NEWFIELDS, N.H. (WHDH) - The battle for victory in the New Hampshire Republican Presidential Primary is raging, with each of the three remaining candidates in the Granite State Friday.
Former President Donald Trump and former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley were atop a recent poll from St. Anselm College, at 52% and 38%, respectively, with Florida Governor Ron DeSantis a distant third, at 6%.
Haley, who declared the presidential primary a two-person race after the Iowa caucuses despite finishing third, is hoping a formidable showing in New Hampshire might actually make the two-person race a reality.
“What I want to do is be strong,” Haley said during a CNN Town Hall Thursday. “We’re not going to know what strong looks like until those numbers come in. We want to do better than we did in Iowa.”
The former South Carolina governor went hard on the former president Thursday, pointing to the larger electoral impact she believes he has had on the GOP.
“Who lost the House for us? Who lost the Senate? Who lost the White House? Donald Trump, Donald Trump, Donald Trump,” she said.
Republicans lost control of the U.S. House of Representatives in the 2018 midterm elections and Democrats won the Senate back from GOP control in 2020. Donald Trump, despite continued denial of the fact, was defeated in the 2020 election by current President Joe Biden. With that, Trump became the first incumbent president since Herbert Hoover in 1932 to lead his party to losing control of the White House, the Senate, and the House of Representatives.
Trump was in Florida Thursday to attend the funeral of former First Lady Melania Trump’s mother, Amalija Knavs. Later in the day he appeared on Fox News, where he criticized New Hampshire’s primary process and the state’s Republican governor, Chris Sununu, who endorsed and has been campaigning with Haley.
New Hampshire primary rules allow voters not affiliated with a political party to vote in the party primary of their choice.
“In order to try and stop Trump, they go out and they sign up and they can sign up very easily and Sununu should have stopped it,” Trump said on Fox News.
DeSantis held events in his home state of Florida and in South Carolina Thursday while continuing to deny reports he’s given up on New Hampshire, where he said he held town halls the two previous days.
“Nikki Haley can not compete with Donald Trump there,” DeSantis said on the Hugh Hewitt radio show Thursday. “And the fact that she can’t do it there, she can’t do it anywhere. She’s certainly not going to do it in South Carolina.”
Haley’s campaign is bouncing around the state all day, starting early at the Newfields Country Store in Newfields, where voters serenaded the candidate with a rendition of “Happy Birthday” – she turns 52 on Saturday. Later in the morning she visited the Polaris Charter School in Manchester, a city the campaign will return to Friday night for a rally after stops in both Amherst and Milford.
DeSantis is scheduled to be back in New Hampshire Friday for town halls in Nashua and in Dover and Trump has a rally scheduled in Concord.
Voters will head to the polls for the New Hampshire GOP Presidential Primary on Tuesday.
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