Like his victory in Iowa last week, Donald Trump’s defeat of Nikki Haley in New Hampshire was substantial enough to remove any real doubt about the outcome of the primary campaign yet also somewhat underwhelming as a statement of voter enthusiasm for a former president and de facto incumbent candidate.
It proved that Trump is basically unbeatable in this timeline while hinting that it could have been otherwise, that we were only a few what-ifs away from a more competitive campaign.
You can see some of those what-ifs hovering around an interesting Politico profile of a New Hampshire Republican voter who considered Haley, even donated to her, before returning to Trump when the primary arrived. The profile, by Michael Kruse, introduces us to Ted Johnson, a retired military man turned project manager for an IT security company: He’s divorced and remarried, the father of three adult sons, working from home in Bedford, N.H., and a Barack Obama voter twice over and then a Trump voter in 2016 and 2020.
When Kruse first meets him, Johnson says that Trump feels to him like a “rebel without a cause” and that he’s looking for a candidate who can help reunite the country — which draws him to Haley as her star rises in New Hampshire. Flash forward to the days just before the election, though, and Johnson has swung back to Trump, even though — or because — the former president is a “wrecking ball” who Johnson thinks will “break the system.”
You can tell it’s a good profile because the details cut in different analytical directions. If you think that Trump’s victory was always assured because Republican voters exist in a bubble of delusion and unshakable loyalty, you’ll find evidence for that assumption in Johnson’s belief that Jan. 6 was a setup organized by Trump’s enemies and in the familiar script he uses to make a populist case for Trump — that he’ll fight the self-dealing insiders, “go in and lead” and “take care of the average guy.”
But if you’re struck by Johnson’s professed (if temporary) Trump fatigue and his willingness to seriously consider Haley despite his obviously Trumpy politics, then Kruse’s piece suggests a few interesting might-have-beens. For instance:
What if Trump had been indicted only in the classified documents case? The pileup of indictments was clearly an inflection point in the primary campaign, sending Trump surging toward a secure front-running position. In Johnson’s narrative, you get a concise summary of the mentality that helped drive that surge of support: “For a guy like me, I am looking, and I’m saying, ‘Why is everybody so hellbent on getting Trump in jail or getting him not to win?’” His answer is that institutional Washington, the intelligence and law enforcement agencies especially, must be “afraid as hell” of Trump coming back, because he doesn’t tolerate their uselessness or play by their bureaucratic rules. They’re “throwing so much stuff at this guy, and it’s almost like I’m rooting for him,” Johnson tells Kruse. “This is a whole system of government going after one man who, probably, I bet, right now, 85 million people want to be president.”