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      Trump holds wide lead over Nikki Haley in New Hampshire, polls show

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      The ignominious end of Ron DeSantis’s presidential campaign is unlikely to boost Donald Trump’s last challenger, Nikki Haley, to the Republican nomination , according to two New Hampshire polls released on the eve of the primary in the north-eastern state.DeSantis also endured a round of scathing critiques of his campaign which started off being seen as a major source of opposition to Trump. But his White House bid never fully took off and fizzled into failure and a major blow to the rightwing Florida governor’s political reputation.In a poll released on Sunday, the day the hard-right Florida governor contradicted his own Super Pac, Never Back Down, and backed down, NBC News, the Boston Globe and Suffolk University put Trump 19 points clear of Haley, at 55% to 36% support.Ending his campaign, DeSantis looked past months of personal attacks from Trump to offer the twice-impeached, 91-times criminally charged former president – whose lie about a stolen 2020 election DeSantis has disowned – his endorsement to face Joe Biden.On Monday, the Washington Post and Monmouth University put Trump at 52% support in New Hampshire, to 34% for Haley.That represented a near-doubling of support for the former South Carolina governor and UN ambassador since November. But, the Post said, that was primarily a result of the withdrawal of Chris Christie, the former New Jersey governor who campaigned as an anti-Trump candidate.DeSantis had 8% support in the Post-Monmouth poll, which was carried out before he ended his campaign.“If DeSantis’s supporters in the poll are allocated based on their second choice,” the Post said, “Trump’s support rises by four points while Haley’s increases by two.”On Sunday, Haley staged a rally in New Hampshire with Judy Sheindlin, better known to millions of Americans as Judge Judy, a former Manhattan family court judge made famous by a small claims, arbitration-based TV show.“What a crowd, Exeter!” she said. “The energy on the ground is electric, and it’s clear Granite Staters are ready to make a difference on Tuesday! An extra special thanks to America’s favorite judge, Judge Judy Sheindlin, for joining us! She gets it: this country needs no drama, no chaos, no nonsense – just results!”But despite such determined boosterism, polling results undeniably show Haley well adrift of Trump in New Hampshire and even further behind in South Carolina, her home state which next month will be the third to vote.According to the polling site FiveThirtyEight.com, Trump leads Haley by 61% to 25% in the southern state.Larry Sabato, director of the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia, said: “I wish I had a dollar for every Republican who’s told me over the last three years, ‘We’ve learned our lesson. No way will Trump be our nominee again.’”Speaking to CNN, Sabato added: “If [Haley] loses on Tuesday, it almost certainly marks the end of her run. She may continue through her home state of South Carolina though I think she’d be hesitant to do it because she wouldn’t want to lose her home state. That’s really difficult to explain to people.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“But for all practical purposes, once DeSantis left and once the other candidates were knocked out of the race, it was Trump’s to lose and Trump has to lose significantly and he’s not going to lose it.”DeSantis exited the race with a statement containing both a Churchill quote it turned out Churchill never said and his endorsement of Trump.Sabato was asked about DeSantis’s decision to back Trump after, only last week, attacking Republicans he said had chosen to “kiss the ring” and endorse the former president.“I guess he saw some good examples of ring kissing and decided to imitate it,” Sabato said.“Look, who knows what was going through his mind other than the fact that he certainly wants to run the next time. Now, whether he’ll be credible as a candidate after this disastrous run? Remember, he was supposed to be Trump’s main challenger and most of the establishment in the Republican party was betting on him. And his campaign crashed and burned.“This was really a disgraceful enterprise in so many different ways. But in [DeSantis’s] mind, at least right now, as he’s coming to terms with the the demise of his dream, he’s thinking about running in 2028. Well, being associated with Nikki Haley is not going to help you, because this party has already become the Donald Trump party or the Maga party and it will be in all likelihood even more so as the years go on.” More

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      Biden’s name won’t appear on New Hampshire ballots – where does that leave Democrats?

