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      Trump-Biden rematch increasingly inevitable after New Hampshire primary

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      A sweep of the first two nominating contests on the 2024 primary season left Donald Trump in a strong position to seize the Republican party nomination, and made a rematch with Joe Biden even more inevitable.Trump’s Republican rival, Nikki Haley, vowed to fight on despite her second place finish in New Hampshire, a state where she had hoped for an upset, and her third place finish in the Iowa caucuses. But she faces long odds. There is no precedent for a candidate winning the Iowa caucuses and the New Hampshire primary and losing their party’s nomination.In his victory night speech, Trump previewed the crudeness of the campaign rhetoric to come if Haley does not accede to his calls for her to drop out. In his remarks, which were more angry than celebratory, Trump suggested that Haley would find herself under investigation if she became the nominee, but then declared that she had no chance of dethroning him.“This is not your typical victory speech,” he said, surrounded by all of his vanquished Republican rivals. “But let’s not have someone take a victory when she had a very bad night.”Haley’s campaign dismissed Trump’s speech as a “furious and rambling rant” and asked: “If Trump is in such good shape, why is he so angry?”“This is why so many voters want to move on from Trump’s chaos and are rallying to Nikki Haley’s new generation of conservative leadership,” her campaign said.Haley was more gracious in her speech. She conceded to Trump and congratulated him on his victory. But she said she would not be pushed out of a contest that had just begun. “New Hampshire is first in the nation,” she told supporters in Concord, the state’s capitol. “It is not the last in the nation. This race is far from over.”Haley insisted that she could parlay her second-place showing in New Hampshire into an even stronger finish in her home state of South Carolina, where she was twice elected governor. But polls show Trump leading Haley by roughly 30 percentage points in South Carolina, which holds its Republican primary election on 24 February.Haley’s loss underscored Trump’s strength among Republican voters, who looked past his false claims of a stolen election and a web of legal troubles amounting to 91 criminal charges.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionHaley has said “chaos follows” Trump and argued Republicans would lose the presidency again if he was their nominee. “A Trump nomination is a Biden win and a Kamala Harris presidency,” she said, suggesting that the 81-year-old president would not be able to complete his term.Biden was not on Tuesday’s primary ballot in New Hampshire, but won the contest thanks to a homegrown write-in campaign.“It is now clear that Donald Trump will be the Republican nominee. And my message to the country is the stakes could not be higher,” Biden said in a statement on Tuesday. “Our Democracy. Our personal freedoms – from the right to choose to the right to vote. Our economy – which has seen the strongest recovery in the world since COVID. All are at stake.” More

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      Nikki Haley has been running to lead a Republican party that no longer exists | Moira Donegan

