‘Not a good night for Donald Trump’: Why never-Trumpers think he’s really losing

MANCHESTER, New Hampshire — Donald Trump thumped Nikki Haley in New Hampshire — but anti-Trump Republicans are hardly upset about it.

Even after Trump went two-for-two in the early nominating contests, the non-Trump movement sees increasingly positive signs that the former president can be beat in November.

Polls and exit surveys from Iowa and New Hampshire show swaths of the Republican electorate cast ballots specifically against Trump — and would refuse to vote for him in November. Independents who helped hand Trump a general election loss in 2020 helped fuel record turnout in New Hampshire’s GOP primary. And Trump didn’t make major strides in either state in the highly educated areas where he was weakest in 2016.

“It was definitely not a good night for Donald Trump,” Mike Madrid, a California GOP strategist and co-founder of the anti-Trump Lincoln Project, said.

“By most metrics, the path to [stopping Trump] has become much clearer,” Madrid said. “The anti-Trump lane is discernible. It’s palpable. It’s big. It’s something that we can work with in a real, meaningful way.”

On the surface, the results from Iowa and New Hampshire look just plain bad for the anti-Trump movement. A former president facing 91 criminal charges and splitting his time between the courtroom and the campaign trail won over 50 percent of the vote in both states. In New Hampshire, where the GOP field quickly shrunk to two, independent voters, whose exit polls showed broke overwhelmingly for Haley, were trumped by Trump’s GOP base.

The next two contests offer even less hope for impeding Trump’s march toward the nomination. Haley is not competing for delegates in Nevada. And Trump leads her by double digits in polls of her home state of South