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      While Donald Trump and Nikki Haley might draw focus, a shadow presidential primary is taking place in New Hampshire, where Joe Biden could stumble at the first hurdle of his bid to run for president again in 2024 following an internal Democratic party feud.As a consequence of the party scrap, Biden’s name will not even appear on the ballot in the Granite state on Tuesday. While the president remains the favorite to win his party’s overall nomination, his absence here has opened a window for Dean Phillips, a Democratic congressman from Minnesota, and Marianne Williamson, an author and self-help guru who ran for president in 2020, to mount longshot presidential bids.The pair have spent weeks campaigning in the state, pitching different visions for the future. Phillips, 55, has touted his reputation as a centrist; his record of working with Republicans to get things done; and the fact that he is 26 years younger than Biden.Williamson, who withdrew from the 2020 race before the Iowa caucuses, is selling more of a deviation from the current administration. A progressive, she would introduce free college tuition, declare a climate emergency and “Department of Peace” which would be tasked with avoiding war abroad and tackling white supremacy at home.So far it is Phillips who seems to be drawing the most attention from Granite staters, even if, as he told voters in Salem on Friday, challenging Biden has meant being “excommunicated” from the wider Democratic party.“I was a darling as of 90 days ago, and now I’m the devil somehow,” Phillips told the Guardian after the event.“But that’s how it works. I expected this because it is a nonsensical culture, of standing in line playing your role waiting your turn. We can’t do that if we hope to save this country.”Phillips, who ran his family’s hundred million dollar brewing company before winning a seat in the House of Representatives in 2018, only launched his campaign in October 2023, but he has established a large political operation in the state.At his events his volunteers scurry around gathering signatures from people in the crowd, and hand out T-shirts and buttons with the legend: “I like Dean” written on the front. Frequently the crowds are large.An event in Nashua on Saturday, a bitterly cold day with wispy snow falling from the sky, drew more than 200 people, who heard Phillips tout his record as “the second most bipartisan” Democrat in the House of Representatives.“We believe it is time to segregate the far-left and the far-right and give voice to the exhausted majority of America. Are you ready for that?” Phillips said, to applause.A man who clearly has a passion for language, Phillips then addressed a Democratic effort to write-in Biden’s name on the ballot on Tuesday by suggesting: “If he wrote you off, why would you write him in,” and claimed that Biden “took the granite state for gran-ted”.On the stump Phillips sometimes adds: “I did torpedo my career in Congress, so that this country will not be torpedoed by this nonsense.”New Hampshire polling shows Biden with a commanding lead over Phillips, and an even more commanding lead over Williamson. But given Biden’s name isn’t on the ballot, there’s a possibility Phillips could win.The unusual situation stems from the Democratic national committee’s decision to ditch decades of tradition this year in choosing South Carolina, a much more racially diverse state, to host the first presidential primary. When New Hampshire said it would host its primary first anyway – South Carolina will vote next week – the Democratic National Committee essentially said it would ignore the state’s results.It means that Phillips’s and Williamson’s efforts here won’t actually help them become a presidential candidate, but that doesn’t render the time they spend here completely redundant, said Dante Scala, a professor of political science at the University of New Hampshire.“New Hampshire historically has not been about delegates, because we have relatively few to offer in the big scheme of things,” Scala said.“It’s about the publicity that comes with a victory or even a better-than-expected performance in an early voting state in the nomination process, and I think they’ve been following that playbook.”Biden might be absent from the state, but a movement has emerged encouraging people to write his name on voting slips, and in a sign that the Biden campaign sees the potential for embarrassment, a series of high-profile Biden supporters have been dispatched to New Hampshire in recent weeks.Ro Khanna, a rising Democratic congressman from California, held an event for Biden on Saturday, while Pete Buttigieg, the transportation secretary, is among a slew of Biden’s cabinet officials who have pitched up here since the start of December.Another problem for Phillips and Williamson is a liberal-led effort to get independent New Hampshirites to vote for Haley in the Republican primary, in an attempt to damage Trump’s chances in the state. PrimaryPivot, the organization running the campaign, has been a regular presence at Republican events.“There’s a difference between a regular conservative Republican and someone who is an autocrat,” said Robert Schwarz, co-founder of PrimaryPivot.“For the issues most important to our democracy, Nikki Haley and Donald Trump are night and day.”For Phillips and Williamson, the write-in Biden campaign, and a separate effort to write-in “ceasefire” on Democratic ballots to critique Biden’s handling of Israel’s actions in Gaza, is an unwanted distraction.“President Biden doesn’t really care about a write-in campaign. The president would care if a candidate, such as myself, who has called for a ceasefire from the very beginning, got a lot of votes,” Williamson said at a campaign event in Manchester on Saturday.“I find [the campaign] kind of self-indulgent, performative.”Williamson, who after dropping out of the 2020 race endorsed Bernie Sanders for president, has a much broader critique of the US than Phillips. Political elites, Williamson said, have a “business model” of “job elimination, and worker exploitation, and demonization of unions, and tax cuts for the very, very wealthy”.“A majority of Americans live paycheck to paycheck. The majority of Americans can’t even dream of homeownership at this point. A majority of Americans cannot afford to absorb a $500 unexpected expenditure. One in four Americans live with medical debt, 75 million Americans are uninsured or underinsured,” Williamson said.She has found some support among people like Lisa Swanson, a student at Quinnipiac university who voted for Sanders four years ago. Speaking after the Manchester event, Swanson said she found Williamson “very reasonable”.“She shares a lot of the beliefs that I’ve had for a very long time, as if she’s plucked them right out of my own brain. So that’s very refreshing,” Swanson said.But while the campaigns of Williamson and Phillips might be winning support, there is still a sense that this could all be for naught. Neither is expected to seriously challenge Biden in South Carolina primary, let alone in the states to follow.Like others who attended events for these rebel candidates, Swanson was angry at the Democratic party skipping their state.“I feel like it’s pretty anti-democratic, quite frankly. It is the opposite of democracy. We are supposed to vote as the people to show what we want, and the DNC doing that with Joe Biden, quite frankly, says that they don’t trust the people to make a decision,” Swanson said. More