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      Can we stop pretending now? After weeks of speculating by the media that perhaps Nikki Haley might eke out a win in New Hampshire – or at least lose by a percentage small enough to make continuing in the race reasonable – she lost by a wide margin.Before we had been offered various rationales for why, just maybe, this wouldn’t happen. Haley, after all, had recently come into a flush of donor money at the end of 2023, as the field dwindled and she was left alone as the last almost-plausible non-Trump candidate. She’d put much of that money into New Hampshire, a state whose Republicans tend to hew more moderate. (Haley, a rabid conservative but one who does not seem to oppose the rule of law outright, is what passes for “moderate” in today’s Republican party.)There was also the force of history to consider, the fact that primary campaigns of either major party do not usually look like this. When there’s such a big field, as there was in this Republican cycle, normally New Hampshire’s first-in-the-nation primary can have quite a bit of sway, helping to advance the strongest contenders and cull the stragglers.But this year there were only two people really running by the time New Hampshire rolled around, and one of them loomed much larger than the other – both in fundraising and in his power to animate the public. It was like watching a race between a whale and a minnow: he lapped her without seeming to try.One word for the 2024 Republican primary contest is “anticlimactic”. But considering how completely Trump has captured the imagination of his party, it is possible that the real story is not about how easily he has trounced his challengers, but that there were so many challengers in the first place.What possessed so many Republicans to run against Trump? Were they delusional? Hopeful? Cynical? Had they missed the memo on what their party had become – a personality cult devoted in total service to one man? Or did they think, somehow, that he was weaker than he was?Perhaps this was the idea of the Trump imitators. Whiny, pleading Ron DeSantis hoped that if he demonstrated enough cruelty in Florida, his home state, Republican voters might admire him as strong, and forget how annoying he is. He was Trump without the charm.Nasally, scheming Vivek Ramaswamy attempted to channel Trump’s snake-oil salesman pitch for nostalgia, punishment of enemies and exaggerated promises; he was Trump without the movement.Chris Christie, the former governor of New Jersey best known for shutting down the George Washington Bridge to punish a mayor who had crossed him, was the only Republican willing to attack Trump, building his campaign around severe, self-serious intonations about the former president’s danger to the nation. But it was impossible to take Christie seriously: he could not convincingly feign honor.Maybe it was fitting, then, that Haley was the last one standing: though she was equally misguided, she was doing something different from her fellow candidates. Haley’s campaign, focused on a revival of a hawkish neoconservative foreign policy and a comparative de-emphasis of social issues, seemed uncannily retro and anachronistic – a 90s-era Republican wearing a 21st-century blazer set.Hers was a campaign that talked about a generational shift and played up Haley’s relative youth (she’s 52), but which also seemed to wish for a return to the political past, attempting to proceed as if Trump had never happened. Who could look at today’s Republican party – animated by racist and misogynist zeal, in thrall to short-sightedness and bigotry, harnessed around petty grievances and functionally largely, for its base, to entertain – and think that what such people wanted was a competent, cool-headed and strategic woman of color? Only the most naive people in the world could think that. Haley, at least, was willing to take their money.In debates, Haley talked about the virtues of foreign military involvement and played up her own discipline and competence. There might be arguments for all this, but they are clearly not arguments that the Republican party base wanted to hear: foreign wars remain unpopular in post-Iraq America. (Trump’s pivot to an “America First” isolationism seems to have returned Republicans to a Lindbergh-esque hostility to the outside world for the foreseeable future.)And things like competence, self-discipline and hard work are qualities that tend to render women into useful, serviceable minor characters – the sort of background figures who can be useful to a man of showmanship and bombast.One of the most plausible explanations for Haley’s campaign has always been that she is actually running for vice-president. This might be the role she is best suited to play: that of a bridge between the old-guard establishment Republicans and the new, permanently Trumpist reality.But it’s unclear how much of a reconciliation is really needed there. After his landslide victory in Iowa, the big donor money has once again flowed to Trump; reporters at Davos issued dispatches detailing how the global rich have made their peace with Trump’s possible return to the White House.The old-school Republicans that Haley represents have never been as far from Trump as it would benefit their egos to pretend. The national war hawks, the corporate rich: these people do not need the democracy that Trump threatens. And in a few days or weeks, when she inevitably drops out of the race and endorses Trump, Nikki Haley will discover that she can live without it, too.
      Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist More

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      Haley vows to fight on despite Trump win in New Hampshire – podcast

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      Donald Trump has won the first in the nation primary election in New Hampshire, making it almost inevitable that we’re poised for the first rematch in a general election since 1956. Despite coming in second in a two-person race, Nikki Haley celebrated at her election night event in Concord.
      So in our final episode of this special three-part series from New Hampshire, Jonathan Freedland speaks to Lauren Gambino and Semafor’s David Weigel about whether or not Haley actually has reason to be positive. Or is she running on hope rather than reason?

      How to listen to podcasts: everything you need to know More

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      Trump v Biden increasingly likely but Haley undaunted: key takeaways from New Hampshire primary

