The 2024 Republican Primary Was Over Before It Began – The New Yorker

So much for suspense. As soon as the polls closed at 8 P.M. in the first-in-the-nation New Hampshire primary on Tuesday night, the Associated Press called the race for Donald Trump. Sometimes, it turns out, the conventional wisdom is actually right. With a sizable, if not overwhelming, victory over Nikki Haley, Trump has very likely insured that the first competitive primary of 2024 will also be, in effect, the last.

Twenty minutes later, Haley was onstage at her headquarters in Concord, New Hampshire, conceding defeat while insisting that this race is far from over and vowing to fight on in her home states Republican primary in late February. South Carolina voters dont want a coronationthey want an election, and were going to give them one, she promised. But Trump, of course, was having none of it. She didnt win, she lost, Trump said at his own victory party in Nashua. He seemed incensed that Haley had not immediately bent her knee. Who the hell was the imposter that went on the stage before and claimed a victory? She did very poorly, he said. We had one hell of a night tonight.

To underscore the point, he brought to the podium Vivek Ramaswamy, one of the Republican also-rans, who dropped out after Iowa and endorsed Trump. The general election begins tonight, Ramaswamy said, to loud cheers. Later, Trump gave Tim Scott, another of the dropouts, the chance to repeat the homage. Its over, it is time for the Republican Party to coalesce around our nominee and the next President of the United States, Donald Trump, Scott said. Lets get that party started tonight. When Trump pointed out that Haley had appointed Scott to the Senate but that Scott nonetheless now supported him, he suggested, You must really hate her. But Scott cut in. I just love you, he said. The self-abasement of the Republicans now that Trump is once again their presumptive nominee knows no bounds.

What is the proper term for a pre-written postmortem? A pre-postmortem? In the run-up to New Hampshire, it seemed inevitable that this was where Haleys challenge to Trump would find both its best expression and its last stand. Haley had hoped for a head-to-head race against Trump in New Hampshire, banking her campaign on its independent-minded voters. When Ron DeSantis, the Florida governor whose political implosion was one of the cringiest story lines of 2023, dropped out over the weekend, she got what she had wanted. And yet there was as much certainty about the outcome of the race as I can remember in notoriously hard-to-predict New Hampshire, which was remarkable given that anything short of a Haley upset would mean that the 2024 race was effectively over before it had barely begun. Everybodys waiting to write my obituary, Haley complained in an interview with CNNs Dana Bash on Tuesday, hours before the polls closed.

But, in fact, they werent waiting. Some themes: Haley made a mistake by centering her campaign on Trumps unsuitability, while he bashed away at her on favorite issues such as immigration. (Politicos Playbook: How Trump is winning on the issues.) Haley failed to benefit from DeSantis dropping out. (CNNs Ron Brownstein: Why DeSantis departure isnt likely to change the dynamic between Trump and Haley.) Haley had almost no meaningful path forward, regardless of how she fared in New Hampshire. (Pretty much everybody.) The final tracking poll from Suffolk University, NBC-10, and the Boston Globe, released the day before the election, had Trump up sixty per cent to thirty-eight per centseemingly more than enough to justify the capital sentence meted out to Haleys campaign before a single primary voter in a single state had shown up at the polls.

Over on Fox News, Laura Ingraham went big picture before the results were in: Trumps forthcoming New Hampshire victory, she said in her opening monologue, marked the last gasp of the Never Trumpers, a final and official end to the anti-Trump heresy that has persisted inside the Republican Party since his successful takeover of the G.O.P. in 2016. Elise Stefanik, the House Republican Conference chair who has been openly lobbying for Trump to pick her as his Vice-Presidential running mate, released a statement congratulating him on his historic and massive victory soon after 7:30 P.M., before the polls had officially closed. Her Senate colleague John Barrasso, of Wyoming, declared minutes later: Donald J. Trump is our presumptive nominee. He, too, did not bother to wait for the voting to end.

Is it quibbling to point out that the race ended up being closer than the polls had suggested? That Haley has insisted she will not drop out? In her concession speech, Haley offered the defiant but not really dispositive rhetoric of a defeated candidate who is still holding her options open. Does that mean she will actually still be in the running come South Carolina? I would not count on it. For now, though, she bragged of being the last one standing next to Donald Trump and insisted that she is the more electable choice for Republicans in November against Joe Biden, given the negativity and chaos that accompany Trump wherever he goes.

She certainly has a point on that scoreTrumps showing in New Hampshire did not exactly suggest that he was heading for an easy win in November. Haley secured more than forty per cent of the vote in New Hampshire, showing how divided the G.O.P. remains. Many of Haleys voters told exit pollsters that they would be reluctant to vote for Trump in the general electionand that, in fact, opposition to Trump was a main reason that they supported Haley in the first place. Forty-seven per cent of Republican primary voters in a CNN exit poll said that, if Trump is convicted in one of the four criminal cases he currently faces, he would not be fit for the Presidency. Even a small fraction of Republicans refusing to vote for Trump in key battleground states would be more than enough to sink his candidacy, which, of course, is exactly what happened in 2020.

Before the results came in on Tuesday, John McCains daughter Meghan posted on X the famous Time magazine cover of her late father, exulting after his upset in the 2000 New Hampshire primary against the overwhelming favorite, George W. Bush. The McCain Mutiny, the headline read, Inside the campaign that turned the G.O.P. race upside down. Plenty of others remembered the 2008 stunner in New Hampshire, when Hillary Clinton, after a tearful moment with a voter, overcame a large deficit in the polls to beat Barack Obama, who, in the states final primary debate, had famously dismissed her as likable enough.

But the great upsets of years past are also reminders that there are limits to the predictive power of a New Hampshire vote. In both cases, the bounce from a big and unexpected win did not, in the end, change the outcome. Both McCain and Clinton went on to lose. This time, Nikki Haley hoped for a shocker; indeed, her campaign was premised on it. But it was not to be.

During Tuesdays interview in Manchester, Bash asked Haley if she thought that Trump was fit for office. If I did, I wouldnt be running, Haley replied.

And yet, when Bash asked perhaps the most important question remaining about Haley in 2024, the answer was just the same as it had been before: she, like all the other Republicans who ran against Trump without ever really challenging him, would nonetheless bow down before the ex-President and vote for him again in November. Why? I dont ever want to see a President Kamala Harris, Haley said. That should send a chill up everyones spine. Welcome to the general election. Its going to be a long one.

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The 2024 Republican Primary Was Over Before It Began - The New Yorker