Former U.S. President Donald Trump appears poised for another significant victory in his bid to claim the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, with polling showing him with a substantial edge in Tuesday’s Republican primary election in the northeastern state of New Hampshire.
Trump also got a boost, both in New Hampshire and in the race overall, with Sunday’s announcement that Florida Governor Ron DeSantis was ending his campaign.
DeSantis failed to meet expectations that he would emerge as a serious challenger to Trump, and his departure from the race leaves Trump and former South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley as the only two major Republican candidates remaining.
A new CNN poll Sunday showed Trump with 50% of the prospective New Hampshire vote, easily topping the 39% figure for Nikki Haley, his one-time ambassador to the United Nations, and 6% for DeSantis. The survey results were in line with recent polling in the state by other news organizations.
Trump won last week’s caucuses in the reliably Republican midwestern farm state of Iowa, collecting more than 50% of the vote, easily doubling the vote for both DeSantis and Haley.
Trump and Haley traded barbs throughout the weekend, while DeSantis visited South Carolina and made a return trip to New Hampshire before ending his run for the White House.
The South Carolina party primary is more than a month away. But Trump attempted this weekend to diminish Haley’s standing in her home state. An array of South Carolina officials who endorsed Trump traveled to New Hampshire, more than 1,300 kilometers (about 807.8 miles) away, to speak on his behalf.
“To the people of New Hampshire,” Trump told supporters at a rally, “All you need to know about Nikki Haley is that every globalist, liberal, Biden supporter and ‘Never Trumper’ is on her side — and virtually every single leader … in her home state of South Carolina is on our side. We have almost everybody.”
Trump has also suggested that somehow Haley, who was born in the United States to Indian immigrants, is not American enough. He has repeatedly referred to her on his Truth Social media platform as “Nimbra,” an apparent intentional misspelling of her birth name, Nimarata Nikki Randhawa. When she married Michael Haley 26 years ago, she adopted his surname and has used it professionally since then.
Trump is trying the reclaim the White House after losing his 2020 reelection bid to Democrat Joe Biden, with polls showing both are favored to win their parties’ nomination for a rematch that many U.S. voters say they do not want but one that appears inevitable.
Haley has claimed that at 77, Trump’s mental acuity is declining, and contended that neither he nor the 81-year-old Biden should lead the country.
In a speech over the weekend, Trump blamed Haley by name four times for the lack of security at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, when 2,000 Trump supporters stormed into the building to try to halt congressional certification of Biden’s victory.
Trump never corrected himself but apparently was referring to another political nemesis, former Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. Haley has never served in Congress and says she was in South Carolina at the time of the riot at the Capitol.
“If you look recently, there have been multiple things: I mean, he claimed that Joe Biden was going to get us into World War II. I’m assuming he meant World War III,” Haley said. “He said that he ran against President Obama. He never ran against President Obama. He says that I’m the one that kept security from the Capitol on January 6. I was nowhere near the Capitol on January 6.”
“Don’t be surprised if you have someone that’s 80 in office, their mental stability is going to continue to decline,” Haley said Sunday. “That’s just human nature.”
Haley claimed that Trump is “just not at the same level he was at 2016,” when he won the presidency. “I think we’re seeing some of that decline.”
