Tuesday, January 23, 2024
Year : 2, Issue : 4
Donald Trump’s last remaining Republican opponent, former UN Ambassador Nikki Haley, was making a final push on Monday to convince New Hampshire voters to turn out and deliver her an upset victory in the state’s presidential nominating contest.
New Hampshire’s primary vote on Tuesday will split the state’s Republican voters into two camps: those with former President Trump, and those against him. The contest became a one-on-one race on Sunday, when Florida Governor Ron DeSantis ended his struggling campaign and endorsed Trump.
Trump coasted to a record-setting victory in Iowa’s first-in-the-nation contest last week.
At the first of five planned campaign events in New Hampshire on Monday, Haley told a packed veterans’ hall in a working class town that Trump was hung up on vendettas and pre-occupied with court cases, keeping him from focusing on the future.
“When you go out on Tuesday, you’re gonna decide: do you want more of the same, or do you want something new?,” Haley, 52, asked voters in Franklin.
Trump, 77, held just one event, a 9 pm ET rally in the central town of Laconia, where he was joined by former Republican presidential candidates, including Senator Tim Scott and entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy, who have since endorsed him.
He repeated previous claims that his opponents, not him, were enemies of democracy since the Justice Department has indicted him on multiple criminal counts, some related to his attempts to overturn his 2020 election loss to President Joe Biden. Trump said, to loud applause. Biden has cast Trump as a threat to democracy.
The state’s large number of independent voters, who are permitted to cast ballots in Tuesday’s election, make New Hampshire friendlier turf for Haley than more conservative Iowa.
Even so, Trump holds a double-digit lead in most statewide public polls. A poll released by Monmouth University on Monday, but conducted before DeSantis dropped out, showed 52% of voters would choose Trump, 34% would choose Haley and 8% would choose DeSantis. DeSantis supporters were twice as likely to name Trump than Haley as their second choice, according to the poll.
Source: Reuters
