Nikki Haley has been running to lead a Republican party that no longer exists

Can we stop pretending now? After weeks of speculating by the media that perhaps Nikki Haley might eke out a win in New Hampshire – or at least lose by a percentage small enough to make continuing in the race reasonable – she lost by a wide margin.

Before we had been offered various rationales for why, just maybe, this wouldn’t happen. Haley, after all, had recently come into a flush of donor money at the end of 2023, as the field dwindled and she was left alone as the last almost-plausible non-Trump candidate. She’d put much of that money into New Hampshire, a state whose Republicans tend to hew more moderate. (Haley, a rabid conservative but one who does not seem to oppose the rule of law outright, is what passes for “moderate” in today’s Republican party.)

There was also the force of history to consider, the fact that primary campaigns of either major party do not usually look like this. When there’s such a big field, as there was in this Republican cycle, normally New Hampshire’s first-in-the-nation primary can have quite a bit of sway, helping to advance the strongest contenders and cull the stragglers.

But this year there were only two people really running by the time New Hampshire rolled around, and one of them loomed much larger than the other – both in fundraising and in his power to animate the public. It was like watching a race between a whale and a minnow: he lapped her without seeming to try.

One word for the 2024 Republican primary contest is “anticlimactic”. But considering how completely Trump has captured the imagination of his party, it is possible that the real story is not about how easily he has trounced his challengers, but that there were so many challengers in the first place.

What possessed so many