr. Trump, which are taking place in four different federal and state courts and cover a range of issues, including his possession of reams of classified material after he left office and his efforts to overturn his loss in the 2020 election.And Mr. Biden’s Justice Department has twice indicted Mr. Biden’s son, Hunter, on gun possession and tax charges. But Mr. Trump has continued to claim, without evidence, that all prosecutors — even the state prosecutors in New York and Georgia — are doing his successor’s bidding.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 Endorsed by Gov. Chris Sununu of New Hampshire

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      Mr. Sununu is popular in the state, though former President Donald J. Trump continues to dominate the field.Gov. Chris Sununu of New Hampshire endorsed Nikki Haley for the Republican presidential nomination at a campaign event Tuesday evening, casting her as a fresh face for the party who could take on the elites in Washington and move the nation past the “nonsense and drama” of former President Donald J. Trump.“We are all in for Nikki Haley,” Mr. Sununu said to loud cheers at a ski area in Manchester, adding that her momentum was “real” and “tangible” and that her poll numbers and ground game have been “absolutely unbelievable.”Pacing in the middle of the audience, Ms. Haley called it “a great night in New Hampshire.” “It doesn’t get any better than this — to go and get endorsed by the ‘Live Free or Die’ governor is about as rock-solid of an endorsement as we could hope for.”The endorsement is a significant victory for Ms. Haley, who is trying to establish herself over Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida as the main alternative to Mr. Trump and has gained ground in New Hampshire polling in the past month.Mr. Sununu, a Trump critic who is serving his fourth and last two-year term as governor, was re-elected last year by more than 15 percentage points and is popular in the state. He was seen as a top recruit for the Senate last year but declined to run, and he also chose not to run for the Republican presidential nomination himself — saying at the time that he thought he could have more influence as an external voice than as a candidate.On the 2024 presidential campaign trail, Mr. Sununu stumped with Ms. Haley, Mr. DeSantis and former Gov. Chris Christie, as he weighed which of the three to back. In an interview last month, he said he would talk over his decision with friends and family over the Thanksgiving break. He said he was looking for someone who could beat Mr. Trump and who could connect with voters on “a very retail level.”Before the raucous crowd in Manchester, Mr. Sununu lauded Ms. Haley as a traditional Republican with the executive experience to secure the border, tackle mental health needs and ensure low taxes and limited government. He urged New Hampshire voters to turn the page on this era’s politics, taking shots at both President Biden and Mr. Trump. “We have a president who is more concerned about nap time,” he said. “We have a president who is worried about jail time.”In a news conference after the event, Mr. Sununu and Ms. Haley shot down suggestions that Ms. Haley might choose Mr. Sununu as her vice president should she win the nomination. “I think he is fantastic, but he has told me he doesn’t want anything to do with V.P.,” she said.Ms. Haley told reporters she had been more focused on winning over voters than scoring endorsements from elected officials, but she nevertheless called Mr. Sununu’s support a huge win for her bid. Mr. Sununu argued the race had now become a contest between only two people — “Nikki Haley and Donald Trump.”“There’s differences with us,” Ms. Haley said when Mr. Sununu was asked if he believed Ms. Haley had sufficiently confronted the former president. “Anti-Trumpers don’t think I hate him enough. Pro-Trumpers don’t think I love him enough. The end of the day, I put my truths out there and let the chips fall were they may.”Given his popularity and his proven ability to win as a Republican in a state that leans Democratic, Mr. Sununu could help sway the moderate Republicans and independents whom Ms. Haley is counting on to give her a strong showing in New Hampshire’s first-in-the-nation primary on Jan. 23.Undeclared voters, who can participate in the Republican primary, now make up roughly 39 percent of voters in the state, a greater slice of the electorate than either Democrats or Republicans. And with no competitive Democratic presidential primary next year, they are expected to play an even larger role in the Republican contest.“It is really a big move,” Matthew Bartlett, a former Trump appointee and Republican strategist who is unaligned in the race, said of Mr. Sununu’s backing. “It is really the last chess piece to fall in line before Election Day, and it is not to be underestimated.”But just how much weight it will carry is an open question in a primary in which nothing — not endorsements, not debates, not 91 felony charges — has changed the basic dynamic: Mr. Trump is the overwhelming favorite, and everybody else is fighting for second place.The Sununu endorsement was first reported by WMUR earlier on Tuesday.Mr. DeSantis received two of the biggest endorsements available in Iowa — those of Gov. Kim Reynolds and the evangelical leader Bob Vander Plaats — but has yet to make significant gains on Mr. Trump there. Still, campaign officials for Mr. DeSantis and Mr. Christie downplayed the impact of Mr. Sununu’s backing.“This puts us down one vote in New Hampshire and when Governor Christie is back in Londonderry tomorrow, he’ll continue to tell the unvarnished truth about Donald Trump and earn that one missing vote and thousands more,” said Karl Rickett, campaign spokesman for Mr. Christie, who has made New Hampshire his do-or-die state.Ray Buckley, the chairman of the New Hampshire Democratic Party, criticized both Ms. Haley and Mr. Sununu in a statement. “No matter how much Nikki Haley or Chris Sununu try to spin Granite Staters, the reality is they’re both MAGA extremists who spent years cozying up to Donald Trump,” he said.At the ski area in Manchester, a prospective voter solicited a low exclamation of “oohs” from the crowd when she asked if Ms. Haley would ever consider the vice presidency given Mr. Trump’s dominance in national and state polls.“It is not that big of a deal,” Ms. Haley responded, calming the crowd and prompting some laughter, “because what you have to know is I don’t play for second.”In the audience, Dan Silverman, 53, an undeclared voter who leans Republican, said he wasn’t particularly keen on any of the contenders in the Republican primary and was concerned about some of Ms. Haley’s “bombastic language” on foreign policy. But after watching her speak, Mr. Silverman, who teaches information systems courses at the University of New Hampshire, said he enjoyed her remarks. “I am coming around,” he said.Nearby, Bruce LaRiviere, 65, a retail salesman, said he was set on voting for Ms. Haley, whom he admired for her calls for term limits and competency tests for elected officials. He hoped Mr. Sununu’s endorsement would provide her the boost she needed to beat Mr. Trump, who he said was a force of a “noise and aggression.”“She’s very conservative,” he said. “I like the way she is going to try to change Washington.” More

