The Iowa Caucuses are history, and now former President Donald Trump’s remaining rivals for the Republican nomination are racing across New Hampshire ahead of that state’s pivotal primary. Will a strong showing be enough for Nikki Haley or Ron DeSantis to turn the tide? And what do these early results tell us about the looming general election in November? For a primary preview, WAMC's Ian Pickus called ups University of New Hampshire political science professor Andrew Smith, director of the UNH Survey Center.
Did anything in Iowa surprise you or give you any sort of insight into what might happen in New Hampshire?
There are a lot of hints that we got from the Iowa caucuses, but I caution people to really remember that the Iowa Caucus electorate in the New Hampshire caucus electorate are very, very different animals. Turnout in Iowa is very low, 5-10% of the electorate come out to the caucuses. In New Hampshire, it's often upwards of 50%. So you've got a different kind of voter, a less ideological voter in New Hampshire than in Iowa. Secondly, the religious overtones that you see, the organization of the Republican electorate by the evangelicals in Iowa just doesn't exist in New Hampshire; New Hampshire is arguably the least religious state in the country. So those social conservative issues just don't resonate as well. And in New Hampshire, we do have a primary rather than caucus. So the turnout is really significantly higher, which means you don't have as many of those really ideological voters. And so New Hampshire is just not as Trump-like as Iowa is. So I think you can expect a few other changes in New Hampshire based on the data that you see there. The most important thing, I think, that impacts the race from Iowa was that Vivek Ramaswamy dropped out. That's likely to help Trump because his support, his voters second choice is typically Trump. One way that Nikki Haley benefited from the caucuses’ outcome is that Ron DeSantis is still in the race. Because I think Ron DeSantis, if you look at his second choice voters, 66% said that Trump is their second choice. Those are not Haley voters. So the fact that DeSantis is in splits the Trump vote up a little bit, which would mean that Trump isn't likely to get that 50% that he got in Iowa.
Who has the most to gain who has the most to lose in Tuesday's vote?
Oh, well, I think the most to gain, obviously, is Donald Trump, because he's got the greatest opportunity of doing well, based on polling. The candidate with the most to lose is probably Ron DeSantis. I'm surprised that he's still in, I don't really think he has much of an avenue after New Hampshire. The one who must win New Hampshire, though, is Nikki Haley. Because if she doesn't win New Hampshire, she really doesn't have any options in subsequent states. She's got a kind of real outside chance as it is. And I think that chance is that if she wins New Hampshire, gets a tremendous amount of media attention, goes to South Carolina, where she's already a pretty popular ex-governor, she may have a chance of winning South Carolina and then getting some additional momentum. But that's a tall order. South Carolina Republicans are really kind of MAGA Republicans.
We saw that former President Trump didn't campaign all that much in Iowa and still really outperformed his rivals. What has it been like on the ground in the closing days of this primary in terms of candidates, events, and that kind of thing?
Well, I think we shouldn't think too much about the importance of retail politics at this point in the campaign. Now it's really about just getting people excited and getting them out to the polls. It's not really convincing them to support you. And I think what we're seeing is a lot of bigger events. Certainly Donald Trump is having just exclusively rallies. He may have a couple of other small events, but he's really holding big rallies where they're very controlled, he can give the message that he wants to give. There are no reporters to ask questions or no voters ask him questions. Haley is not going to be able to draw the crowds that Trump did. But she's having some medium sized to large size events. And she's having many more of them than Trump is. She just doesn't have the position now to do just the really big rallies that Trump is. DeSantis has just come back to the state so he doesn't have as many events. It's going to be interesting to see how he manages to stay viable with his retail campaigning because if he does have a weakness , his retail campaigning just isn't up to the power of Trump’s over-the-top stuff. And Haley is very polished and very on message in her retail campaign.
Do you think that anything has changed without Asa Hutchinson and Chris Christie in the field anymore?