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      DeSantis drops out, Trump rallies and Haley brings out Judge Judy – podcast

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      Two days before voters in New Hampshire were due to head to the polls, Ron DeSantis announced he was suspending his campaign to become the presidential nominee for the Republican party.
      Donald Trump had already focused his attack lines on his remaining opponent, Nikki Haley, but can she pull a shock win out of the bag? Jonathan Freedland heads out on the campaign trail, talking to voters along the way

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

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      Ron DeSantis put nearly all his eggs in the basket of a ‘war on woke’

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      It began in a glitch-filled disaster on Twitter. It ended with a misattributed quotation on X. Just like Elon Musk’s social media platform, efforts to rebrand Ron DeSantis’s US presidential election campaign could not mask its fundamental flaws.When in May the Florida governor announced his run during a chat with Musk on Twitter Spaces, the platform’s audio streaming feature, there were technical breakdowns that drew comparisons with one of Musk’s space rockets blowing up on the launchpad.Eight months, dozens of staff departures, tens of millions of dollars and one crushing defeat in Iowa later, DeSantis announced he was dropping out in a video posted on the renamed X that quoted Winston Churchill as saying: “Success is not final, failure is not fatal – it is the courage to continue that counts.” According to the International Churchill Society, the British wartime prime minister never said that.Two days before the New Hampshire primary election, DeSantis’s humiliation was complete. “This is probably the biggest collapse of a presidential campaign in modern American history, if not all American history,” David Jolly, a former Republican congressman from Florida, told the MSNBC network on Sunday. “Ron DeSantis had everything going for him.”A year ago, DeSantis had stormed to re-election as governor of Florida by nearly 20 percentage points in what not so long ago was a swing state. He was beating Donald Trump in some opinion polls. He was drawing attention, donor money and headlines such as “DeFuture” in Rupert Murdoch’s New York Post newspaper.The argument seemed compelling: DeSantis could offer the former president’s Maga (“Make America great again”) politics in purer, perfected form, unencumbered by Trump’s age, chaos or court cases. Some said he was therefore more dangerous than Trump. Comedian Trevor Noah suggested that, if Trump was the original Terminator, DeSantis was the T-1000, a smarter and slicker upgrade.DeSantis was billed as Trump without the baggage. He turned out to be Trump without the votes.The governor made a series of bad gambles. He bet big on May and Twitter Spaces as the right time and place to start. He bet big on a moral crusade against wokeness. He bet big on outsourcing central parts of his campaign to a Super Pac (whose boss spent significant time during the last days in Iowa working on a jigsaw puzzle). He bet big on Trump’s candidacy imploding under legal pressures. He bet big on the Iowa caucuses. None of them paid off.Longtime political observers in Florida had doubts from the start. They knew that DeSantis had conquered the heavily populated Sunshine state with heavy TV advertising and an unusually weak Democratic opponent. They suspected that the retail politics of Iowa – shaking hands, kissing babies, holding long conversations in diners about ethanol – would expose his lack of people skills. They were right.Rick Wilson, a longtime Republican operative and cofounder of the Lincoln Project, says: “This guy was politically overpriced stock from the very beginning. He represented Diet Trump but no Trump voter wants the low sugar, low fat, no caffeine version of Trump. They want the real thing.”But while much has been written about DeSantis’s joyless, low charisma campaign, this was a failure not only of style but of substance. The governor ran to the right of Trump on many issues and put nearly all his eggs in the basket of a “war on woke”.His timing was off. Culture war issues had been all the rage during the coronavirus pandemic – masks, vaccines, school closures – then morphed into a parents’ rights movement around book bans, critical race theory and transgender children’s access to bathrooms and sports. If it worked for Glenn Youngkin in Virginia, why not DeSantis in the US?But by the time the Iowa caucuses and New Hampshire primary came around, the pandemic had faded and masks were rarely seen. DeSantis’s accusations that Trump palled around with Dr Anthony Fauci and forced national lockdowns, while Florida stayed open had lost their resonance.The limitations of anti-wokeness were also exposed. Groups such as Moms for Liberty, which aim to keep race and LGBTQ issues out of school curricular, underperformed in last year’s elections in states such as Virginia, where Youngkin seemed to have lost his touch.Polls show that DeSantis’s six-week abortion ban is unpopular in Florida and nationwide. His actions against the Walt Disney Co after the company spoke out against Florida legislation that limited discussion of gender and sexuality in classrooms went down badly among pro-business Republicans.Aware of such trends, Trump is trying to be vague on abortion and talk less about culture war issues these days. At a rally in Manchester, New Hampshire on Saturday, it took him an hour and 15 minutes to promise a crackdown on schools “pushing” critical race theory and transgender content as well as vaccine mandates. The crowd cheered heartily, suggesting that these topics have not lost all their potency, but Trump quickly moved on.Wilson comments: “Trump may not be smart, but he’s got a kind of feral cunning and he recognises that the culture war stuff has run out too far. That’s why he said, oh, you have to have a few exceptions [for abortion].“A guy like DeSantis was on the very bleeding edge of six-week abortion bans and the most punitive approaches to all the culture war things – book banning and everything else – and he thought that was going to get him over the finish line. But when Trump is in the race, he still could never put it together.DeSantis is still just 45 and aware that other candidates – Ronald Reagan and Joe Biden included – have lost primaries only to try again and win the presidency. He recently claimed that Trump voters in Iowa told him they will back him in four years’ time, telling reporters: “They were coming up to me saying: ‘We want you in 2028, we love you, man.”The timing of his withdrawal and endorsement of Trump, which frees the former’s president voters to back him against Haley in New Hampshire in South Carolina, will earn him a few points in Trump World.Florida congressman Matt Gaetz said on Sunday: “Welcome home Ron, welcome back to the Maga movement where you’ve always belonged.” More

