The GOP race is over
MANCHESTER, N.H. — Shortly after the New Hampshire primary was called for Donald Trump on Tuesday night, his last remaining Republican opponent put on a brave face and stepped to the stage of a hotel ballroom filled with her disappointed supporters.
“This race is far from over. There are dozens of states left to go, and the next one is my sweet state of South Carolina,” declared Nikki Haley, who served as the Palmetto State’s governor for six years before being chosen by Trump to serve as his ambassador to the United Nations.
But it’s time for the rest of us to quit pretending. With Trump’s solid win here, the primary season is effectively over. A humiliation in South Carolina awaits Haley, unless she decides to end her campaign before its Feb. 24 primary.
What that means is that the battle is now between the former president and the current one — a rematch of two unpopular, geriatric men whom most Americans have said they do not want.
But Trump is indeed the opponent President Biden was hoping for. His campaign manager, Julie Chavez Rodriguez, quickly put out a statement that said in part: “Tonight’s results confirm Donald Trump has all but locked up the GOP nomination, and the election-denying, anti-freedom MAGA movement has completed its takeover of the Republican Party.”
The slog between now and November will be long and grim and bitter. Add to that the unprecedented situation in which a major-party nominee is battling 91 criminal charges.
As former New Hampshire Republican chairwoman Jennifer Horn put it at an election-eve roundtable hosted by Bloomberg News, the election season that lies ahead will be “record anxiety-inducing for American citizens throughout the entire thing.”
There were only 22 delegates at stake in New Hampshire, but as the primaries move forward, Haley is not likely to find an environment more welcoming than the Granite State, where those who register as “undeclared” can vote in either party’s primary. Exit polls indicated that 65% of these independents voted for Haley; 74% of registered Republicans voted for Trump.
New Hampshire’s GOP primary electorate, which was poised to set a new turnout record, was also less tethered to the MAGA movement than the voters who participated in Iowa’s Republican caucuses last week.
Preliminary exit polls indicated that New Hampshire Republican voters were about evenly split on the question of whether Biden was legitimately elected or won by fraud; by comparison, two-thirds of Iowans surveyed as they entered the Republican caucuses said Biden did not win legitimately. In New Hampshire, only about half of Republican voters said they would consider Trump fit to be president if he were convicted of a crime; in Iowa, about two-thirds said so.
Normally, things don’t come to such an early end in a primary season in which there is not an incumbent president on the ballot.
But although only two small states have voted, Trump’s domination of the Republican Party appears complete. Its establishment has rapidly closed ranks behind him — something that would have been hard to imagine in the wake of the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol by Trump supporters who were trying to overturn his reelection defeat.
Despite Biden’s sagging approval numbers, many Republicans fear that what they are signing up for is an electoral disaster, given that they lost not only the White House but also the House and the Senate on Trump’s watch. Yet Haley’s efforts to portray herself as a more electable alternative did little to shake Trump’s grip on his devoted followers.
Now his campaign is eager to assert the prerogatives that come with his status as the presumptive nominee. It plans to move quickly to take control of the national and state party machinery and to consolidate fundraising muscle.
Don’t expect Trump to follow the traditional playbook for candidates who are moving from a primary to a general election footing and looking to broaden their appeal. Trump will not be toning down his belligerent, base-pleasing message of grievance and retribution as he turns his fire on Biden exclusively. Any repositioning is “not going to be so much a pivot as it is a slight turn,” one of his top advisers told me.
No, this is not the election that America wants. But given the ragged state of our politics, this looks like the best we are capable of coming up with.