Here's the latest from the 2024 campaign trail:
- Live coverage on this blog has ended. Click here for the latest updates.
- Former President Donald Trump, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley are campaigning in New Hampshire six days out from the primary.
- DeSantis will return to New Hampshire on Friday for events hosted by his super PAC Never Back Down before he hits the campaign trail in South Carolina.
- New Hampshire Republicans want to see Haley campaign more aggressively as she looks to cut into Trump's polling lead.
- Two new polls show Trump hitting the 50% mark in New Hampshire, with Haley a distant second and DeSantis in single digits.
- E. Jean Carroll testified about Trump at a New York trial seeking damages for defamation, with the former president in attendance.
New Hampshire primary 101
The process, makeup and history of the coming New Hampshire primary couldn’t be more different from what we saw in the Iowa caucuses.
For one thing, New Hampshire’s contest is a primary. Unlike in Iowa, where GOP caucusgoers had to arrive at a designated time to conduct party business and then vote, New Hampshire’s voters have all day to show up and cast their ballots. There is no early or absentee voting, however.
Then there’s New Hampshire’s famed independent/undeclared voters, who outnumber both registered Democrats and Republicans in the state. In Iowa on Monday, just a combined 18% of caucusgoers were either independents or crossover Democrats, according to the entrance poll. But for next week’s New Hampshire primary, the expectation is that these voters will make up nearly half the GOP electorate.
That’s a big reason Trump’s lead in the New Hampshire polls is smaller than what we saw in Iowa.
Undeclared voters can also choose either a Republican or a Democratic ballot at their polling places. (The deadline for registered Democrats to change their party affiliations and vote in the GOP primary was Oct. 6.)
And that brings us to the last big difference between Iowa and New Hampshire. Unlike in Iowa on Monday, Democrats will be participating in New Hampshire, too — though the contest won’t count in the Democratic presidential nominating race.
Remember, because New Hampshire didn’t comply with the Democratic National Committee’s proposed primary calendar (which has South Carolina going first), the party has said this contest won’t be awarding delegates to the candidates who are on the ballot — like Rep. Dean Phillips of Minnesota and author Marianne Williamson.
But Democrats are launching a write-in campaign to bolster Biden, whose name won’t be on the ballot.
Trump rally in Portsmouth at capacity at just 320 people
The assistant fire chief at Trump's rally tonight in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, said the event was at capacity at 320 people, making it one of the former president's smaller gatherings on the campaign trail.
Trump typically holds events in larger venues that draw bigger crowds.
Trump remade the GOP. How permanent is it?
Was Trump buying or leasing the Republican Party when he descended that escalator in 2015?
At the time, many a longtime Republican tried to argue that Trump was no Republican, let alone a conservative. Just about every major figure in the party circa 2015 viewed him as an interloper, certainly not the avatar for what the GOP was then or would become later.
But eight years later, in the aftermath of Trump’s decisive caucus victory, it’s clear that he is no outsider anymore. He’s no “hijacker” of the GOP; he is the Republican Party. And, to the chagrin of a lot of small-government conservatives in my orbit, he has also redefined the very definition of the word “conservative” in the modern political dictionary.
Republicans in two key swing states are charting very different paths
For Republicans in Michigan and Pennsylvania, two critical swing states, the 2022 midterms followed a similar script.
Hugely divisive primaries. Fringe candidates backed by Trump ascending to the top of the statewide ballot. Electoral wipeouts that saw Republicans lose every contested statewide office and relinquish control of long-held branches of state legislatures.
Where Republicans in each state differed, though, is in the lessons they took from these defeats and how they are applying them to 2024.
Trump eyes Elise Stefanik as a potential VP pick
During a candlelit dinner with Mar-a-Lago members in late December, Trump walked around the table as the conversation turned to one of the biggest decisions he’d have to make should he become the Republican nominee: Whom should he pick to be his running mate?
That’s when Rep. Elise Stefanik, the hard-charging upstate New York Republican, came up, according to a person at the dinner table. Attendees around Trump raved about her viral moment just weeks before, when she grilled three university presidents at a congressional hearing about antisemitism on campus.
