MOST THINGS become banal after a near decade of cultural dominance. But not Donald Trump. Republican voters are still enthralled by him, undaunted by all the turmoil and scandal of his time in the White House and his post-presidential life. His rallies retain their feeling of secular religious revival. His fresh-faced challengers, by contrast, have looked unoriginal and uninspiring. By the time Republicans had voted in just one state, Iowa, only one serious challenger remained. All the rest had dropped out; most had endorsed the impending nominee. The last woman standing, Nikki Haley, a former governor of South Carolina who served as America’s ambassador to the United Nations while Mr Trump was in office, mounted her resistance in New Hampshire, the second state to cast ballots. Like all the rest, she was overrun.

The Associated Press called the race for Mr Trump just two minutes after the last polls in the state closed. As this article was published ballots were still being tallied, but Mr Trump seemed to have scored a decisive victory. An unbowed Ms Haley vowed to fight on. “You’ve all heard the chatter among the political class, they’re falling all over themselves saying this race is over,” she said at a speech in Concord, New Hampshire, conceding victory to Mr Trump. “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.” Mr Trump was not particularly pleased. “Who the hell was the imposter that went up on the stage before and, like, claimed a victory?” he sniped at his victory speech.

The problem for Ms Haley is that, if she cannot win in New Hampshire, she cannot expect to win anywhere. Entrance polls conducted during the Iowa caucuses, held on January 15th, show Ms Haley overperforming among Republicans with college degrees, who labelled themselves as political moderates, who didn’t identify as evangelical Christians and especially well among those who believe that President Joe Biden legitimately won the election of 2020. Those kinds of voters are heavily overrepresented in New Hampshire.

And it was not just a demographic dividend that Ms Haley had hoped to cash in. She won the coveted endorsement of Chris Sununu, New Hampshire’s popular Republican governor, who took to barnstorming the state with her. She and her allies heavily outspent Mr Trump, splashing out $31m versus his $15.7m. She spent months traipsing around the state’s breweries, cafés and diners, while Mr Trump eschewed such drudgery. Anti-Trump Republicans had warned that the only way to beat the former president was to clear the field and consolidate support into a single opposition candidate—which has now happened. And even after all that the projected result is an 11-point loss.

Subsequent states in the primary calendar are all much more hostile terrain for Ms Haley. Republicans in her home state of South Carolina, which holds its primary contest on February 24th, look much more like those in Iowa—where Ms Haley came third, 32 points behind Mr Trump—than New Hampshire. An average of recent polls there shows Ms Haley trailing by a crushing 37 points. Mr Trump has secured the endorsements of the top South Carolina Republicans with whom Ms Haley once worked as governor.

In trying to explain away this uncomfortable reality at an election-eve rally in Salem, New Hampshire, Ms Haley branded herself as somehow more of a populist insurgent than Mr Trump. One candidate “has got the entire political elite all around him. It’s all of Congress. It’s all these legislative people. He’s got the media all around him. But you know what? I’ve never wanted them.” Only the most credulous supporters in the crowd would believe Ms Haley’s line that her former colleagues were abandoning her because she had been so zealous in pursuing ethics reforms while governor. One especially bored reporter (not this one) began timing their Rubik’s-cube-solving abilities midway through the speech.

In a memo released on the day of the New Hampshire vote, Ms Haley’s campaign argued that she had a viable path to the nomination, urging a “deep breath” until “Super Tuesday” on March 5th, when many states hold their primaries. Her team’s argument is that many of the states that will vote in the next six weeks are “open primaries”, in which independent voters who are not registered Republicans can take part. This factor will indeed help Ms Haley. But in order to be the Republican presidential nominee, one unfortunately needs to be able to command a majority of the party.

Ms Haley’s demise would be the last gasp of the meek and muddied anti-Trump resistance. Only late in her campaign did Ms Haley take to attacking Mr Trump by name. Her criticisms of the man are usually meticulously crafted to avoid moral judgment. “Rightly or wrongly, chaos follows him,” is a favourite line in her stump speech, as if the chaos had been a curse of some vindictive god rather than intrinsic to the man himself.

Her seemingly inevitable collapse would commit the Republican Party to Trumpism, with its particular blend of isolationism, illiberalism and protectionism, and away from the internationalism of which Ms Haley sometimes seems the sole influential ambassador on the Republican side. In America, voters get what they want. And it seems that nothing—not a dozen serious and vanquished Republican candidates, not the one remaining woman, not the 91 criminal indictments facing the former president—can get in their way.■