‘Now we have a two-person race,’ Haley told supporters Monday evening. ‘And you got one who’s got the entire political elite all around him.’
Salem, N.H. — Former U.N. ambassador Nikki Haley has spent the past few days characterizing her former boss’s lock on prominent Republicans as a sign that she’s the real outsider candidate in the GOP presidential primary. It’s an attempt by Haley to spin the bevy of attacks she’s sustained in recent months from former president Donald Trump surrogates and voters, who have spent the entire race casting her as an “establishment” candidate and a “warmonger” who is out of touch with the modern GOP.
“Now we have a two-person race,” Haley told a crowd of several hundred voters here Monday evening, urging them to bring five friends to the polls in today’s open primary. “And you got one who’s got the entire political elite all around him.”
New Hampshire voters will head to the polls Tuesday as the list of high-profile Republicans who have thrown their support behind the former president seems to grow by the hour. The camp of elected Republican Trump endorsers now includes her former rival, Florida governor Ron DeSantis, who bowed out of the race Sunday afternoon after coming in a distant second place to Trump in Iowa. He then immediately threw his weight behind the front-runner.
One day before the Iowa caucuses, Trump secured the support of his former primary rival, Florida senator Marco Rubio, whom Haley had endorsed for president in 2016. On Friday he scored an endorsement from his former 2024 rival, South Carolina senator Tim Scott, whom Haley appointed to the Senate back when she was governor of the Palmetto State.
And then on Monday he won the support of Charleston-area Representative Nancy Mace, whom Haley had endorsed in 2022 to help her win reelection against a Trump-backed primary challenger. (Adding insult to injury, Haley lives in Mace’s district.)
Entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy and North Dakota governor Doug Burgum also got behind Trump immediately after leaving the race.
Add to the list a who’s-who of rank-and-file Republican lawmakers and many congressional leaders.
“It’s all these legislative people,” Haley said of the recent additions to Trump’s bandwagon. “He’s got the media elite around him. But you know what, I’ve never wanted them. Never.”
The D.C. establishment has thrown its lot in with Trump, Haley argued, in part because she supports the passage of a constitutional amendment that would break the grip on power long enjoyed by entrenched D.C. lawmakers. The amendment would limit House members to three terms and senators to just two. Haley also supports mandatory mental-competency tests for legislative and presidential candidates — such as Trump and Biden — who are over the age of 75.
“You’re not going to see some congressional people get around me because I think we need to have term limits in Washington, D.C,” she told supporters.
The former U.N. ambassador also pushed back on a favorite attack of Trump, DeSantis, and Ramaswamy: That she is a tool of the military-industrial complex who cashed in on her hawkish commitments with a lucrative board seat at Boeing.
“I am not a warmonger. You are not the wife of a combat veteran and want war. I don’t want war,” she said.
Just as FiveThirtyEight’s polling average in New Hampshire has shown a slow but continuous surge for Haley, it has shown a precipitous fall for DeSantis. Before dropping out of the race, he was polling at around six percentage points here. Polls suggest the few supporters he’d held on to before dropping out slightly favor Trump to Haley.
“He didn’t have much support. But I think the vast majority is gonna go to Trump,” said New Hampshire-based GOP consultant Dave Carney, adding that there was no path for DeSantis after his 30-point loss to Trump in the state where he’d staked his campaign. “He probably wanted to give it a good old college try in South Carolina. But he made the right decision. He’s wasted enough people’s money.”
“We actually said about ten minutes before the press release came on our phones: ‘Why doesn’t he just drop out?‘” Patricia Nesto, a self-described left-leaning independent voter from Dover, N.H., told NR ahead of Haley’s Sunday evening rally in Exeter.
Even before he dropped, some New Hampshire voters had expressed frustration that DeSantis traveled straight from Iowa to Haley’s home state of South Carolina — whose primary is in February — before making his way to the Granite State.
“It kind of showed us disrespect my opinion. We take this seriously,” Nashua resident Donald Berube, a Republican, told NR Sunday morning in Derry. “If he wants any hope for 2028 I think he’s better off getting out.”
Tuesday’s primary in independent-friendly New Hampshire is Haley’s greatest opportunity to upset Trump’s path to the GOP nomination. But many GOP lawmakers already see his victory as a foregone conclusion.
Nikki Haley tells CNN that Tim Scott didn’t tell the truth about giving her a heads up on Trump endorsement.
“That’s not true. He didn’t call, he didn’t text. He didn’t tell me he was going to do this.”
Says she had texted him, asking to “sit down and talk about endorsement.”
— Natalie Allison (@natalie_allison) January 21, 2024
New Hampshire–based Republican strategist Mike Dennehy says the decisions by DeSantis and Ramaswamy to bow out of the race before Tuesday’s primary make it harder for Haley to keep Trump’s vote-share below 50 percent. If she manages to pull off an upset, she will likely have independent voters to thank. “Haley needed DeSantis and Vivek to stay in the race to split up the GOP vote,” he said.