In a recent interview on Fox News that was subsequently highlighted by MSNBC, Nikki Haley — a former governor of South Carolina, a former official on Donald Trump’s own presidential team, and Trump’s last competitor in the GOP’s presidential primary with extensive name recognition — clearly distanced herself from the possibility of winning New Hampshire’s primary.
“What I said is, I want to be strong in Iowa, I want to be even stronger in New Hampshire, and then I want to be stronger in South Carolina,” Haley told Fox’s Neil Cavuto. Asked if the campaign strength she was referencing meant actually winning, the former governor added: “We won’t know until the numbers come in, but making sure that we continue to be strong — I want to be stronger than I was in Iowa.”
Haley and Trump will face each other in New Hampshire this week after the abrupt departure from the race of Ron DeSantis, Florida’s Republican governor whose long-expected bid for president started promising but concluded by massively trailing Trump, who was sitting by this weekend at around two-thirds of the support nationally per a FiveThirtyEight average of polling from the primary.
Before dropping out, DeSantis predicted in an interview with actually the same Fox host that he wouldn’t win in New Hampshire and neither would Haley. DeSantis has now endorsed Trump, though the former president has spent basically the entire time that DeSantis running for president has been even a publicly glaring possibility going after the governor.
DeSantis will now be finishing his second term as Florida’s governor, after which he’ll be term-limited out of office. The now looming, unceremonious end will come after DeSantis has occupied himself as Florida’s governor with broadsides in the so-called culture wars, meaning areas where Republicans have turned personal, social, or cultural disagreements into political cudgels — or attempted attacks, at least. Trump-endorsed Republican candidate Daniel Cameron tried to make attacks that put down transgender Kentuckians a piece of his campaign for governor of that state and lost, no matter the state’s obvious Republican lean.
