Nikki Haley bets on New Hampshire as best chance of wresting nomination from Trump

Plodding across frigid New Hampshire ahead of Tuesday’s primary, Nikki Haley offered the state’s proudly freethinking voters a tantalizing proposal: choose her and save America from the presidential rematch seemingly nobody wants.

“Seventy percent of Americans have said they don’t want to see a Donald Trump-Joe Biden rematch,” Haley exclaimed on Sunday, drawing head nods and murmurs of agreement from attendees packed into a middle school library in Derry. Haley leaned in: “Do we really want to have two presidential candidates in their 80s?”

Biden, the 81-year-old Democratic president, is coasting to his party’s nomination and Trump, the 77-year-old former president, is marching toward the Republican one as the field narrows and he consolidates support from across the party. But Haley, who celebrated her 52nd birthday hopscotching the state on Saturday, insisted there was a different – viable – path.

Haley, the former “Tea Party governor” of South Carolina who served as Trump’s first United Nations ambassador, has staked her presidential aspirations on a strong showing in the first-in-the-nation primary.

“New Hampshire is do-or-die for Nikki Haley,” said Mike Dennehy, a veteran Republican strategist in New Hampshire who worked on John McCain’s winning presidential primary campaigns in the state in 2000 and 2008 and is unaffiliated. “She needs to go all in and speak specifically to independent voters who want change in this country.”

Trump demolished his rivals in the Iowa caucuses. Haley finished third, behind the Florida governor Ron DeSantis who dropped out of the race on Sunday and threw his support behind Trump, the latest sign of Republicans closing ranks around the former president.

A Suffolk University/Boston Globe/NBC10