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      The New Hampshire primary, even with its history of unpredictability and freethinking independents, produced a familiar result on Tuesday: Donald Trump v Joe Biden.After months of heavy campaigning in the state, former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley came in second place in the Republican primary. Securing a double-digit win over Haley, Trump nabbed his second decisive victory after the Iowa caucuses a week before.In the Democratic primary, Joe Biden’s name wasn’t on the ballot after the Democratic National Committee decided to have their first primary in South Carolina in early February. But New Hampshire decided to go ahead with the Democratic primary anyway, and Biden handily won through write-in votes, although the DNC has said that no delegates will be awarded based on the results.The dynamics of the New Hampshire primary, which marked the second voting event of the 2024 election season, also held some insights for the high-stakes general election in November. Here are five things you need to know.1. The independent vote couldn’t topple Trump, but it should still make him nervousNew Hampshire is known for its independent voting bloc – which comprises 40% of the electorate. This group has helped numerous presidential candidates rise to the top in past elections, or at least remain competitive. Haley was hoping Republican-leaning independent voters would respond to her tempered messaging, in which she pitched herself as a younger, fresher face and antidote to both Trump and Biden.Although independent voters were not able to lift Haley to victory, their support for her could create a problem down the road for Trump. According to an NBC News exit poll, Haley won 73% of Republican primary voters who described themselves as moderate. If Trump wants to defeat Biden in November, he will need to sway some of those moderate Republicans, and Haley’s strong performance with that voting bloc indicates the former president has much more work to do to win their support.2. Haley remains undaunted after two bruising lossesDespite her third-place finish in Iowa and her double-digit loss in New Hampshire, Haley still insists that she will continue on in the Republican primary. As she addressed supporters in New Hampshire on Tuesday night, Haley expressed optimism about her home state of South Carolina, which will hold its Republican primary on 24 February.“New Hampshire is first in the nation. It is not the last in the nation,” Haley said. “This race is far from over. There are dozens of states left to go, and the next one is my sweet state of South Carolina.”But polls show Haley trailing far behind Trump in South Carolina, so it remains unclear how the state might shake the fundamental dynamics of the race.3. Biden avoided embarrassment with some help from his campaign and surrogatesBecause of the strange circumstances of the Democratic primary, Biden’s name was not on the ballot, though the names of long-shot candidates Dean Phillips and Marianne Williamson were. There was some concern that Biden’s decision not to run in New Hampshire could provide an opening for a candidate like Phillips, who tried to present himself as more electable than the sitting president.But in the end, Biden cruised to an easy victory thanks to the help of a write-in campaign led by his most loyal supporters and promoted by surrogates like Congressman Ro Khanna of California, who traveled to New Hampshire over the weekend.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion4. Republicans and Democrats appear ready to turn their attention to the general electionNew Hampshire provided further evidence that the 2024 general election in November will indeed be a rematch between Biden and Trump, and members of both parties indicated on Tuesday that they are ready to move past the primary.“While we work toward November 2024, one thing is increasingly clear today,” Julie Chávez Rodriguez, Biden’s campaign manager, said on Tuesday. “Donald Trump is headed straight into a general election matchup where he’ll face the only person to have ever beaten him at the ballot box: Joe Biden.”With more and more Republican lawmakers lining up to endorse Trump, the former president’s allies called on Haley to withdraw from the race to allow the party to focus on defeating Biden in November.Taylor Budowich, CEO of the pro-Trump Super PAC Make America Great Again Inc, said on Tuesday: “It’s time for unity, it’s time to take the fight to the Democrats, and for Nikki Haley: it’s time to drop out.”5. Trump’s election lie was not as popular in New Hampshire as it was in IowaDuring the Iowa caucuses, a clear majority of Republican voters said they believe that Trump won the 2020 election, despite all evidence supporting a fair Biden win. In New Hampshire, early exit polling and interviews showed that there was more of an even split among Republicans in that state who believe the false claims about widespread election fraud in the 2020 election and those who do not.As Haley voter Patricia Hemenway told the Guardian on Tuesday: “I will have to say the January 6 thing was absolutely revolting to me.”Nevertheless, Trump leaned into the big lie in his victory speech on Tuesday. “We won in 2016. And if you really remember, if you want to play it straight, we also won in 2020, by more,” he said. “And we did much better in 2020 than we did in 2016.” More

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      Biden Wins New Hampshire Democratic Primary

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      President Biden won the New Hampshire Democratic presidential primary on Tuesday, carried by his supporters’ write-in campaign after he declined to appear on the state’s ballot.The victory, called by The Associated Press, was good, if expected, news for Mr. Biden. But votes were still being counted, and the final margin of his win will be closely watched.As an incumbent president facing a list of long-shot challengers, anything short of a decisive victory would be perceived as bruising for Mr. Biden, even though he did not try to compete in the primary.Mr. Biden skipped the state after a dispute over the timing of its primary, as he and the Democratic National Committee sought to push New Hampshire’s contest later in the nominating process. Granite Staters, deeply protective of their first-in-the-nation tradition, refused to comply.His allies in the state eventually stepped in, and the write-in effort, supported by top Democrats there, generated the kind of grass-roots energy for Mr. Biden that has not yet materialized in other states — and that he did not enjoy in New Hampshire’s primary in 2020, when he came in fifth place.“Despite President Biden’s absence from the ballot, Granite Staters still turned out in robust numbers to show their support for the great work that the Biden-Harris administration has done,” Ray Buckley, the chairman of the New Hampshire Democratic Party — and an ardent critic of the calendar changes — said in a statement, praising the success of the write-in campaign. “Once again, New Hampshire’s first-in-the-nation primary made history — and we are proud as ever.”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 Vows to Fight On Against Trump After New Hampshire Loss