At the thought of Stefanik as a possible choice for vice president, Trump nodded approvingly.
“She’s a killer,” Trump said, according to the person at the event.
White House apologizes to Hutchinson after snarky DNC statement
The White House took the unusual step today of apologizing to former Republican presidential candidate Asa Hutchinson over a snarky news release Biden’s party sent out after he withdrew from the race.
Jeff Zients, the White House chief of staff, called Hutchinson in the morning to offer an apology over the Democratic National Committee’s one-sentence statement after Hutchinson, the former governor of Arkansas, announced yesterday that he was ending his 2024 campaign after a poor showing in the Iowa caucuses the previous night.
“This news comes as a shock to those of us who could’ve sworn he had already dropped out,” the DNC said in a statement released by national press secretary Sarafina Chitika.
DeSantis to return to New Hampshire before South Carolina events
DeSantis will return to New Hampshire once more on Friday for an event hosted by Never Back Down, two PAC officials familiar with the planning told NBC News.
DeSantis will be in Florida tomorrow before returning to New Hampshire on Friday — the sources did not provide any further details about the end-of-week visit. DeSantis will then travel to South Carolina for campaign events Saturday and Sunday, as previously reported.
At this point, it still remains unclear where DeSantis will be spending Monday or Tuesday, which is primary day here in New Hampshire.
Never Back Down is now publicly advertising three DeSantis events on Friday: a town hall in Dover, a visit to a retail stop in Manchester and a town hall in Nashua.
Biden says his campaign raised $1.6 million after Trump won Iowa
Biden announced that his re-election campaign raised more than $1.6 million in the 24 hours after Trump won the Iowa GOP caucuses.
"Our campaign is nurses and teachers versus extreme MAGA Republicans, and we need you with us," Biden said in a video his campaign account posted to X. "It’s time to get on board."
Another New Hampshire poll shows Trump hitting 50%
A new poll from Saint Anselm College shows 52% of likely New Hampshire Republican primary voters are backing Trump, followed by 38% for Haley and 6% for DeSantis.
Trump and Haley both increased their support by 7 percentage points from last week's Saint Anselm survey, while DeSantis' share remained unchanged.
The latest poll shows Haley leading Trump among registered undeclared voters in the survey, but Trump leads her by a bigger margin among registered Republicans.
The results are in line with a Suffolk University/Boston Globe/NBC10 poll released this morning that showed Trump at 50%, Haley at 34% and DeSantis at 5% in the Granite State ahead of Tuesday’s primary.
The Saint Anselm poll of 1,398 likely New Hampshire GOP primary voters was conducted on Jan. 16 and has a margin of error of plus or minus 2.6 percentage points.
New Hampshire Republicans ‘disappointed’ Haley isn’t fighting harder in the state
MANCHESTER, N.H. — As Republicans here seek a standard-bearer, Haley is making herself scarce, and GOP insiders say that could doom her long-shot bid to beat Trump in Tuesday’s primary.
Haley has forced the cancellation of two planned debates in New Hampshire — one sponsored by ABC News and the other by CNN — by refusing to go toe-to-toe with DeSantis. Her schedule is light on campaign stops in a state where candidates typically pack their days with events. And, since failing to identify slavery as a cause of the Civil War last month, she has stopped taking questions on stage from voters.
Haley’s team is gambling that less of her will end up being more in a race that is down to three candidates, with one of them — DeSantis — already having decided to pack it in and move his fading campaign to South Carolina.
That’s a bad bet, said Dave Carney, a veteran New Hampshire-based Republican strategist who described the state’s history of vetting presidential candidates through free-flowing town hall-style forums as sacred. Haley’s refusal to debate and take questions at her first post-Iowa event in the state could kill her campaign, he said.
“As an incumbent, maybe, or somebody who’s a front-runner — sure, you’re ahead, you’re not taking any risks,” Carney, who is neutral in the race, added. “But when you’re in second place? You need to throw f---ng Hail Marys. You have five nights left.”