Nikki Haley’s New Hampshire Surge Is Getting Serious

Nikki Haley on the grip-and-grin tour in New Hampshire. Photo: Erin Clark/The Boston Globe via Getty Images

From December 19 until January 9, the only public polls of the New Hampshire Republican primary came from the Granite State–based American Research Group, an outlet with a shaky reputation (it earned a C+ rating from FiveThirtyEight) and not much of a recent track record. ARG twice showed Nikki Haley trailing Donald Trump by just four points; no other pollster had shown Trump leading by less than 13 points in New Hampshire, dating all the way back to a January 2023 survey in which Ron DeSantis was running first. Some media folk reported the outlier ARG numbers, and others didn’t; RealClearPolitics chose not to include them in its polling database.

Finally, two weeks before New Hampshire votes on January 23, other polls are coming out, and perhaps ARG wasn’t as off base as many observers thought. A new CNN-UNH survey shows Haley (at 32 percent) within seven points of Trump (at 39 percent). The last poll from this source in November had Trump leading Haley by 22 points. At virtually the same moment, however, USA Today–Suffolk released a new poll placing Trump’s lead in New Hampshire at a significantly more robust 20 points (46 percent to Haley’s 26 percent). Both these new polls show Chris Christie running third at 12 percent with Ron DeSantis and Vivek Ramaswamy in single digits.

It’s not surprising that Haley is doing relatively well in New Hampshire. It’s emphatically the least-Trumpy state in the early going, and its primary is open to registered independents. The CNN–UNH survey shows 45 percent of likely voters as independents (Haley leads Trump among them by 43 percent to 17 percent) and 39 percent as either liberal (7 percent) or moderate (32 percent). Haley leads Trump among liberals by 44 percent to 5 percent and among moderates by 55 percent to 13 percent. She has been endorsed by the popular lame-duck Republican governor Chris Sununu and has benefited clearly from the winnowing of the field, her solid debate performances, and both money and buzz from the GOP donor class.

Can Haley overtake Trump in the next two weeks? The answer depends in part on which poll you believe is more accurate and in part on what happens to the field in and after the January 15 Iowa caucuses. Iowa’s another state with spotty recent polling, but every indication is that Trump is winning big there with Haley and DeSantis locked into a close race for second place.

If Haley can overcome DeSantis’s superior organization in Iowa (and perhaps an Arctic cold snap peaking on Caucus Night that will make such an organization more essential) then there is every prospect that she can roll into New Hampshire on a wave of hype from anti-Trump media and opinion leaders who will treat the nomination contest as a head-to-head competition between Trump and his former U.N. ambassador.

It may actually help Haley if DeSantis and Ramaswamy decide to stay in the race even if they bomb in Iowa since they might take a few votes from the front-runner. But the intense focus of her backers going into the Granite State will be to marginalize or even knock out Christie and win over his supporters. According to the CNN–UNH survey, “Those behind Christie break solidly toward Haley, with 65% saying they would support her were Christie not in the race, with fewer than 1 in 10 of his backers choosing any other candidate and 13% saying they would not vote.” But Haley will need to strictly avoid missteps like her recent suggestion that resistance to Big Government was the cause of the U.S. Civil War; she wasted immense time and momentum overcoming that gaffe. The same CNN–UNH poll that gave her such good news also showed Trump’s New Hampshire supporters are more firmly committed to their candidate than Haley’s (80 percent of those favoring Trump say they have definitely decided on him; only 54 percent of Haley’s backers are sure about their choice).

The long-term prospects for Haley are a lot dimmer even if she does pull the epochal upset in New Hampshire. There will be a solid month before her own state’s primary on February 24, and while a strong New Hampshire showing and the disposal of also-rans will help her, she currently trails Trump by 30 points on her home turf, according to RealClearPolitics polling averages. The state’s governor (Henry McMaster) and senior senator (Lindsey Graham) are in Trump’s corner, and a South Carolina win by the former president could all but end Haley’s candidacy. It’s also not a great bet that she can build the kind of national organization that would give her a fighting chance against Trump in the vast primary landscape that will unfold in March and could clinch the nomination for him even if he momentarily stumbles in New Hampshire or South Carolina.

Maybe this is all academic. Haley could well finish third in Iowa and may be as far behind Trump in New Hampshire as the USAT–Suffolk poll suggests. But for a moment that is undoubtedly thrilling to Never Trumpers, Haley seems to be putting together the most credible challenge to the front-runner that we’ve seen since the wheels began coming off the once-formidable DeSantis bandwagon, and a primary calendar that front-loads New Hampshire and South Carolina is heaven-sent for her and deeply annoying to her ex-presidential prey.