In New Hampshire Sprint, Haley Tries to Stay in Race

MANCHESTER, N.H. — Nikki Haley raced across New Hampshire on Monday to hustle for voters in what may amount to her last, best chance to prevent or at least delay a 2024 rematch between President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump.

In the final day of campaigning before Tuesday’s first-in-the-nation primary election, Haley and Trump embodied the increasingly lopsided nature of a race in which the former president has methodically drained the political life out of his rivals. His latest victim was Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who on Sunday ended his campaign with a desultory video in which he endorsed Trump.

While Haley dashed to half a dozen events in New Hampshire, Trump began the day in New York City for an optional court appearance in his civil defamation trial that ended up being postponed. He had no public appearances planned until the evening, when he was to hold a rally in Laconia, New Hampshire, with three vanquished opponents-turned-supporters: Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina, Vivek Ramaswamy and Gov. Doug Burgum of North Dakota.

Haley — whose starriest endorsement by a onetime Republican presidential competitor came over the weekend from former Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson — insisted there was still hope for her cause.

“America doesn’t do coronations,” Haley said at her first event of the day, in Franklin, New Hampshire. “We believe in choices. We believe in democracy, and we believe in freedom. I have said I love the live-free-or-die state, but you know what? I want to make it a live-free-or-die country.”

Yet polls show Trump inching closer to the crown. He led Haley by 57% to 38% in a tracking survey released Monday by Suffolk University, The Boston Globe and Boston’s NBC10 television station. An outcome like that in moderate New Hampshire, which long appeared to be a golden chance for a Haley triumph, could effectively end the nomination race.

DeSantis’ departure gave Haley the one-on-one showdown with Trump that she has desired, but the Florida governor’s grudging endorsement of a rival who had bullied him with derisive nicknames for months only seemed to add to an aura of inevitability around the former president. If anti-Trump Republicans had once imagined Haley’s rivals coalescing behind her in a show of force to rid their party of the former president, instead the opposite has happened.

Still, Olivia Perez-Cubas, a spokesperson for Haley’s campaign, said Monday morning that it had raised $500,000 since DeSantis dropped out Sunday afternoon.

Haley pleaded with New Hampshire voters Monday to change the primary’s direction, casting herself as an outsider taking on Trump and the political establishment rallying behind him.

Underscoring the one-on-one contest, she said in Franklin: “Do we want more of the same or do we want a new generational leader?”

Trump, having declared the primary nearly over during a rally Sunday night in Rochester, New Hampshire, said during a recorded interview that was shown Monday on Newsmax that he would not call for Haley to exit the race if she did not win New Hampshire.

“I don’t ask people to drop out,” Trump said. “They drop out of their own volition.”

But he added: “Perhaps she should. Maybe she’ll drop out on Tuesday.”

In a demonstration of his political muscle, Trump on Monday announced an endorsement from Rep. Nancy Mace, R-S.C., whose 2022 primary campaign he opposed and Haley supported.

Mace was merely the latest South Carolinian to throw public support behind Trump as the state’s primary approaches Feb. 24: In addition to Scott, Gov. Henry McMaster and several state lawmakers flew north to appear with Trump at rallies in New Hampshire.

In an ominous sign of the deceptive role that technology could play in the rest of this year’s campaign, New Hampshire officials also sought to bat back a robocall some Democrats received from a voice doctored to sound like Biden’s that urged them not to vote in Tuesday’s primary and to “save” their vote for the general election in November.

The state attorney general’s office called the messages “an unlawful attempt to disrupt the New Hampshire presidential primary election and to suppress New Hampshire voters” and urged voters to ignore them.

Kathleen Sullivan, a former chair of the New Hampshire Democratic Party whose phone number was revealed in the robocall, called the recording “outright election interference” intended to depress turnout for the campaign to write in Biden’s name on the Democratic primary ballot, an effort she is helping lead.

Biden skipped New Hampshire’s primary election after the state refused to comply with the Democratic National Committee’s edict to push South Carolina in front of New Hampshire on the presidential nominating calendar.

Haley’s final sprint had the feeling of the last competitive days of the 2020 Democratic primary contest, when Biden gained an insurmountable lead over Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders in delegates and backing from voters. But while that occurred after Super Tuesday in early March nearly four years ago, the consolidation of Republican support behind Trump has come after just 110,000 votes in Iowa’s caucuses and before New Hampshire has delivered its verdict.

As in that Democratic primary race, the defeated candidates this year have largely lined up behind a man they have concluded will be their party’s nominee, while a lone factional candidate is insisting that a path forward still exists.

Voters who came to see Haley on Monday said they were hopeful that with DeSantis out of the race, his support would swing to her.

“He was clogging the candidacy. We don’t need extra people,” Sandy Adams, a retired school psychologist who backed Trump in 2016 and 2020, said after Haley poured beers for patrons with her most influential New Hampshire supporter, Gov. Chris Sununu, at T-Bones Great American Eatery in Concord. “She’s ready, she is right, she is what America needs.”

Haley’s final event of the day was jam-packed with several hundred supporters but still had a lackluster feel. Sununu introduced her, and she was also joined by Don Bolduc, a retired general who lost a Senate race in New Hampshire in 2022 and has backed Haley. But there was no one else standing by her side. Her speech was short and lacked memorable moments.

More than ever, Trump and his allies are acting as if the nomination is a foregone conclusion. His allies in Congress are now referring to him as the presumptive nominee, and Trump has used his New Hampshire campaign stops — and surrogate appearances — as tryouts to be his running mate.

Trump himself was set to return to New Hampshire for his evening rally, his last scheduled campaign event before voting begins Tuesday.

The former president’s son Donald Trump Jr. was scheduled to speak to supporters in Hollis, near the Massachusetts border.

Other Republicans making the trek to New Hampshire to demonstrate support for Trump — and potentially audition for vice president or a spot in a possible Cabinet — included Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, Rep. Elise Stefanik of New York and Kari Lake, the Republican candidate for Senate in Arizona.

Leading New Hampshire Democrats continued their push for voters to cast write-in ballots for Biden. What began as an effort to avoid the embarrassment of having a little-known Democrat beat Biden morphed in the campaign’s final weeks into an effort to demonstrate an organic strength for the president that has yet to materialize in other states.

Rep. Dean Phillips of Minnesota, a long-shot challenger to Biden who is trying to turn the delegate-free Democratic primary in New Hampshire into a referendum on the president’s political strength, on Monday won the endorsement of The New Hampshire Union Leader, a conservative Manchester newspaper that has emerged as the state’s leading anti-Trump organ.

But given Phillips’ underdog status against Biden, he may join a long list of presidential primary candidates — including Pete du Pont, Steve Forbes and Newt Gingrich — who drew the newspaper’s backing only to go down in defeat.

The Union Leader also endorsed Haley on Sunday.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.