Haley in a hurry in NH
HOOKSET, N.H. >> At this point in the process, it’s becoming increasingly unclear what former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley is looking to get out of New Hampshire’s first-in-thenation primary and the 2024 race writ large.
If Haley plans to win the state’s Republican primary next week and use that momentum to move on to her home state of South Carolina and then Super Tuesday, she needs to get the word out as far as she can to drive voters into a booth on Jan. 23, and she needs to go at former President Donald Trump, who continues to lead her in national polling by about 50 points, according to experts.
The behavior of her campaign in New Hampshire yesterday calls her intentions into question.
With less than five days to go before the first primary of the 2024 cycle, the former South Carolina governor’s campaign announced a series of events yesterday, starting in Hollis and ending in Hooksett. She was also in Bretton Woods on Tuesday.
None of that is at all unusual.
What is odd is that Haley did not bother with much public engagement of voters and that members of her campaign were actively attempting to prevent members of the press — ostensibly to get the word our on her efforts — from interacting with event attendees.
In Hollis, Politico’s Lisa Kashinsky was stopped from speaking with one voter midsentence and ordered to return to a press corral. After Hooksett, the New Hampshire Union Leader’s long-serving political reporter Kevin Landrigan described Haley’s staff as “unbelievable” and less cooperative than Trump’s notoriously un-media-friendly campaign team.
Haley spoke for about 20 minutes in Hollis at the Alpine Grove Event Center and then took just three questions from the crowd. From there, she traveled to Alpha-bits in Manchester for an event that was entirely closed to the media. Her third event, at the historic Robie’s Country Store, included far too many members of the press for the small venue and not nearly enough members of the public. She took no questions from the audience there after speaking for about 5 minutes.
“Take questions already. We’re not a bunch of sheep,” Brian Pfitzer, of Concord, said.
Pfitzer said he hadn’t seen Haley before heading into Hooksett, and her short speech at a packed sandwich stop was less than compelling if she was shopping for votes.
“I have no leanings whatsoever,” he said. “I’m not convinced by anyone at this point.”
Haley did manage to launch what may be described as the most direct assault she’s offered against her former boss in the 11 months since she started her campaign for the Republican nomination, according to one observer.
“I know that Donald Trump went on a temper tantrum about me last night,” Haley said.
Trump’s claim she is against border security, she said, is an outright falsehood, so too the former president’s assertions she is looking to cut social security.
“If he’s going to lie about me, we’re going to tell the truth about him,” she said. “He said he wants to raise the retirement age to 70. When he was president he proposed a gas tax of 25 cents. See it for what it is. I’m going to tell you the truth. You’re going to see a lot of things said. But at the end of the day, it’s the drama, and the vengeance, and the vindictiveness that we need to get out of the way.”
Trump, she said, not the Democrats, added $8 trillion to the deficit after four short years in office.
“I just don’t want my kids to live like this anymore,” she said.
John Krull, director of the Franklin College Pulliam School of Journalism in Franklin, Indiana, attended both Hooksett and Hollis events alongside a pair of journalism students. The former political writer said Haley’s calling out the former president is the closest she’s come to a direct attack on Trump over the course of the last year, but it may be too little too late.
“She needs to win New Hampshire if she wants to continue her campaign,” he said. “At this point, I don’t think she can.”
According to polling by Saint Anselm College released ahead of the Iowa Caucus and a Suffolk University/Boston Globe/NBC10 Boston tracking polls, Trump continues to lead in New Hampshire as he has for the length of the primary contest.
Polling shows Trump sees about as much support in the Granite State as he won in Iowa, with around half of surveyed conservatives saying they will pick the 45th president. The same polling shows Haley doing significantly better in New Hampshire than she did in Iowa, but still behind by around 15 points.