Brightly dressed in a red-and-white starry jacket, Melinda Tourangeau was waiting eagerly at Grill 603, a casual diner in small-town New Hampshire, for a US presidential candidate not named Donald Trump.
Tourangeau, 57, who lives in Milford, was “reluctantly forced to vote for Trump” in 2016 and 2020, she said. “I had to leave my morals at the door.”
But this time she is supporting Nikki Haley. “She has gone all over the state to meet people, and when she meets you, and when you meet her, you feel raised, you feel like you’re a better person after you’ve met her. And her platform is brilliant – clear, concise, cogent – and she intends to do everything she says. She’s the right candidate.”
Whether this is a minority view, or indicative of tectonic plates shifting among Republicans in New Hampshire, will be put to the test in Tuesday’s first-in-the-nation primary election. It comes one week after Trump’s record victory over Ron DeSantis, the governor of Florida, and Haley, an ex-US ambassador to the UN, in the Iowa caucuses.
For half the century, no candidate who won both Iowa and New Hampshire has failed to secure their party’s presidential nomination. Victory for Trump here would probably seal the deal and set up a rematch with Democrat Joe Biden in November.
But if Iowa played to Trump’s strengths among evangelical Christians and rural conservatives, New Hampshire is a different proposition. Its voters pride themselves on an independent streak – the state motto is “Live free or die” – and are generally wealthier, more educated and less religious. Both states are about 90% white.
Voters who are registered without a party affiliation make up about 40% of the electorate in New Hampshire and are eligible to cast a Republican primary ballot, which makes them more moderate than in Iowa. New voters can also register at the polls on Tuesday.
For Trump, whose authoritarian language, criminal charges and brash populism play less well among college-educated voters, this represents something of an away game. Even in the Iowa suburbs last week, he won only a third of the votes.
Haley has a more “Republican classic” image – less extreme on issues such as abortion, more hawkish on foreign policy – and has been barnstorming New Hampshire for months. Although her third place finish in Iowa blunted her momentum, and some opinion polls still show Trump well ahead in New Hampshire, others put Haley running neck and neck.
That makes Tuesday a make-or-break moment. EJ Dionne, a senior fellow in governance studies at the Brookings Institution, said at a panel discussion organised by the thinktank: “There is a road for her but it’s rocky, it’s rutted, it’s narrow and it runs along the edge of a cliff. She has to win New Hampshire, I believe, to have any chance of going on. I don’t think running Trump close in New Hampshire will really cut it any more, especially after running third in Iowa.”
Trump apparently senses the danger and has stepped up his attacks on Haley. At a rally in Concord on Friday, he told supporters: “All you need to know about Nikki Haley is that every corrupt and sinister group we’ve been fighting for the past seven years is on her side … Nikki Haley is backed by the deep state and the military-industrial complex. She’s never seen a war she doesn’t like.”
He has also resorted to his default tactic of using race and ethnicity as a political cudgel. In a post on his Truth Social account, Trump repeatedly referred to Haley, the daughter of immigrants from India, as “Nimbra”. She was born as Nimarata Nikki Randhawa but has always gone by her middle name.
Asked about Trump’s false claim that her heritage disqualifies her from running from president, Haley told reporters: “I’ll let people decide what he means by his attacks. What we know is, look, he’s clearly insecure if he goes and does these temper tantrums, if he’s spending millions of dollars on TV. He’s insecure, he knows that something’s wrong.”
She has also been returning fire by making a case that, while Trump was the right choice for president in 2016, he is now too old and chaos follows him wherever he goes. She is seeking to thread a needle, appealing to independents as the more acceptable face of the Republican party while not entirely alienating Trump’s “Make America great again” base.
Such calculations have led her into trouble. Last month, when she was asked by a New Hampshire voter about the reason for the civil war, she did not mention slavery in her answer. Last week, in an interview on Fox News, she claimed: “We’ve never been a racist country.”
But even if Haley does pull off a stunning upset, she would then head into less favourable territory next month in Nevada and her home state of South Carolina. It is also difficult for any candidate to compete with the attention-grabbing spectacle of Trump, facing 91 charges across four cases, showing up in courtrooms even as he runs for president.
Tara Setmayer, a senior adviser to the Lincoln Project, an anti-Trump group, predicts that he will win the New Hampshire primary. “There are some people who are hoping and praying and wishing that Nikki Haley can overtake him, which would be interesting, but again, fleeting in her success because she will go to South Carolina and lose by 30 points in her own home state. I cannot think of any example in political history where losing in your own home state by double digits has been a momentum booster.”
She added: “Some are looking at New Hampshire and thinking, well, depending on how Trump does, this could be indicative of his weakness in the general election. Perhaps. But there is a certain desire by the political media for a story and the horse race, and they’re looking for anything to write other than the inevitability of Trump, because once that happens, then people may tune out because they’re bored.”
DeSantis got about 21% of the vote in Iowa, 30 points behind Trump’s narrow majority and two points ahead of Haley. He had spent little time in New Hampshire, aware that his mini-Trump persona and joyless campaign were unlikely to gain traction with either the Maga base or independents. On Sunday, he abandoned his campaign entirely and gave his support to Trump, with an eye on another run in 2028.
Kristen Soltis Anderson, a Republican pollster, told an audience at the American Enterprise Institute thinktank in Washington last week: “His appeal overlaps so much with Donald Trump. Even though he and Donald Trump have sparred a little bit throughout this race, it hasn’t got super nasty. And all of the polling I see, Nikki Haley’s favourables are not great-great but Ron DeSantis’s are still pretty great-great among Republican voters.
“Even though I don’t see a path for him – he’s going to get single digits in New Hampshire and go to South Carolina, I don’t know where this all ends – I do think I can see why he wants to stay in and be relevant as long as he can, because he does have a shot at being able to say: ‘I’m the second place guy if there is an in-case-of-emergency-break-glass situation.’”
Meanwhile Democrats are also holding a primary on Tuesday but Biden is skipping it because the state defies new Democratic rules he advocates. The president will not be on the ballot alongside nearly two dozen candidates but his allies in the state have mounted a campaign to get voters to write in his name. The result will have no bearing on the Democratic nomination but could deal Biden a symbolic blow.
Another tradition missing from the final week in New Hampshire is debates. Haley, angling to frame the primary as a battle between Trump and herself, had suggested that she would debate only if he was on stage. But the former president has skipped every debate so far and paid no price. Two televised debates for the final New Hampshire sprint were duly cancelled.
Indeed, Trump is already campaigning as if he were already in a general election against Biden, focusing his invective on border security and rising prices. At a rally in Atkinson, New Hampshire, this week he told supporters: “Our country is dying … And I stand before you today as the only candidate who is up to the task of saving America.” He promised to “make our country rich as hell again”.
There are also ominous signs of the Republican party coalescing around him, just as it did in 2016. Primary rivals Doug Burgum, the governor of North Dakota; Vivek Ramaswamy, a biotech entrepreneur; and Tim Scott, a senator for South Carolina, all endorsed Trump after dropping out of the race. A constellation of senators, representatives, governors, and former White House and cabinet officials have done likewise, lending his nomination a sense of inevitability.
Back in Milford, despite all the criminal charges and his past conduct towards women, Tourangeau admitted that she would still vote for Trump if he is the Republican nominee come November, not least because of her retirement savings plan.
“I will have the sickest feeling in my stomach as I begrudgingly walk to the polls with my head down, and I will cast a vote for him,” she said. “But it’s only because my 401k will be bursting.”
