Donald Trump, former president of the United States, is one step closer to becoming the Republican candidate for the White House for the third consecutive term. With 54.4% of the vote and a margin of eleven points – narrower than the polls predicted – the tycoon won the New Hampshire primaries, the second date of the electoral calendar. After his landslide victory in the Iowa caucuses, which forced three hopefuls to drop out of the race after their lack of support was found, this victory over the only alternative left standing, Nikki Haley, brings him closer even more so in the nomination of the Republican Party.
“The race is over,” the tycoon celebrated in a post on his social network, Truth Social, when barely 20% of the votes had been counted. Half an hour later, he took the stage in Nashua (New Hampshire) looking serious and focused his victory speech – more angry than euphoric – on attacking Haley and the state’s electoral process, which allows registered voters to vote. as independent “Haley has had a very bad night,” he said, accompanied by former candidates Tim Scott and Vivek Ramaswamy, and encouraged by the shouts of his supporters, who repeated “head of sparrows”, the derogatory nickname with which he refers to the former governor.
Shortly after, he lied when he assured that he has won the elections in New Hampshire “three times”, when he lost in the 2016 and 2020 presidential elections: “We have always won. We won the primaries and we won the generals. It’s a special place for me.” And he hinted, without providing evidence, that his competitor had committed an illegality, which he also did not specify: “She won’t win, but if she did, she would be investigated for things she doesn’t want to talk about.”
Trump won by a smaller margin than the polls indicated, but the result leaves Haley’s campaign equally affected, which came to the polls hoping to surprise. With an intense campaign in the northern state, more moderate than Iowa, he won the support of the popular governor Chris Sununu, but he was only able to win 9 of the 22 delegates at stake in New Hampshire.
The former governor of South Carolina, who served the Trump administration as ambassador to the United Nations, acknowledged her defeat and assured that she will not give up: “This race is far from over . We are the last ones standing and today we got close to half the votes,” he said in a speech in Concord, the capital of New Hampshire, as he quelled rumors of his withdrawal. But the comeback will be an almost impossible task: all the candidates who have won the first two Republican primaries have secured the party’s nomination. And everything seems to indicate that this is the fate that awaits the former president in July, when delegates from each state will vote for the Republican candidate for the White House in Milwaukee (Wisconsin). If this happens, everything points to the fact that he will have the same opponent in the November general election as he did four years ago: President Joe Biden.
At the moment, the two electoral dates have distributed 62 of the total of 2,429 delegates that will be sent to the Republican National Convention. But Trump’s two consecutive victories, with which he reaches 32 delegates, pave the way for the nomination.
“There are dozens of states left to go. And the next one is my sweet home, South Carolina”, said the candidate while recalling her time as governor in this state between 2011 and 2017. However, polls here give her a poor 25% vote intention , against 62.2% of the tycoon, according to the FiveThirtyEight model. In the next primaries, if she manages to maintain the support of her donors – which is now in question -, Haley will continue to try to gather the vote of those opposed to Trump.
“We will not be able to fix Biden’s chaos with more Republican chaos”, he said, directing the attacks against the former president: “With Trump we have one outburst after another. This court case, that controversy, this tweet…”. And he recalled that, after the tycoon’s victory in 2016, “the Republicans have lost almost every contested election. We lost the Senate, we lost the House of Representatives and we lost the White House: we lost 2018, 2020 and 2022.”
After learning the results, Biden issued a statement in which he already takes the tycoon’s nomination for granted. “It is clear that Donald Trump will be the Republican candidate. My message to the country is that what is at stake could not be greater.” After the victory yesterday morning, Trump starts the campaign to beat him in November and return to the White House. But it will not be easy: the latest poll, published yesterday by NewsNation, gives Biden 46% of the intention to vote against 39% for Trump. Although, perhaps, the most relevant data is the disappointment that the repetition of the confrontation between the two would cause: 59% of Americans are “not enthusiastic” about this scenario.
