Donald Trump defeated Nikki Haley in the New Hampshire primary election on Tuesday, continuing his momentum towards the Republican nomination and raising fresh questions about her viability going forward.

Trump’s victory, called by The Associated Press just as final polls closed at 8 pm Eastern Time, means that he has, in consecutive weeks, outpaced Ron DeSantis in Iowa and Haley in New Hampshire, the two states where they had campaigned and spent most aggressively. No Republican candidate has ever won the first two states and then not ultimately secured the presidential nomination.

Haley conceded her loss and congratulated Trump — “he earned it”, she said — but vowed to press ahead with her campaign to South Carolina, her home state, which holds its primary election on February 24.

“New Hampshire is first in the nation,” she told supporters in Concord, New Hampshire. “It is not the last in the nation. 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.”

Haley used what was nominally a concession speech to deliver some of the sharpest attacks she has made on one of the largest platforms she has had against Trump.

She blamed Trump for Republican losses in elections dating to 2018 and warned that his court cases, controversies and a “senior moment” would damage his campaign.

She said she would defeat President Joe Biden, while Trump would lose and usher in a second term for the incumbent and Vice-President Kamala Harris.

“You can’t fix the mess if you don’t win an election,” she said, before predicting the 81-year-old Biden would not live to finish a second term. “A Trump nomination is a Biden win and a Kamala Harris presidency.”

Trump did not seem to be pleased with Haley’s speech. He called her “delusional” on his social media site and pointed out that she placed third in Iowa’s caucuses.

On the Democratic side, Biden triumphed in his party’s presidential primary, carried by his supporters’ write-in campaign after he declined to appear on the state’s ballot following a dispute over the primary’s timing.

The result, called by the AP, was good news for Biden. He faced a collection of long-shot contenders led by Represetative Dean Phillips of
Minnesota, who has denounced Biden as “unelectable.”

Regardless of what comes next, the win on Tuesday sealed Trump’s status as the party’s standard-bearer in the history books: Before Trump, the only Republicans who have ever won both the Iowa caucuses and the New Hampshire primary have been sitting Presidents.

New York Times News Service