Trump ramps up attacks on Haley before N.H. primary
New Globe poll shows her in 2nd place in the state
Trump cast Nikki Haley as ‘unelectable’ and a beneficiary of Democratic support Tuesday.
Days before New Hampshire’s presidential primary, Donald Trump is escalating his attacks on Nikki Haley, a former member of his administration and who polling shows is his closest threat in the crucial early-voting state.
The former president sprinkled a variety of jabs at Haley into a sprawling speech Tuesday at an Atkinson, N.H., country club, casting his former United Nations ambassador as “unelectable” and a beneficiary of Democratic support.
Haley has crept up in recent polling, closing within 16 percentage points of Trump in a new Suffolk University/Boston Globe/NBC-10 poll. In New Hampshire, voters not enrolled in any party can choose in which primary they vote, and the GOP primary is expected to prove a larger draw for voters than the Democratic one, where President Biden is not on the ballot and faces several longshot challengers.
“Nikki Haley in particular is counting on the Democrats and liberals to infiltrate your Republican primary,” Trump told the crowd Tuesday. “That’s what’s happening. You have a group of people coming in that are not Republicans, and it’s artificially boosting her numbers here — although we’re still leading her by a lot.”
Trump simultaneously dismissed Florida Governor Ron DeSantis as a threat, mentioning him several times Tuesday but often immediately turning to Haley.
“We don’t talk about him too much,” Trump said of DeSantis, “because over here, he’s polling at 4 percent.”
DeSantis garnered 5 percent of the 500 likely voters surveyed in the latest Suffolk poll, which was released after Trump’s comments Tuesday.
Haley is likely to be a constant target of Trump’s in the week ahead. On Tuesday, he again test-drove a new nickname for her, saying “some people” have called her “Nicki New Tax” before immediately claiming he didn’t think the moniker was “particularly good.”
Trump’s campaign has pointed to a 2012 Facebook post, in which Haley — then South Carolina’s governor — said she supported a GOP congressional proposal known as the “Fair Tax” that would have instituted a 23 percent sales tax. Trump and his campaign have omitted that the proposal also would have eliminated a series of other federal taxes.
Haley, for her part, has repeatedly cast the primary as a one-on-one race between her and Trump, including at her event in Bretton Woods on Tuesday. She also has called herself the most likely GOP candidate to beat Biden in November, pointing to a poll that showed her with a 17-point lead over the Democrat in a hypothetical matchup.
Trump, too, targeted that. “She walks around with a poll saying she’s up on Biden by 17. That poll is about three months old, and it’s a fake poll,” Trump claimed.
The Wall Street Journal poll is not three months old: It was conducted in early November and late December.
Steve Kesselring, who drove from Manchester with his wife, Kim, and his 10-year-old daughter, Hannah, to see Haley at the Omni Mount Washington Resort, said they “finally made a decision” on backing Haley only after seeing every candidate at least once.
”I was a Trump supporter in the beginning. We needed change in this country,” said Kesselring, 40, who registered as a Republican during the last election cycle.