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      Ron DeSantis drops out of Republican presidential race

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      Ron DeSantis, the hard-right governor of Florida, has ended his campaign for the Republican presidential nomination and endorsed Donald Trump.“It’s clear to me that a majority of Republican primary voters want to give Donald Trump another chance,” he said in a statement posted on X. “He has my endorsement because we can’t go back to the old Republican guard of yesteryear, a repackaged form of warmed over corporatism that Nikki Haley represents.”DeSantis’s withdrawal in the days ahead of the New Hampshire primary follows a disappointing result in the Iowa caucus, where he finished second place but trailed Donald Trump by a large margin. In New Hampshire, his numbers were far behind former South Carolina governor Haley and Trump.“He’s been a good governor and I wish him well,” Haley said at a campaign event on Sunday. “Having said that, it’s now one fella and one lady left.”DeSantis’ news was the culmination of a long, agonising decline.As recently as spring 2023, the former navy lawyer and rightwing congressman was widely seen as the Republican most likely to stop Trump becoming the nominee for a third election running, in large part by attempting to offer harsh Trumpist policies without the attendant drama.In November 2022, DeSantis cruised past the Democrat Charlie Crist to win a second term in Tallahassee. In his victory speech, he crowed: “We have embraced freedom. We have maintained law and order. We have protected the rights of parents. We have respected our taxpayers and we reject ‘woke’ ideology.”Referencing Winston Churchill, a near-mythic figure on the American right, he went on: “We fight the woke in the legislature. We fight the woke in the schools, we fight the woke in the corporations. We will never ever surrender to the woke mob. Florida is where woke goes to die.”He received a rapturous reception, supporters with an eye on 2024 chanting “two more years” and the New York Post branding him “DeFuture”, as speculation abounded that Rupert Murdoch was finally set to move on from Trump.But despite formidable fundraising, a seemingly strong campaign structure, strong polling and a rising Republican star in his wife, Casey DeSantis, after a long run-in to a formal campaign declaration, little went right.DeSantis’s hard-right agenda ran into trouble as he chose to take on Disney, a dominant employer in Florida, over its opposition to his “don’t say gay” policy regarding LGBTQ+ issues in schools. Generating a string of stories, scandals and lawsuits over book bans in school libraries, the subject continued to dog the campaign.In May the launch of that campaign, a Twitter Spaces session with Elon Musk, descended into farce as the platform glitched and buckled. The event host, the donor David Sacks, claimed: “We got so many people here that we are kind of melting the servers, which is a good sign.” Few observers agreed.On the campaign trail in the months that followed, the governor came across as stilted and awkward. For a campaign focused on social media and the influencers who lurk there, the resultant string of mocking memes and threads could not have been in the plan.Nor could a summer fiasco over bizarre campaign videos, posted to social media and featuring far-right, white supremacist, Nazi and arguably homoerotic imagery. A firing followed but the campaign’s image had taken another big blow, reports of fundraising problems appearing.There was a scandal over an attempt to change history teaching in state schools, regarding the place of slavery in Florida’s past. There were attempts to troll Democrats on immigration, including sending undocumented migrants to Democratic-run states by bus or plane. That policy ended up in the courts as well.As the polling gap to Trump grew, and as the former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley steadily moved through the field, DeSantis sought ways to fight back.In November he took the unexpected step of debating a Democrat other than Joe Biden. The Fox News-hosted contest with Gavin Newsom, the California governor, proved little more than a sideshow. Brandishing a map he said showed the spread of “human faeces” on the streets of San Francisco, DeSantis succeeded only in feeding more “poop map” memes.DeSantis and Haley became more willing to attack Trump as the first vote neared, if still with the gloves kept on, even Trump’s lie about a stolen election in 2020 proving hard to simply disown. In Iowa, DeSantis picked up key nominations from the governor, Kim Reynolds, and evangelical leaders and eventually finished in second. But that still didn’t catapult his campaign into safe New Hampshire territory, and he dropped out before the numbers could prove just how far behind he might be. stuck fending off speculation about whether he wore lifts in his shoes.Democrats celebrated the news on Sunday.“As Democrats, we’ve been shouting from the rooftops that his strategy of waging culture wars on the backs of hardworking Floridians just to further his own ambitions was wrong for the state & would be disastrous for the nation,” said Fentrice Driskell, the lead Democrat in the Florida state legislature on Twitter/X.Sarafina Chitika, spokesperson for the Democratic National Committee, said: “Just like Trump, DeSantis ran a campaign pledging to ban abortion nationwide, rip away access to health care, and gut Social Security and Medicare, while embracing election deniers and whitewashing January 6. Whichever candidate wins the race for the Maga base will be left running on the same dangerous and unpopular anti-freedom agenda that voters will reject in November.”For its part, the New Hampshire electorate did not seem too shaken by his last-minute announcement.Two hours before an event he had planned in New Hampshire, there were no signs of the DeSantis campaign or his fans at The Farm Bar and Grille. A member of staff said they had found out from news reports that DeSantis wouldn’t be coming and said he had not yet pre-paid for the space.“Nope, I’m about to charge him right now.”
      Adam Gabbatt contributed reporting from New Hampshire More