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      Man charged with threatening to kill Vivek Ramaswamy at campaign event

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      A man from Dover, New Hampshire, faces a federal criminal charge after threatening the Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy and attendees at a campaign event.The US attorney’s office for New Hampshire said Tyler Anderson, 30, “received a text message from the victim’s campaign notifying him of a political event in Portsmouth, New Hampshire.“Anderson responded to the text message on 8 December 2023, stating: ‘Great, another opportunity for me to blow his brains out!’ and ‘I’m going to kill everyone who attends and then fuck their corpses.’”The federal release did not name the candidate or say when the event was but charging documents identified a breakfast meeting on Monday, a time when only Ramaswamy was scheduled to stage such an event in the state.A spokesperson for the biotech entrepreneur told NBC Boston: “Unfortunately it is true. We are grateful to law enforcement for their swiftness and professionalism in handling this matter and pray for the safety of all Americans.”Anderson is charged with transmitting in interstate commerce a threat to injure the person of another, an offense that can lead to a prison sentence of up to five years and a fine of up to $250,000.He was due in court in Concord, New Hampshire, on Monday afternoon.As cited by NBC, charging documents said federal agents searched Anderson’s residence on Saturday, finding guns as well as the phone used to send the texts regarding Ramaswamy.Agents also found threats to another candidate, NBC said, including a promise to “blow that bastard’s head off” and the message: “Thanks, I’ll see you there. Hope you have the stamina for a mass shooting!”Anderson reportedly admitted sending messages to “multiple” campaigns.New Hampshire will hold the second event of the Republican presidential primary, with voting on Tuesday 23 January.The website fivethirtyeight.com gives the former president Donald Trump a comfortable New Hampshire lead over the former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley, 44.7% to 18.9%.Ramaswamy shone early in the primary campaign but has fallen back, amid a series of abrasive debate performances. According to fivethirtyeight.com, he now sits fifth in New Hampshire, on 6.7% support, with only the former Arkansas governor Asa Hutchinson below him. More

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      Annoyed at Biden, New Hampshire Democrats Aim to Help His Presidential Campaign