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

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      Trump takes aim at Haley in combative New Hampshire primary victory speech

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      Donald Trump has won the New Hampshire primary, likely cementing his place as the Republican presidential nominee.The win over Nikki Haley, who had briefly threatened to rein in the former president, suggests there will be a smooth path to the GOP nomination for Trump, who also won easily in the Iowa caucuses last week. Addressing supporters in Nashua, Trump took a victory lap with a combative speech that included sharp criticism of Haley.“She had a very bad night,” Trump said. “She came in third [in Iowa], and she’s still hanging around.”The Associated Press called the race just as the last remaining polling places in New Hampshire closed at 8pm ET, following a contentious primary that saw groups backing both candidates spending millions of dollars in increasingly vicious TV advertising.Haley, who branded Trump a “chaos” candidate, promised a more palatable version of the rightwing fire and brimstone that has come to characterize the Republican party. She surged in the polls in New Hampshire in mid-December, but could not capitalize on that momentum on Tuesday night.Despite her disappointing performance in New Hampshire, Haley insisted she would continue on to her home state of South Carolina, which will hold its Republican primary next month. As she spoke to supporters in Concord on Tuesday, Haley congratulated Trump on his victory in the first primary state, but emphasized the importance of upcoming races.“New Hampshire is first in the nation. It is not the last in the nation,” Haley told supporters in Concord. “This race is far from over. There are dozens of states left to go, and the next one is my sweet state of South Carolina.”But polls show Trump maintaining a significant lead in South Carolina, so it is unclear how that primary might reshape the dynamics of the race. New Hampshire appeared to represent the last significant threat to what seems set to become a Trump coronation. In a purple state that voted for Joe Biden over Trump in 2020, Haley presented herself as a centrist Republican, while Trump continued to proffer rightwing populism in a series of rallies in recent days. Haley was Trump’s only serious contender in New Hampshire, after Ron DeSantis dropped out of the race on Sunday.As he addressed supporters, Trump derided Haley’s efforts to downplay her loss in New Hampshire, saying: “Let’s not have somebody take a victory when she had a very bad night.”New Hampshire primary: read more
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      Trump’s team similarly ridiculed Haley’s decision to stay in the race after two decisive losses, with one of the former president’s strategists mocking her as “delusional”. Appearing undaunted, Haley stuck to her campaign message that Trump was incapable of leading the Republican party into a more promising future, referencing the former president’s numerous legal battles. Trump has now been charged with 91 felony counts across four criminal cases, and he spent much of the past week in court for a defamation case.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“With Donald Trump, you have one bout of chaos after another – this court case, that controversy, this tweet, that senior moment,” Haley said on Tuesday night. “You can’t fix Joe Biden’s chaos with Republican chaos.”But Trump’s routine continues to appeal. Tina Lorenz, who said she had supported Donald Trump since 2016, was among those who voted for the former president on Tuesday.“He is representing the American people. He is not out for himself. He’s not out for political gain. He’s not out for financial reasons. He doesn’t need money, he doesn’t need fame and fortune. He already has all of that,” Lorenz, 63, said.“He is out there for the average person. And that’s what’s happening, we’ve become so polarized, that there’s nobody out there for just regular people.”The result in New Hampshire suggests Trump will become his party’s presidential candidate for the third election in a row, and will likely face Biden in November. After Trump’s wins in Iowa and New Hampshire, more and more Republican lawmakers are lining up to endorse him. Speaking at Trump’s victory party on Tuesday, former presidential candidate Tim Scott, who dropped out of the primary race in November and endorsed the former president last week, called on Republicans to unify.“It is time for the Republican party to coalesce around our nominee and the next president of United States: Donald Trump. Let’s get that party started tonight,” Scott said.Despite Haley’s claims to the contrary, Democrats also clearly believe the Republican presidential primary is effectively over, and they are already turning their attention to the general election.“Tonight’s results confirm Donald Trump has all but locked up the GOP nomination, and the election denying, anti-freedom Maga movement has completed its takeover of the Republican party,” said Julie Chavez Rodriguez, Biden’s campaign manager. “While we work toward November 2024, one thing is increasingly clear today: Donald Trump is headed straight into a general election matchup where he’ll face the only person to have ever beaten him at the ballot box: Joe Biden.” More