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      Why New Hampshire could be the last chance for Republicans to beat Trump

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      Brightly dressed in a red-and-white starry jacket, Melinda Tourangeau was waiting eagerly at Grill 603, a casual diner in small-town New Hampshire, for a US presidential candidate not named Donald Trump.Tourangeau, 57, who lives in Milford, was “reluctantly forced to vote for Trump” in 2016 and 2020, she said. “I had to leave my morals at the door.”But this time she is supporting Nikki Haley. “She has gone all over the state to meet people, and when she meets you, and when you meet her, you feel raised, you feel like you’re a better person after you’ve met her. And her platform is brilliant – clear, concise, cogent – and she intends to do everything she says. She’s the right candidate.”Whether this is a minority view, or indicative of tectonic plates shifting among Republicans in New Hampshire, will be put to the test in Tuesday’s first-in-the-nation primary election. It comes one week after Trump’s record victory over Ron DeSantis, the governor of Florida, and Haley, an ex-US ambassador to the UN, in the Iowa caucuses.For half the century, no candidate who won both Iowa and New Hampshire has failed to secure their party’s presidential nomination. Victory for Trump here would probably seal the deal and set up a rematch with Democrat Joe Biden in November.But if Iowa played to Trump’s strengths among evangelical Christians and rural conservatives, New Hampshire is a different proposition. Its voters pride themselves on an independent streak – the state motto is “Live free or die” – and are generally wealthier, more educated and less religious. Both states are about 90% white.Voters who are registered without a party affiliation make up about 40% of the electorate in New Hampshire and are eligible to cast a Republican primary ballot, which makes them more moderate than in Iowa. New voters can also register at the polls on Tuesday.For Trump, whose authoritarian language, criminal charges and brash populism play less well among college-educated voters, this represents something of an away game. Even in the Iowa suburbs last week, he won only a third of the votes.Haley has a more “Republican classic” image – less extreme on issues such as abortion, more hawkish on foreign policy – and has been barnstorming New Hampshire for months. Although her third place finish in Iowa blunted her momentum, and some opinion polls still show Trump well ahead in New Hampshire, others put Haley running neck and neck.That makes Tuesday a make-or-break moment. EJ Dionne, a senior fellow in governance studies at the Brookings Institution, said at a panel discussion organised by the thinktank: “There is a road for her but it’s rocky, it’s rutted, it’s narrow and it runs along the edge of a cliff. She has to win New Hampshire, I believe, to have any chance of going on. I don’t think running Trump close in New Hampshire will really cut it any more, especially after running third in Iowa.”Trump apparently senses the danger and has stepped up his attacks on Haley. At a rally in Concord on Friday, he told supporters: “All you need to know about Nikki Haley is that every corrupt and sinister group we’ve been fighting for the past seven years is on her side … Nikki Haley is backed by the deep state and the military-industrial complex. She’s never seen a war she doesn’t like.”He has also resorted to his default tactic of using race and ethnicity as a political cudgel. In a post on his Truth Social account, Trump repeatedly referred to Haley, the daughter of immigrants from India, as “Nimbra”. She was born as Nimarata Nikki Randhawa but has always gone by her middle name.Asked about Trump’s false claim that her heritage disqualifies her from running from president, Haley told reporters: “I’ll let people decide what he means by his attacks. What we know is, look, he’s clearly insecure if he goes and does these temper tantrums, if he’s spending millions of dollars on TV. He’s insecure, he knows that something’s wrong.”She has also been returning fire by making a case that, while Trump was the right choice for president in 2016, he is now too old and chaos follows him wherever he goes. She is seeking to thread a needle, appealing to independents as the more acceptable face of the Republican party while not entirely alienating Trump’s “Make America great again” base.Such calculations have led her into trouble. Last month, when she was asked by a New Hampshire voter about the reason for the civil war, she did not mention slavery in her answer. Last week, in an interview on Fox