If Donald Trump is ever going to lose a state in the GOP presidential primary, it will likely be on Tuesday. If former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley cannot defeat him in New Hampshire, nobody ever will. For the former president, a loss would be an annoyance. For Haley, it would break the back of her campaign.
In national polling, Trump leads Haley and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis by around 50 percentage points. On Monday, Trump won an emphatic 30-point victory in the Iowa caucuses, relegating DeSantis to a remote second. But in New Hampshire, things appear somewhat more interesting.
In the RealClearPolitics polling average of the state, Trump is besting Haley by a respectable but comparatively modest 13 points. Haley received a boost when former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie dropped out of the race, as his supporters vastly favored Haley over Trump and DeSantis. In many surveys, Haley and Christie were combining for a proportion of the vote not too far off from Trump’s total. Could Haley be within striking range of the seemingly invincible frontrunner? The first New Hampshire poll released after Christie’s withdrawal seemed to suggest as much. Taken before the Iowa caucus, it found Trump and Haley deadlocked at 40 percent support each.
Why is the New Hampshire primary so much closer than the rest of the GOP race? It comes down to the fact that the Granite State’s electorate looks very different from Iowa’s. Members of Iowa’s GOP are more likely to be blue collar and working class, the so-called “beer track.” Trump’s enduring strength with working-class voters has powered his general election campaigns, but those voters are a key source of strength in the Republican primary as well. New Hampshire’s Republicans are more emblematic of the GOP’s “wine track,” voters who are more likely to have a high income and a college degree.
The sharpest divisions, however, are over ideology. New Hampshire voters are generally more ideologically moderate than they are in Iowa. According to CNN’s entrance polls from the Iowa caucuses, 52 percent of voters identified as very conservative. Thirty-seven percent were somewhat conservative and only 11 percent described themselves as moderate or liberal.
By contrast, in Saint Anselm College’s most recent poll of New Hampshire, just 26 percent of likely GOP primary voters were very conservative, barely more than the 23 percent who were moderate or liberal. And Nikki Haley is cleaning up with the latter group: per Saint Anselm, moderates support her over Trump by 1 point, and liberals back her by a staggering 64 points.
Because of these advantages, Haley is under extreme pressure to perform well. Several Haley donors told CNBC that unless she can finish at least “a very close second,” “the race could effectively be over for her after that.” Haley has staked her campaign on the state, bolstered by the endorsement of popular Gov. Chris Sununu. The thinking goes that an impressive Haley performance in New Hampshire might give her momentum going into her home state of South Carolina, the next major contest.
Trump, for his part, has turned his fire onto Haley, blasting her as “counting on the Democrats and liberals to infiltrate your Republican primary.” While he is at his weakest in New Hampshire, Trump still may be strong enough to overcome all of Haley’s advantages. While there are fewer conservative voters in New Hampshire, Trump wins them so emphatically that in the aforementioned Saint Anselm poll, he registers 52 percent overall support against Haley’s 38 percent. Very conservative voters back Trump over Haley by 67 points. Suffolk University also released a poll with Trump with a comfortable 50 percent to 34 percent lead over Haley.
The former president is coming off of a burst of his own momentum from a commanding win in Iowa. His performance was sufficiently strong to force upstart entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy out of the race. Ramaswamy, who endorsed Trump upon his exit, was running as a strong ally of the former president. His small but not insignificant base of support has helped Trump counter whatever boost Haley got from Christie’s exit.
DeSantis, on the other hand, is polling at 6 percent and is shifting resources away from the state already. He may have succeeded in blunting Haley’s momentum with his distant second-place finish in Iowa, but he does not appear to have picked up any of his own. In Iowa, DeSantis benefitted from a more conservative electorate, a huge investment of resources, and endorsements from important figures like Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds and evangelical leader Bob Vander Plaats. In New Hampshire, he has none of that.
If one squints just the right way after taking just the right cocktail of controlled substances, it is almost possible to see a world where Haley upsets Trump next week, is able to parlay that into a win in her home state of South Carolina, and is able to make super Tuesday into a serious contest. In the real world, though, New Hampshire’s primary is likely to be a mere curiosity on the road to one of the most obvious outcomes in the history of presidential nominations.
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