It’s hard to think of a scenario where Republicans reject Donald Trump as their presidential candidate. Despite his 91 criminal charges and one attempt to overturn an election, enough GOP voters have remained loyal to the former president that he has wide leads over his rivals for the nomination. But not everyone who votes in a Republican primary is a Republican: Many states have open primaries where anyone can participate regardless of party affiliation.
One of those states is New Hampshire, where unaffiliated voters make up a plurality of the electorate and can participate in the primary of their choice. They have repeatedly determined the winner of the first-in-the-nation presidential primary in the past, and if enough of them back Nikki Haley, it might just cost Trump the state on January 23.
That is what Robert Schwartz hopes to make happen. He’s the leader of a group called Primary Power that looks to push Democratic-leaning independents to vote against Trump in the GOP primary. Schwartz said the group has raised more than $670,000 through small and large donations, though as a 501(c)(4), its contributors are not publicly disclosed. A Democrat who spent his career working in foreign policy focusing on countries like Venezuela and Nicaragua that have suffered significant backsliding toward dictatorships, Schwartz said he is trying to make sure the same thing doesn’t happen in the U.S. with a second Trump presidency. At this point, he’s settled upon Haley as the option. “She seems to respect the Constitution,” Schwartz said. “We would have a peaceful transfer of power and free and fair elections with her as president.”
His goal is pretty simple. If he can increase the number of unaffiliated voters who cast a ballot in New Hampshire’s Republican primary just enough, it might cause an upset that could damage Trump’s chances of returning to the White House. “Trump is getting something like 40 percent in the polls,” and if his percentage of the vote can be pushed down into the mid-30s, it could permit Haley to win. There are more than enough independents in the state for this to happen, and they’ve long been a mainstay of New Hampshire politics: John McCain famously won Republican primaries in 2000 and 2008 in the state with a motley coalition of moderates and independents. By the early-October deadline to change registration, roughly 4,000 voters dropped their Democratic affiliation in order to have the ability to take a Republican ballot.
Haley has been surging in the New Hampshire polls in recent weeks as Ron DeSantis’s campaign has collapsed into infighting and finger-pointing. A recent poll from St. Anselm College in New Hampshire has shown Trump stuck in the mid-40s as Haley, buoyed by the endorsement of the state’s incumbent governor, Chris Sununu, has seen her support double and put her in second place with 30 percent support.
Haley has been open about her desire to win over nontraditional voters in the Granite State. “If we get independents, if we get conservative Democrats, that’s what the Republican Party should pursue,” she told reporters in mid-December, according to Semafor. “Our goal is to get as many people in the tent as we can. Stop pushing people away from the party. Instead, bring people in.” The Haley campaign did not respond to a request for comment.
When Schwartz launched his project, there seemed to be no downside for Democrats to switch, given that Biden’s name wouldn’t appear on the ballot, leaving author Marianne Williamson — who received 99 votes in the state’s 2020 primary after dropping out a month earlier — as the best-known candidate. One hiccup, though, is Dean Phillips, the Minnesota congressman who launched a long-shot campaign against Biden and who has the potential to lure voters to cast their ballots in the Democratic contest. Schwartz expressed his fear that Phillips “is targeting many of the same left-of-center, undeclared voters. We’re hoping to offer voters the strategic choice to vote against Trump. So while he’s offering for these people to vote against Biden, and embarrass Biden, we are offering the same voters the chance to vote against Trump and damage Trump.” In his view, Phillips is simply running a “kamikaze campaign … If he’s truly interested in stopping Trump, he would not try to take away 5,000 to 10,000 voters, potentially, from Nikki Haley.”
Of course, Schwartz is still counting on Democratic-leaning voters casting a ballot for an anti-abortion, conservative former governor of South Carolina who served as Trump’s ambassador to the United Nations.
Ray Buckley, the chair of the New Hampshire Democratic Party, didn’t think that Schwartz’s efforts to convince Democratic-leaning independents to back Haley would amount to much. “You might, after an enormous amount of effort, get 5,000 Democratic-leaning independents,” he said. “It’s not going to be very successful.”
“Nikki Haley is no John McCain,” Buckley continued. “Her record, on issue after issue, is either identical to Donald Trump’s or worse.” However, even that slim margin could determine who wins and who loses. Bernie Sanders won the 2020 Democratic primary by less than 4,000 votes over Pete Buttigieg, and that reshaped the narrative of the race.
In the meantime, Schwartz’s group was going to keep up its efforts regardless and try to do what it could to chip away at those voters. He said that the group has already budgeted for mail and text messages to target people who had voted in Democratic primaries but were not registered as Democrats. After all, he said, “the most important thing is just getting the word out about this possibility so that when people are sitting at the dinner table, this is one of the options that they’re discussing if they’re undeclared voters.”