News, she claimed: “We’ve never been a racist country.”But even if Haley does pull off a stunning upset, she would then head into less favourable territory next month in Nevada and her home state of South Carolina. It is also difficult for any candidate to compete with the attention-grabbing spectacle of Trump, facing 91 charges across four cases, showing up in courtrooms even as he runs for president.Tara Setmayer, a senior adviser to the Lincoln Project, an anti-Trump group, predicts that he will win the New Hampshire primary. “There are some people who are hoping and praying and wishing that Nikki Haley can overtake him, which would be interesting, but again, fleeting in her success because she will go to South Carolina and lose by 30 points in her own home state. I cannot think of any example in political history where losing in your own home state by double digits has been a momentum booster.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionShe added: “Some are looking at New Hampshire and thinking, well, depending on how Trump does, this could be indicative of his weakness in the general election. Perhaps. But there is a certain desire by the political media for a story and the horse race, and they’re looking for anything to write other than the inevitability of Trump, because once that happens, then people may tune out because they’re bored.”DeSantis got about 21% of the vote in Iowa, 30 points behind Trump’s narrow majority and two points ahead of Haley. He has spent little time in New Hampshire, aware that his mini-Trump persona and joyless campaign are unlikely to gain traction with either the Maga base or independents. He may soldier on to Nevada and South Carolina, playing for second in case Trump is unexpectedly felled by his age or legal troubles, and with an eye on another run in 2028.Kristen Soltis Anderson, a Republican pollster, told an audience at the American Enterprise Institute thinktank in Washington last week: “His appeal overlaps so much with Donald Trump. Even though he and Donald Trump have sparred a little bit throughout this race, it hasn’t got super nasty. And all of the polling I see, Nikki Haley’s favourables are not great-great but Ron DeSantis’s are still pretty great-great among Republican voters.“Even though I don’t see a path for him – he’s going to get single digits in New Hampshire and go to South Carolina, I don’t know where this all ends – I do think I can see why he wants to stay in and be relevant as long as he can, because he does have a shot at being able to say: ‘I’m the second place guy if there is an in-case-of-emergency-break-glass situation.’”Meanwhile Democrats are also holding a primary on Tuesday but Biden is skipping it because the state defies new Democratic rules he advocates. The president will not be on the ballot alongside nearly two dozen candidates but his allies in the state have mounted a campaign to get voters to write in his name. The result will have no bearing on the Democratic nomination but could deal Biden a symbolic blow.Another tradition missing from the final week in New Hampshire is debates. Haley, angling to frame the primary as a battle between Trump and herself, had suggested that she would debate only if he was on stage. But the former president has skipped every debate so far and paid no price. Two televised debates for the final New Hampshire sprint were duly cancelled.Indeed, Trump is already campaigning as if he were already in a general election against Biden, focusing his invective on border security and rising prices. At a rally in Atkinson, New Hampshire, this week he told supporters: “Our country is dying … And I stand before you today as the only candidate who is up to the task of saving America.” He promised to “make our country rich as hell again”.There are also ominous signs of the Republican party coalescing around him, just as it did in 2016. Primary rivals Doug Burgum, the governor of North Dakota; Vivek Ramaswamy, a biotech entrepreneur; and Tim Scott, a senator for South Carolina, all endorsed Trump after dropping out of the race. A constellation of senators, representatives, governors, and former White House and cabinet officials have done likewise, lending his nomination a sense of inevitability.Back in Milford, despite all the criminal charges and his past conduct towards women, Tourangeau admitted that she would still vote for Trump if he is the Republican nominee come November, not least because of her retirement savings plan.“I will have the sickest feeling in my stomach as I begrudgingly walk to the polls with my head down, and I will cast a vote for him,” she said. “But it’s only because my 401k will be bursting.” More

