In the final days before New Hampshire’s first-in-the-nation primary, Nikki Haley is sharpening her attacks on Donald Trump as the former South Carolina governor courts the state’s famously discerning independent voters.
After coming in third in the Iowa caucuses, Haley’s is casting her candidacy as a “better choice” for a nation barreling towards a possible rematch between Trump, 77 and Joe Biden, 81.
“Do we really want to have two 80-year-olds running for president, when we’ve got a country in disarray and a world on fire?” Haley, who turns 52 on Saturday, is filmed asking during a CNN town Hall in Henniker, New Hampshire.
On the campaign trail and on social media, she has taunted Trump for refusing to debate her. This week, Haley announced she would only participate in Republican debates if Trump did. He refused, forcing CNN and ABC News to cancel two scheduled Republican debates.
At an event in Rochester, she accused Trump of throwing a “temper tantrum” after he berated her performance as his UN ambassador. It was Trump, she told voters in the town of Hollis, who “lost” Republicans control of Congress and the White House.
It’s a notable shift in rhetoric for a candidate who, until recently, had attempted to establish herself as the only viable alternative to Trump without taking him on directly. After months of implicit calls for “generational change” and competency tests for older politicians, she is now openly seeking confrontation with her former boss.
Trump hardly needed to be goaded into a response. At rallies and on social media, he has unleashed a torrent of attacks on Haley, even as he predicted an easy victory in New Hampshire and declared the race effectively over.
At a rally in Concord on Friday night, Trump said Haley was “not presidential timber” and essentially ruled her out of contention as his running mate. (Earlier on Friday, an anti-Trump Haley supporter said she assured him that being Trump’s vice-president was “off the table”.)
Haley has brushed aside some of Trump’s ugliest conspiratorial and race-based attacks as a sign that he was “insecure”. In a revival of the birtherism claims, he falsely suggested on social media that Haley, the South Carolina-born daughter of Indian immigrants, was ineligible for the presidency. She is not. And though she has always gone by her middle name, Nikki, Trump referred to her in a series of social media posts by her given name, Nimarata, misspelling it as “Nimrada” and “Nimbra”.
“I know President Trump well. That’s what he does when he feels threatened,” she said. “I don’t take these things personally.”
But even as Haley ramps up her criticism of Trump, she is treading carefully. “People either want me to hate Trump or love Trump,” Haley told voters on Thursday, explaining that she would refrain from personal attacks.
The approach has frustrated never-Trump voters in the state who are searching for a Republican who will challenge him on matters of principle, not just policy.
“She’s just not willing to take him on,” said Fergus Cullen, a former chair of the New Hampshire Republican party and prominent Trump opponent.
Cullen has seen Haley campaign four times in New Hampshire and said he was left “frustrated and disappointed” by her reluctance to go after Trump more aggressively, which he thinks will cost her support among independents.
But Haley’s allies say there are risks to a more aggressive approach. If there was an appetite among the Republican electorate for a fiercely anti-Trump candidate, they contend, the former New Jersey governor Chris Christie would still be in the race.
In recent weeks, Haley has declined to comment on Trump’s fitness for office and has repeatedly sidestepped questions related to the pending criminal cases against him.
At the CNN town hall, Haley said she would not pre-emptively pardon Trump but would do so if he were convicted of any of the 91 felony counts against him. “The last thing we need is an 80-year-old president sitting in jail, because that’s just going to further divide our country,” she said.
After winning every single county in Iowa save for one – the state’s most liberal, which broke for Haley by one vote – Trump is seen as potentially more vulnerable in New Hampshire. Granite state voters tend to be better educated, less religious and more independent than Iowa caucus-goers, a departure from Trump’s core base in Iowa.
In the latest Boston Globe/Suffolk University/NBC-10 Boston tracking poll, Trump earned support from 53% of likely New Hampshire Republican primary voters, followed by Haley with 36%.
Haley said on Thursday that her goal in New Hampshire was to “do better than we did in Iowa”.
The odds that she can improve on a third place finish in Iowa are high: the Florida governor, Ron DeSantis, is effectively looking past the New Hampshire primary, where he is polling in the low-single digits, to next month’s contest in South Carolina, Haley’s home state.
With DeSantis weakened, Trump has turned his ire on Haley as he seeks to blunt her already narrow path to the nomination with a decisive victory in New Hampshire. In speeches and ads, he is assailing her record as governor and as his ambassador, while accusing her of relying on “Democrats and liberals” to win the state.
The broadsides have forced Haley to defend her conservative record as a “Tea Party governor” and as his hawkish UN ambassador. “I’m going to be hard on China, and he wasn’t hard on China,” Haley said Friday, urging voters and the press to “stop taking what he’s saying to be golden.”
Haley hopes a strong showing in New Hampshire will vault her into South Carolina. In a sign that Trump is consolidating support, South Carolina senator Tim Scott, who Haley appointed to the seat in 2012, endorsed the former president on Friday. Scott suspended his presidential bid last year after failing to break through in the polls.
“Interesting that Trump’s lining up with all the Washington insiders when he claimed he wanted to drain the swamp,” Haley said in a statement. “But the fellas are gonna do what the fellas are gonna do.”
Chris Sununu, the popular Republican governor of New Hampshire who has been sheparding Haley around the state during the weeklong sprint between the caucuses and the primary, said she had “already exceeded expectations” by forcing Trump into a two-person race.
“Voter turnout was very, very low in Iowa,” he said at a campaign event in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire on Tuesday night. “But here in New Hampshire we understand what this is all about, and we understand the rest of the country is watching and praying that we get this one right.”
