As we reported earlier, Nikki Haley won New Hampshire’s first votes by carrying Dixville Notch, the place that votes at midnight.
In this case, she won all six voters there.
As my colleague Susie Moore explained, Dixville Notch’s history seems pretty liberal — they voted for Biden in 2020 and Hillary Clinton in 2016, in the general election, among other things.
But the final poll of the race is in this morning, and it’s not looking good for Haley. Former President Donald Trump has gained three points over the past day. That’s likely been bolstered by the endorsement of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, as well as other Republicans flooding into New Hampshire to help campaign for Trump, including Sen. Tim Scott (R-SC), Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-NY), Lee Zeldin, and Vivek Ramaswamy.
The last Boston Globe/Suffolk poll has Trump up at 60 percent over Haley at 38.
Final Wave #7 of 7 with net change in parentheses (1/21-1/22)
— David Paleologos (@davidpaleologos) January 23, 2024
Topline Ballot Test "First Choice":
Trump 60 (+3)
Haley 38 (–)
Someone else 1 (-1)
Undecided 1 (-1)
Refused <1 (–)
After a long week of multiple candidates dropping out, our work is done here. No matter what the…
Look at the trajectory in New Hamphire on @RCPolitics. That's called momentum, and often, it's very hard for pollsters to fully catch even in a tracking poll.
— Rich Baris The People's Pundit (@Peoples_Pundit) January 23, 2024
Look at the trajectory in New Hampshire on folk_U did great jobs.s pic.twitter.com/ufEtSAihzA
That puts Trump’s final average in the RealClearPolitics tracker at +19.3 percent. For Haley to win, she would have to pull off one of the greatest upsets in primary history.
Despite Dixville Notch’s results, the momentum seems to be on Trump’s side. To overcome this, Haley’s going to have to hope a lot of Trump folks stay home, assuming that Trump is going to win and he doesn’t need their vote. Trump was trying to dismiss any thought of that last night, encouraging people to get out and vote, to not assume anything.
She’s also going to have to hope she pulls in a lot of undeclared/crossover Democrats, but there may be some folks who have been doing some game-playing to vote for Haley to make it tough for Trump. That was a strategy that folks like David Plouffe encouraged, and it might pump up her vote a little.
However, we are also seeing the opposite with some kind of funny business going on with a robocall from “Joe Biden” (it wasn’t Biden) supposedly telling people to stay home and not vote. But the problem for the Democrats is that because they attempted to try to make South Carolina the first primary state to help Biden, Biden isn’t officially on the ballot in New Hampshire.
So all these game-playing and rigging efforts are likely to end up reducing the number of people who end up voting for Joe Biden, embarrassing him with a low turnout (and possibly popping up the number for his challenger, Dean Phillips).
Wouldn’t that be so appropriate, given all their attempts to control everything, that this blows up in their faces and makes Biden look weaker?