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      ‘God spoke to me’: Ryan Binkley’s quixotic quest for the Republican nod

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      In a movie, Ryan Binkley would be storming towards the presidency.At more than 6ft tall, with a strong jaw and an athletic physique, Binkley looks the quintessential Hollywood vision of a political leader. The long-shot Republican candidate for president wears well-cut suits and has a full head of dark brown hair. He has a lovely set of teeth, nice shiny shoes, and he smells nice.But Binkley’s problem? No one knows who he is.The Texan, a pastor and co-founder of a financial services company, has spent more than $8m of his own money on his quixotic presidential campaign. He has been running for president for more than nine months: three-quarters of a year spent in the early voting states of Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina.The sum total of his efforts so far has been almost zero attention from US media, a lot of puzzlement when he introduces himself to people, and 774 votes in Iowa.On Thursday night Binkley strode confidently into one of his political events, held in a back room of a bar in Manchester, New Hampshire. There was a broad grin fixed on his face, and his right palm was pre-extended, ready to shake the hands of potential voters.That didn’t take long. Only two people had turned up. And they weren’t eligible to vote in New Hampshire.“You know, I’ve been to meetings with one person in it,” Binkley said. “It’s disheartening sometimes, but you know, you do it 200 times and you get used to it.”Binkley is trying to sell people his version of Republicanism: budget balancing and small government, with a heavy dash of Christianity-inspired social conservatism. It’s the faith bit that inspired Binkley to run for president.“I am a business owner, I’m a pastor,” he said.“And God spoke to me many years ago about this. It became increasingly clear that he had a message for our country that … I think is this: we are so far in debt, we’re at a precipice. Something’s coming financially that we’re not ready for. I don’t know what it is.”It would be unfair to paint Binkley as solely a religious candidate – even if his campaign literature stresses that one of his aims is “restoring trust in God and each other”.Binkley has a plan to balance the US budget, and would rein in health insurance companies so Americans can receive better medical care. If elected president, he would “focus on people truly struggling financially”, he said, by improving education and offering job training.Binkley has a proper written-out platform, and can talk at length about his ideas. But there’s no one listening.As the event in Manchester continued it took on a tragicomic air. His sole member of staff had ambitiously laid out Binkley baseball caps, T-shirts and signs, and there was food and an open bar.But only four more people showed up, and only one of them lived in New Hampshire and was actually eligible to vote. He wasn’t fully sold on Binkley.“There’s so many candidates that are coming in and out of the race, you just kind of have to see what’s available the day of. It’s like going to the market. I maintain an open mind,” said Jason Barabas. He’s a professor of government at Dartmouth College, an Ivy League university in New Hampshire, and there was a sense that he was there as an anthropological exercise.“New Hampshire is famously independent, people really like to meet candidates,” Barabas said when asked about Binkley’s chances.“So a lot of New Hampshire voters will appreciate this exact moment, which is he’s coming to New Hampshire trying to meet with voters. I think that’s going to be really impactful for a lot of people.”Binkley’s event was competing against a trivia night taking place in the main bar. Once that had finished, Binkley’s campaign staffer, a pleasant person apparently well-practiced in remaining positive, went round to try to lure people to Binkley’s event. But not even the open bar could tempt a crowd that had largely never heard of the candidate.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“I just looked him up. He’s this guy,” said one woman triumphantly, after the Guardian pointed at Binkley and asked if she knew who he was.Did she plan to vote for him?“Probably not, no. I don’t even know his party affiliation.”The next day, at the Red Arrow Diner, a must-visit location for presidential candidates whose walls are adorned with photos of politicians including Binkley’s rivals Donald Trump, Nikki Haley and Ron DeSantis, there was a bit more success.No one was at the diner specifically to meet Binkley, but he seemed to get on well with the smattering of people eating their lunch. A huddle of female staff were impressed too.“He’s so handsome!” one worker said as Binkley loitered at the end of the counter.“Who is he?”Binkley, a high school football star who has an MBA from Southern Methodist University, may have made his money in finance, but it is Create church, the Christian church he co-founded with his wife, Ellie, that appears to be his passion. Housed in a gigantic building just north of Dallas, it’s the kind of modern American church where a band plays electric guitars and keyboards on stage, and parishioners raise both hands in the air and close their eyes as they pray.It is going to take a lot of prayer for Binkley to have a breakout moment on Tuesday, even if his goals for the primary are almost upsettingly low.At the diner, he giddily pointed out that a New Hampshire poll released on Wednesday has him polling four points behind Ron DeSantis, but he failed to mention that the poll had DeSantis at just 6%, and Binkley at 2% of the vote – with a margin of error of plus or minus 3%.“Man, if I could get 2 or 3%, and keep moving up in the polls, that’d be a win for me,” he said.To Binkley’s mind, 3% of the vote here, after the 0.7% he won in Iowa, would represent a sort of rolling progress that could see him win exposure and support. But in any case, for this unknown, religious, good-looking, would-be president, the decision on whether to stay in the race is out of his hands.“I feel like our message will connect,” Binkley said.“And I’m keep standing until it’s heard, and until I feel like God tells me to hang up the cleats.” More

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      Trump’s campaign trail runs via the courthouse – and he’s fine with that

