Donald Trump defeated Ron DeSantis in Iowa and Nikki Haley in New Hampshire. He prevailed against his two rivals in the Republican Party primaries in his most promising areas. Everything indicates that he will easily secure his nomination as a presidential candidate. But just as the victory in the Iowa caucuses was overwhelming and left no doubt about his strengths, the victory in New Hampshire worries the former president. The way independent voters have turned their backs on her and turned to Haley proves she is right to question Trump's chances of defeating current President Joe Biden in the Nov. 5 presidential election. Biden's popularity is low and Trump is currently ahead in the polls.
In the speech Haley gave on Tuesday evening, when barely 20% of the votes had been counted, the former UN ambassador and former South Carolina governor attacked Trump with this flank. He recalled that the Republicans had lost almost all elections under his leadership. “We lost the Senate. We lost the house. We lost the White House. We lost in 2018. We lost in 2020 and we lost in 2022. The worst kept secret in politics is the Democrats' desire to run against Donald Trump. They know that Trump is the only Republican in the country that Joe Biden can defeat. You can't fix the mess if you don't win an election. “A Trump nomination is a victory for Biden and a presidency for Kamala Harris,” said Haley, who refused to throw in the towel and vowed to continue fighting for the nomination despite the Republican Party’s maneuvers to declare Trump the virtual winner to fight.
The former president did particularly well in the most conservative parts of New Hampshire, while Haley won in the most progressive parts. The candidate only led Trump in Democratic-leaning cities like Concord, Keene and Portsmouth. The New Hampshire primary is half-open. Unregistered voters, those who are not registered as either Republicans or Democrats, can choose to vote in either party's primary. This attracts voters who are not necessarily loyal to either party to participate.
Primary exit polls conducted on Election Day showed a stark contrast between the support Trump received from voters registered as Republicans and those unaffiliated with either party, identified as independents, who aligned themselves with Haley. Trump won 65% of the Republican vote, compared to 29% for Haley, according to AP VoteCast, an exit poll of the state's voters. On the other hand, 60% of independents achieved this, compared to 33% for Trump. The candidate also beat Trump among college graduates. Among the electorate as a whole, the victory was 54.3% to 43.2% in favor of the former president.
This brings good and bad news for Trump. The good news is that the nomination is almost guaranteed. There are some other states with open or semi-open primaries, such as New Hampshire, but most independent states exclude them from the Republican vote, and among the party's voters, Trump's dominance is overwhelming. In addition, his double opening win seems to be paving the way for him. “If you win Iowa and New Hampshire, there has never been a defeat, so we won't be first, I assure you,” Trump said in his speech assessing the results, in which he fumed about it It seemed that Haley had not given up the race.
The bad news for Trump because of this low support among independents is that he will have a hard time winning the November election against Biden. The electability thesis was one of the focuses of Haley's campaign, particularly with the four indictments for 91 alleged crimes against the former president. Add to that civil lawsuits, like the one this Friday that resulted in his being ordered to pay $83.3 million for defamation against columnist E. Jean Carroll.
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Half of Republicans were worried
“Don’t complain about what happens in November if you don’t vote tomorrow,” Haley told attendees at her final rally. According to AP VoteCast, about half of Republican Party primary voters say they are very or somewhat concerned that Trump is too extreme to win the presidential election.
Curiously, Trump made one of his hoaxes (or made one of his mistakes) when he accurately referred to his election results in New Hampshire: “You know we won New Hampshire three times, three times now. We always win it. We won the primaries. We won the presidential election. We won it and it’s a very, very special place for me,” he said during his appearance this Tuesday evening.
Although his victory in the 2016 primary was crucial for him, he later lost in the presidential election in that state to both Hillary Clinton in 2016 and Joe Biden in 2020. New Hampshire has a Republican governor, which shows that it's someone else Moderates can prevail against the Democrats. This governor, Chris Sununu, has campaigned tirelessly for Haley.
Biden, meanwhile, interprets that the results of the New Hampshire primary make it clear that he will run against Trump again in November, as he did in 2020, as a result of a partisan dispute over the electoral calendar.
In a statement, the president thanked those who voted for him by handwriting his name on the ballots and appealed to independent and Republican voters who oppose Trump to support his campaign. “My message to the country is that the stakes could not be higher. Our democracy. Our personal freedoms, from the right to vote to the right to vote. Our economy, which has seen the strongest recovery globally since Covid. “Everything is at stake,” he said.
The bad thing for him is that Biden himself, 81, is turning off many voters. A Gallup poll released this Thursday showed his approval rating in the third year of his term was just 39.8%, the lowest for a president in his first term since Jimmy Carter's 37.4%. Another study released Thursday showed that 66% of Americans say they would not vote for a candidate over 80 years old. Here too, according to the same survey, the best hope for Biden – with the associated risks – is Trump. 66% of citizens say they would not vote for a candidate who has been indicted and 70% would not vote for a candidate convicted of a crime by a jury.
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