Trump wins New Hampshire primary and solidifies his candidacy for the Republican presidential nomination

Donald Trump has won the New Hampshire primary election and solidified his position as the Republican presidential nominee. The victory over Nikki Haley, who had briefly threatened to rein in the former president, suggests there will be a clear path to the GOP nomination for Trump, who also handily won the Iowa caucuses last week.

Pending the final results, which may take days for the local Secretary of State to release, media projections give the former President a double-digit advantage over the former US Ambassador to the United Nations: half the respective percentage of votes counted. Recorded 54.1% and 44.5%.

Addressing supporters in Nashua, Trump delivered an aggressive speech that included harsh criticism of Haley. “She had a very bad night,” Trump said. “She came in third (in Iowa), and she’s still hanging around.”

Haley, who called Trump a “chaotic” candidate, promised a more palatable version of the Republican Party. Haley rose in the New Hampshire polls in mid-December, but was unable to maintain that momentum Tuesday night.

Despite her performance in New Hampshire, Haley insisted she would advance in her home state of South Carolina, where there is a Republican primary next month. Speaking to supporters in Concord on Tuesday, Haley congratulated Trump on his primary victory, but stressed the importance of the upcoming victory.

“New Hampshire is first. This is not the last,” Haley told supporters in Concord. “This race is not over yet. Dozens of states remain, and next up is my beloved state of South Carolina.

But polls show Trump maintaining a significant lead in South Carolina, so it’s unclear how these primaries could change the dynamics of the race.

New Hampshire appears to be the last significant threat to Trump’s coronation. In a state that voted for Joe Biden rather than Trump in 2020, Haley ran as a centrist Republican, while Trump has continued to preach right-wing populism in recent days. Haley was Trump’s only serious challenger in New Hampshire after Ron DeSantis dropped out of the race on Sunday.

Addressing supporters, Trump mocked Haley’s efforts to downplay her loss in New Hampshire, saying, “Let’s not let anyone feel victorious when they had a very bad night.”

Trump’s team also mocked Haley’s decision to remain in the race after two losses, and one of the former president’s strategists mocked her as “delusional.” Undaunted, Haley stuck to her campaign message that Trump is incapable of leading the Republican Party toward a brighter future, citing the former president’s numerous legal battles. Trump has been charged with 91 felonies in four criminal cases, and spent much of last week in court over a defamation case.

“With Donald Trump, there’s one chaos after another: that court case, that controversy, that tweet, that senior citizen moment,” Haley said Tuesday night. “You can’t fix Joe Biden’s chaos with Republican chaos.”

But Trump continues to gain traction. Tina Lorenz, who said she has been supporting Donald Trump since 2016, was among those voting for the former president on Tuesday. “He is representing the American people. He is not there for himself, but for political gains. It is not for financial reasons. He neither needs money, nor fame, nor wealth. It already has all that,” says Lorenz, 63: “It’s available to ordinary people. And that’s what’s happening, we’ve become so polarized that there’s no one there for normal people.”

The New Hampshire result suggests Trump will become his party’s presidential nominee for the third consecutive election, and will likely face Biden in November. After Trump’s victory in Iowa and New Hampshire, more and more Republican lawmakers are lining up to support him. Speaking at Trump’s victory party on Tuesday, former presidential candidate Tim Scott, who dropped out of the primary race in November and endorsed the former president last week, called on Republicans to come together.

“It is time for the Republican Party to unite around our nominee and the next President of the United States: Donald Trump. Let the party begin tonight,” Scott said.

Despite Haley’s claims to the contrary, Democrats also clearly believe that the Republican presidential primary is over and are already turning their attention to the general election.

Biden campaign manager Julie Chavez Rodriguez said, “Tonight’s results confirm that Donald Trump is all but assured of the Republican nomination, and that the election-denying, anti-libertarian MAGA movement has emboldened Republicans.” Have completed our takeover of the party.” “As we work toward November 2024, one thing is clear today: Donald Trump is heading straight into the general election, in which he will face the only person who has ever defeated him in the election: Joe Biden.”

Biden, the ‘real’ Democratic candidate

The President, Joe Biden, also won his party’s primaries in New Hampshire this Wednesday, despite the fact that he did not officially appear in them. He needed barely 1% of the votes to count for networks like NBC News and Fox to declare him the winner.

The next stops in the Republican primary process will be in Nevada on February 8 and Haley’s home state of South Carolina on the 24th of that month, where she hopes to gain momentum.

In the Iowa caucuses on Monday last week, Trump came in first with 51% of the vote, followed by Florida Governor Ron DeSantis (21.2%), who is now retired. Haley got 19.1% and businessman Vivek Ramaswamy, who has left the fight, got 7.7%.