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      Monday night: Des Moines, Iowa, celebrating victory with supporters over beer and popcorn. Tuesday morning: Manhattan, New York, on trial for defaming a woman he sexually abused. Tuesday night: Atkinson, New Hampshire, campaigning for the US presidency. Wednesday morning: court in New York again.Donald Trump, the former US president and frontrunner for the Republican nomination in 2024, has intertwined his political and legal calendars until they are all but indistinguishable. At rambunctious campaign rallies, he plays the victim and rails against a biased justice system. In sombre courtrooms, he creates a spectacle that guarantees airtime and fundraising to fuel his run for the White House.The jarring juxtaposition seems to be working.Trump’s 91 criminal charges across four cases did not stop him winning 98 out of 99 counties in Monday’s frigid Iowa caucuses, and interviews with his support base showed they accept his narrative of politically motivated prosecutions. He is leading opinion polls in New Hampshire and looks poised to become the Republican standard bearer.“The court appearances are his campaign,” Larry Sabato, director of the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia. “He’s spending much less time than the other candidates in the key states. He’s not spending as much on TV advertising. He’s doing all kinds of things that candidates for president usually don’t do because he’s got an ace card that none of the others have.“This has convinced not just his supporters but in a broad-based way the whole Republican party that he’s being oppressed, that Joe Biden is using the judicial system to try and put a stake in the heart of his toughest challenger for November. And they buy it.”Trump’s recent court appearances have been voluntary, not obligatory, at a time when his Republican rivals are crisscrossing states in search of votes. Last week the 77-year-old former reality TV star showed up for a hearing in Washington DC to hear his lawyers argue that he is immune from criminal charges for trying to overturn the 2020 election. A day later he was in Des Moines, Iowa, for a Fox News town hall.The duelling schedule evidently did him no harm in Iowa, where he romped to victory over the Florida governor, Ron DeSantis, by nearly 30 percentage points, more than twice the biggest winning margin ever achieved by a Republican. During his speech in Des Moines, Trump nodded to his legal tribulations: “I go to a lot of courthouses because of Biden, because they’re using that for election interference.”The following morning, he was in a Manhattan federal court – again by choice – to watch the selection of a jury that will decide whether he should pay damages for defamatory comments he made in office about the writer E Jean Carroll. Last year a jury concluded that Trump sexually abused her in a department store in 1996 and defamed her in 2022.That evening he headed to Atkinson, New Hampshire, for a campaign rally where he boasted about his win in Iowa but told supporters: “If I didn’t get indicted all these times and if they didn’t unfairly go after me, I would have won, but it would have been much closer. I tell you, I don’t know if I would have made the trade. I might have just liked the position we’re in right now.”Come Wednesday, it was back to New York and the Carroll case. This time Trump was animated, shaking his head at testimony he disliked, passing notes to his lawyers and speaking to them while jurors were in the room.He was scolded by Judge Lewis Kaplan after a lawyer for Carroll complained that he was grumbling about the case so loudly that jurors could hear him. When the judge threatened to expel him, Trump retorted: “I would love it.” The judge admonished: “I know you would. You just can’t control yourself in this circumstance, apparently.”Outside the courtroom, the Republican frontrunner then held a press conference, describing the trial as “rigged” and Carroll as “a person I never knew”. He complained that Kaplan, a Bill Clinton appointee, was “a nasty judge” and a “Trump-hating guy” who was “obviously not impartial”.Somehow he had made the case about himself rather than his victim. Maggie Haberman, author of Confidence Man: The Making of Donald Trump and the Breaking of America, told CNN: “He showed up for her testimony and so instead of us talking about her testimony we are talking about the fact that he was making noises, he was overheard whispering to his lawyer.”She added: “He would have liked to have gotten thrown out because he would then claim he was a victim. It’s heads he wins, tails the other side loses.”Trump was not in court on Thursday so he could attend his mother-in-law’s funeral in Florida. He will soon head back to New Hampshire to hold rallies ahead of Tuesday’s primary election, where he could in effect seal the Republican nomination. As endorsements from senior Republicans pour in, it seems that the party has made a collective decision to carry the legal baggage of a man who now openly brags that he has been indicted more often than Al Capone.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionCharlie Sykes, editor of the Bulwark website and a former conservative radio host, said: “He’s going to have a courtroom campaign because Donald Trump relishes the idea of being the martyr. He thinks that being associated with these trials will actually help him in the polls and so far he’s not wrong. Every time he’s been indicted, he’s gone up.”But Sykes believes that Trump’s decision to attend the trial involving E Jean Carroll could be a mistake as he pivots to general election voters. “How many Americans actually know about this case? There’s been such a firehose of indictments, hearings, charges. Now Donald Trump himself has decided that he is going to draw attention to a case that he’s already lost, that has found him liable for sexual assault.“It’s hard for me to imagine any swing voters in the suburbs of Philadelphia or Milwaukee hearing for the first time about this case and thinking, yeah, this is the guy that I want to support for president.”Anna Greenberg, a senior partner at polling firm GQR, also sees limitations in Trump’s gameplan. She said: “He saw that when he got indicted he got a major boost, and you saw it in the primary polls, and so he may be thinking if I engage with these trials against me and I rail and I attack, that’s going to continue to give me some kind of benefit.“I think he already got the benefit. I don’t think there’s any additive benefit for him but I think there’s a real downside for him, which is that’s how he’s spending his time and not out on the campaign trail and doing the campaigning.”Trump has pleaded not guilty in four state and federal criminal cases, including two claiming he tried to overturn his 2020 election loss to Biden. This week his lawyers filed paperwork in another case – over his allegedly illegal retention of sensitive classified documents – arguing that intelligence agencies were politically biased against Trump.Some observers fear that the scorched earth approach poses a far-reaching danger to civil society and American legal and political structures. Sykes, author of How the Right Lost Its Mind, added: “Donald Trump is waging a concerted campaign to de-legitimize the justice system in America.“He is trying to discredit not just prosecutors, but also judges and juries and the entire process of legal accountability and the damage is going to be long lasting and it’s going to be profound.” More