Trump maintains big lead over Haley in New Hampshire, poll finds

Judy Sheindlin – Judge Judy to you – is famous for weighing on things, and she recently reached her own verdict on this year’s presidential race: Nikki Haley is the best candidate for the job.

She campaigned with the former South Carolina governor in New Hampshire yesterday, urging voters to, “bring her home on Tuesday”. Sheindlin’s political allegiances have shifted over the years, and in 2020, she endorsed former New York mayor Michael Bloomberg for the Democratic presidential nomination.

We’ll find out soon enough if her verdict on Haley is enough to push her over the top in New Hampshire. If it is not, Sheindlin does not seem ready to campaign for Joe Biden – she went on CNN to say that she thinks he is too old:

With Ron DeSantis’s exit, former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley has the two-person race she wants in New Hampshire, the state she has bet her campaign on. But will it be enough to beat Donald Trump on Tuesday? The Guardian’s Lauren Gambino took a look at Haley’s pitch to voters, and if it’s working:

Plodding across frigid New Hampshire ahead of Tuesday’s primary, Nikki Haley offered the state’s proudly freethinking voters a tantalizing proposal: choose her and save America from the presidential rematch seemingly nobody wants.

“Seventy percent of Americans have said they don’t want to see a Donald Trump-Joe Biden rematch,” Haley exclaimed on Sunday, drawing head nods and murmurs of agreement from attendees packed into a middle school library in Derry. Haley leaned in: “Do we really want to have two presidential candidates in their 80s?”

Biden, the 81-year-old Democratic president, is coasting to his party’s nomination and Trump, the 77-year-old former president, is marching toward the Republican one as the field narrows and he consolidates support from across the party. But Haley, who celebrated her 52nd birthday hopscotching the state on Saturday, insisted there was a different – viable – path.

Haley, the former “Tea Party governor” of South Carolina who served as Trump’s first United Nations ambassador, has staked her presidential aspirations on a strong showing in the first-in-the-nation primary.

“New Hampshire is do-or-die for Nikki Haley,” said Mike Dennehy, a veteran Republican strategist in New Hampshire who worked on John McCain’s winning presidential primary campaigns in the state in 2000 and 2008 and is unaffiliated. “She needs to go all in and speak specifically to independent voters who want change in this country.”

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Joe Biden won’t be on the ballot in New Hampshire, but two long-shot Democratic candidates will be, while opponents of Israel’s invasion of Gaza are encouraging voters to write in “ceasefire” as a show of protest. Here’s more from the Guardian’s Adam Gabbatt on some of the lesser-known aspects of the state’s primary tomorrow:

While Donald Trump and Nikki Haley might draw focus, a shadow presidential primary is taking place in New Hampshire, where Joe Biden could stumble at the first hurdle of his bid to run for president again in 2024 following an internal Democratic party feud.

As a consequence of the party scrap, Biden’s name will not even appear on the ballot in the Granite state on Tuesday. While the president remains the favorite to win his party’s overall nomination, his absence here has opened a window for Dean Phillips, a Democratic congressman from Minnesota, and Marianne Williamson, an author and self-help guru who ran for president in 2020, to mount longshot presidential bids.

The pair have spent weeks campaigning in the state, pitching different visions for the future. Phillips, 55, has touted his reputation as a centrist; his record of working with Republicans to get things done; and the fact that he is 26 years younger than Biden.

Williamson, who withdrew from the 2020 race before the Iowa caucuses, is selling more of a deviation from the current administration. A progressive, she would introduce free college tuition, declare a climate emergency and Department of Peace which would be tasked with avoiding war abroad and tackling white supremacy at home.

There are reportedly some shenanigans happening in New Hampshire ahead of Tuesday’s primary, though what they amount to is unclear.

NBC News reports that Granite state residents are getting robocalls from a fake voice that sounds like Joe Biden and encourages them not to vote tomorrow. The president’s name is not appearing on the ballot in New Hampshire, after the Democratic National Committee opted to make South Carolina the first state in its nominating process.

However supporters of the president are encouraging people to write in Biden’s name on their ballots, as a way to show their support and try to win back the state’s spot in the nominating process. In previous years, New Hampshire was the second state to vote after Iowa for Democrats.

The robocalls concluded by giving people the phone number for Kathy Sullivan, a former state Democratic party chair who is supporting the write-in campaign. She believes the calls’ intention is to hurt Biden, NBC News reports, and that they are illegal.

“I want them to be prosecuted to the fullest extent possible because this is an attack on democracy,” she told NBC. “I’m not going to let it go. I want to know who’s paying for it? Who knew about it? Who benefits?”

Money, endorsements, poll numbers: Ron DeSantis had it all, and then he lost it. Was it taken from him by the 800lb gorilla of the Republican party Donald Trump, or did he cause his own downfall? The Guardian’s David Smith untangles the question, and finds that it’s a little bit of both:

It began in a glitch-filled disaster on Twitter. It ended with a misattributed quotation on X. Just like Elon Musk’s social media platform, efforts to rebrand Ron DeSantis’s US presidential election campaign could not mask its fundamental flaws.

When in May the Florida governor announced his run during a chat with Musk on Twitter Spaces, the platform’s audio streaming feature, there were technical breakdowns that drew comparisons with one of Musk’s space rockets blowing up on the launchpad.

Eight months, dozens of staff departures, tens of millions of dollars and one crushing defeat in Iowa later, DeSantis announced he was dropping out in a video posted on the renamed X that quoted Winston Churchill as saying: “Success is not final, failure is not fatal – it is the courage to continue that counts.” According to the International Churchill Society, the British wartime prime minister never said that.

Two days before the New Hampshire primary election, DeSantis’s humiliation was complete. “This is probably the biggest collapse of a presidential campaign in modern American history, if not all American history,” David Jolly, a former Republican congressman from Florida, told the MSNBC network on Sunday. “Ron DeSantis had everything going for him.”

DeSantis’s exit winnows Republican race down to just two candidates

Haley scrambles to overtake Trump ahead of Tuesday’s must-win New Hampshire primary vote