Asa Hutchinson dropping out really made no difference. But Chris Christie certainly, I think, gave an additional boost to Haley. Christie voters, who their second choice was, before he dropped out, we were seeing that for Christie supporters, 65% of them said Nikki Haley was their second choice. So I think that helped bolster Haley's run, gave her some momentum coming out there. And again, as they say, DeSantis staying is probably a really good thing for Haley right now.
What is Chris Sununu doing in the closing days of this race? And what kind of effect might his efforts have?
I don't think we should overplay the importance of endorsements in New Hampshire, because the state has so little money in its government and so few people in this government compared to many other states, there's really no ability for a governor to build up that kind of political machine based on patronage, etc., that you see in some other big states. But what Sununu can do is be a surrogate for Haley and be able to go out and talk on his behalf, introduce him and so forth. So a good surrogate will spend a lot of time out on the road. But endorsements generally are not that impactful in races. Usually an endorsement is largely a two- or three-day news story. And that's about it. But Christie will certainly be a nice surrogate to have for Haley.
We've talked in the past about the reasons why President Biden isn't running a Democratic primary campaign in New Hampshire this year. There is a write-in effort as he faces some rivals. So what about the Democratic side? Is there anything interesting to watch there?
There could be, but I don't think there's much. I was watching this more closely about a month ago to see if Dean Phillips could get any traction for that anti-Biden vote, especially among younger voters and more progressive voters who really don't like what the administration is doing. With the war in Gaza right now, if there had been kind of a protest vote showing up, that would have made this race interesting, but we're just not seeing it in our polling. Even having Biden as a write-in about 70 Democratic voters say they're going to write him in. Now the question is, is 70% good enough? Is 60% good enough, let alone win, maybe get 55%?
The story is going to be really critical to see if it's described as a poor performance by Biden, despite the fact that he's got a write-in campaign. So poor performance is a demonstration of a weak party and a non-unified party. That can be problematic, because there's a precursor for that in the 1968 race. Lyndon Johnson was facing an unpopular war in Vietnam and chose to run as a write-in New Hampshire in 1968, and another Minnesotan, Gene McCarthy, almost beat him. Now, Johnson beat McCarthy, but the fact that first of all, in Johnson's eyes that they were receiving a significant race, and then in the eyes of the public and the press, the fact that Johnson won, but by not by that much, that made the story coming out of that, that the Democrats faced a weaken and divided party. And Johnson took that message and decided he would not run for reelection. So that same story, is there that same storyline? And frankly, there are a lot of Democrats that went clean for Gene back in 1968, who are leaders of the political party now or the elders in the party here in the state and remember that very well. So they're the ones who are behind the write-in campaign. They don't want to see the embarrassment that Johnson faced by Biden of not being able to show a unified face going forward. So this write-in campaign is actually a fairly significant effort that began last spring, really, and has been, I think, fairly effective. It looks like most Democrats, particularly older Democrats, are going to come out and vote. And if they do, they're going to write-in Biden.
Assuming that Biden and Trump are facing off in November, how does the state of New Hampshire look today?
We'll probably be probably be a leaning, slightly leaning Democrat, simply because I think by the time we get around to the election, both parties will have made peace with the fact that neither of them has the candidate that they really want to have in both cases. I think both parties would rather have somebody other than Trump or other than Biden. So once people make peace with that, they’ll end up supporting their party's candidate. A guy I used to work with in Wisconsin used to say that rationalization is the second-strongest human drive. And even those people that may be supporting Haley right now, they'll rationalize why they have to vote for Trump in November because he's better than Biden. And the people that maybe are really opposed to Biden now and really like Dean Phillips or Marianne Williamson, believe me, they'll come around in November and say that, well, they can't let Trump win. They'll vote for Biden and hold their noses. So that rationalization goes on by general election time. We can't underestimate the impact of that.
Will you be going to any of the famous midnight voting this time?
No, I won't. I've been to Dixville Notch one time to see that and there really isn't much going on there to see; it's kind of a media circus. It's predictive of nothing. So it's a kind of a fun place to go and say you've been to, but it's not really gonna tell us anything about where the election is going.