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      Despite being bumped down the presidential calendar, Democrats in the state are planning a write-in campaign for the president, who won’t be on New Hampshire primary ballots.New Hampshire Democrats were furious at President Biden when he shook up the party’s nominating calendar last year, diminishing their state’s political importance by pushing its primary election behind South Carolina’s.Kicking and screaming, they defied the Democratic National Committee and refused to move back their primary. This year, they warned that the upheaval could come back to haunt Mr. Biden and cause him an embarrassing loss in the state’s primary.In turn, the national party stripped the state of its delegates. Mr. Biden declined to campaign in New Hampshire or even place his name on the ballot.Now a range of the state’s influential Democrats, including Senator Jeanne Shaheen, are coming around to the idea that they need to swallow their pride and help Mr. Biden win their primary despite his snub of their state.“It’s up to us in New Hampshire to fix a problem that his advisers and the D.N.C. made for the president,” said Kathleen Sullivan, a former New Hampshire Democratic Party chairwoman who is leading a write-in Biden super PAC.Ms. Sullivan’s super PAC is one of two groups of Democrats in the state organizing campaigns to promote Mr. Biden as a write-in candidate in the Jan. 23 primary election.For the Biden-backing Granite Staters, the write-in efforts amount to a bit of a tail-between-their-legs moment after months of howling objections about the president’s decision. Like Ms. Sullivan, they find themselves blaming the D.N.C. or Mr. Biden’s aides rather than a president whom they still support.Their goal is a substantial Biden victory over the two Democrats running protest campaigns against the president, Representative Dean Phillips of Minnesota and the self-help author Marianne Williamson. Both of them, unlike Mr. Biden, will appear on Democratic ballots in the state.“People here, quite frankly, don’t care about the D.N.C. or their rules,” said Terie Norelli, a former speaker of the New Hampshire State House and a leader of Granite State Write-In, a grass-roots group supporting Mr. Biden. “The vast majority of Democrats and independents in New Hampshire do support President Biden.”The group hopes to use its modest budget — $50,000 to $70,000 — to inform New Hampshire Democrats and independents, who are allowed to cast ballots in the state’s primary elections, about how to vote for the president in a contest in which he is not participating.Beyond obvious details, like making sure voters know that his name is spelled B-i-d-e-n and that they have to check a write-in box on the ballot, the group is recruiting a team of volunteers. They will partake in the small-town New Hampshire experience of standing outside voting sites and holding signs urging voters to write in Mr. Biden’s name.The group also plans to have its members write letters and place opinion essays in New Hampshire newspapers and appear at town Democratic club meetings before the primary.Ms. Norelli said she was not worried that Mr. Biden would lose to Mr. Phillips or Ms. Williamson. The aim, she said, is to give his campaign — with which her group is not coordinating — momentum to defeat former President Donald J. Trump in the general election, assuming he is the Republican nominee.“It’s not like it’s a big, contested race,” she said.This month, the group distributed stickers at a New Hampshire Democratic Party fund-raising dinner where, in a public-relations triumph for the effort, Ms. Shaheen, the state’s senior senator, expressed her support.“Let’s kick off 2024 by writing in Biden and making our first-in-the-nation primary the very first victory for the Biden-Harris re-election team,” Ms. Shaheen said at the dinner.Representative Ro Khanna of California, who is widely seen as having presidential ambitions of his own and has publicly lamented Democrats’ decision to place New Hampshire after South Carolina on the nominating calendar, dialed into one of the group’s video conferences, which Ms. Norelli said were held every two weeks and usually attracted about 85 people.A Biden campaign spokesman declined to comment.Florida’s Democratic Party has already canceled its presidential primary. Democratic officials in other states have moved to list only Mr. Biden on their ballot, which has led to complaints from Mr. Phillips and Ms. Williamson.Ms. Sullivan said that by all but ignoring the New Hampshire primary, Mr. Biden ran the danger of allowing the challenges from Mr. Phillips and Ms. Williamson to become competitive. She pointed to 1976, 1980 and 1992, when incumbent presidents lost re-election, and to 1968, when President Lyndon B. Johnson was driven out of the race. In all of those years, the presidents faced tough primary opponents in New Hampshire.“I don’t think it would be good for him if he does poorly in New Hampshire,” Ms. Sullivan said of Mr. Biden.Ray Buckley, the chairman of the New Hampshire Democratic Party since 2007, said Mr. Biden retained support from a vast majority of the state’s Democrats, but cautioned that a significant percentage would be likely to vote against him.“About one-third of New Hampshire Democratic primary voters are cranky people who always want to be contrary,” said Mr. Buckley, who added that he had not communicated with the write-in groups. “Anyone who is not the main person starts off with a third of the vote.”Mr. Buckley himself plans to stay neutral — sort of.“Ever since I became state party chair, I have consistently written in Jimmy Carter,” Mr. Buckley said. “Maybe this time I’ll write in Rosalynn to honor her. That’s really the choice for me.”Lou D’Allesandro, a New Hampshire state senator who has known Mr. Biden for decades, said he would reluctantly write the president’s name on the ballot despite lingering anger about how the Granite State had been treated.“People felt slighted,” he said. “But what he’s done for the country overrides that decision.”Mr. D’Allesandro said he saw Mr. Biden last week at a Boston fund-raiser where the musician James Taylor played a concert. Mr. D’Allesandro said that he had embraced Mr. Biden, and that the president had invited him to the White House.But Mr. D’Allesandro didn’t bring up his grievances about New Hampshire’s primary.“It wasn’t the time or the place to do that,” he said. More