The Daily - Why the G.O.P. Nomination Fight Is Now (All But) Over

Episode Date: January 24, 2024

On Tuesday, Donald J. Trump beat Nikki Haley in New Hampshire. His win accelerated a push for the party to coalesce behind him and deepened questions about the path forward for Ms. Haley, his lone remaining rival.Jonathan Weisman, a political correspondent for The Times, discusses the real meaning of the former president's victory.Guest: Jonathan Weisman, a political correspondent for The New York Times.Background reading: Donald Trump’s win in New Hampshire added to an air of inevitability, even as Nikki Haley sharpened the edge of her rhetoric.Here are five takeaways from the New Hampshire primary.For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily. Transcripts of each episode will be made available by the next workday. 

From The New York Times, I'm Michael Barbaro. This is The Daily. Today, the real meaning of Donald Trump's victory last night in the New Hampshire Republican primary. I spoke with Times political correspondent Jonathan Weissman. It's Wednesday, January 24th. Jonathan, are you rolling? I'm rolling. I'm right here.

Okay, very good. So, it is, at this very moment, 11.03 p.m., and we have almost the full results of the New Hampshire primary. I think 70-some percent of the votes are in. So just walk us through the top-line numbers. So it looks like Donald Trump has beat Nikki Haley in New Hampshire by about 10.5-11 percentage points. That's certainly not the kind of blowout that we saw in Iowa. It's not even as bad as some of the late polling that had her down more like 15-16 percentage points. But for Nikki Haley, 15, 16 percentage points. But for Nikki Haley, a loss is a loss. She really needed to pull New Hampshire out. And it only gets a lot more difficult from here. And look what Trump won. He won women. He won men. He won Republicans. He won conservative Republicans. He pretty much did what he did in Iowa,

which was to show that he has control over the Republican electorate. Right. And now I think the question on everyone's mind, let's just cut to the chase, is whether this nomination battle is basically now over. Did Trump just end Nikki Haley's candidacy effectively? Thank you, New Hampshire, for the love, the kindness, the support, and a great night here tonight.

Thank you so much. So after the race was called, Nikki Haley came out to her after party, I'll call it, and she said, Now you've all heard the chatter among the political class. They're falling all over themselves, saying this race is over. Well, I have news for all of them. That New Hampshire primary is the beginning of this process, not the end of this process. Mm hmm.

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. And she vowed she'll stay in the race. South Carolina voters don't want a coronation. They want an election. And we're going to give them one. Because we are just getting started. Thank you for the energy. Right. And I think we have all observed in this primary and in pretty much every primary I've

covered, Jonathan, you've covered as well, that candidates say they are in the race and suddenly they're not in a heartbeat. We saw that with Jeb Bush, Marco Rubio in 2016. We saw that with Ron DeSantis just a few days ago. Just a few days ago. Remember, DeSantis said he is not going to kneel down and kiss the ring. And then just days later, he knelt down and kissed the ring. So yes, just because a candidate is saying she is going to keep going doesn't necessarily mean she will. She has to take stock and decide whether it is good for her. So I'll ask this question again. Is this race effectively over? Has Donald Trump, for all intents and purposes, wrapped up, not officially, but in kind of the political realpolitik of this race, the Republican nomination.

Yes. Donald Trump will be the nominee of the Republican Party, barring some miraculous intervention that won't involve Nikki Haley at this point. Well, let's talk, Jonathan, about why this played out the way that it did in New Hampshire. Because if you rewind the clock just a few days ago, a political lifetime ago, our understanding was that this was supposed to be a three-person race in New Hampshire, a three-person race that would, we predicted, be focused on the battle for number two.

That's where we left our listeners off a week ago when we talked to Shane Goldmacher, with the sense that unless either Haley or Ron DeSantis dropped out, they would just muck up each other's path to being competitive with Trump. DeSantis, as we just talked about, drops out in the middle of this past week, a theoretical boon to Nikki Haley. And yet she lost by something like 10 points. So just untangle that for us. Well, let's look at Ron DeSantis. I mean, by the time DeSantis dropped out,

he hardly had any voters, six percentage points. In New Hampshire. In New Hampshire, I'm sorry. And almost all of DeSantis' voters said that their second choice wasn't Nikki Haley. Their second choice was Donald Trump. I actually think that DeSantis' departure was kind of a stab in the back to Nikki Haley. DeSantis not only left two days before the election in New Hampshire, but he endorsed Trump and he went out with a blast against the corporatist Nikki Haley.

He didn't want his voters to go to her. So that was a big blow. Even though she got the two-person race she wanted, we saw Trump's numbers go up, not down. did or didn't have to offer Haley, why then didn't Haley's own strategy end up working at all in New Hampshire, where she has been on the rise, she campaigned a tremendous amount, and where her campaign said she was a natural fit for this primary electorate. So what made her campaign think that, say that, and why didn't it ultimately bear out? 40%, the largest chunk of the electorate in New Hampshire is unaffiliated, independent, not connected to the Democratic or the Republican Party.

40%, that is a big chunk. Right. And the assumption was that most of those 40 percent, the ones that wanted to vote in the Republican primary, were going to go to Nikki Haley. And Nikki Haley had a template. She could have looked back at John McCain's campaign in 2000 to see how you energize these unaffiliated voters, how you get folks that aren't really tied to a political party or an ideology decide with you. And that template is to actually reach out to them in a big way to say, I want independent voters. I want a big tent. You know, independent voters. I want a big tent. You know, voters in New Hampshire, especially independents, really want authenticity. They want access. McCain in 2000, he would do these town hall meetings that would go on and on and on until everybody had asked every question that they

could come up with. There was never a question of him hiding. He was out there. He was taking risks. Nikki Haley, she would go into like a diner. She would give a 15-minute stump speech, and then she would leave. Sometimes she would say, I'm going to take questions today, and she would take literally like five questions. If that, that wasn't what New Hampshire wanted to see. They wanted access. They wanted authenticity. And she just never offered it up. You know, I was talking to an independent from Dover, New Hampshire a few days ago, and he had told me, you know, I really wanted Chris Christie,

but with Christie out of the race, I'll vote for Nikki Haley. I don't love her, but I do want to stop Donald Trump. Well, he reached out to me today and he said, I don't know if you're going to do a follow-up story, but I decided I just can't vote for Nikki Haley. I'm going to go and write in Joe Biden's name. And I said, why? And he said, you know, Nikki Haley never asked me for my vote.

She never gave me a compelling reason for me to vote for her. And if she's not going to do that, I'm not going to. Fascinating. So how did Haley's failure in this telling to follow that template and truly persuade independents in New Hampshire to come to her, how did that ultimately manifest in the final numbers we saw on Tuesday night? Haley won independents, no question. She won them.

But she didn't win them by the overwhelming majorities that she needed to. So she also had the other side of the equation. She needed to win a good number of Republicans because ultimately she's running for the Republican nomination. And she didn't do it. Donald Trump absolutely overwhelmingly crushed her with Republicans, especially with Republicans who identified themselves as conservatives. It really showed her fundamental weakness because New Hampshire is not as conservative a Republican base as

she's going to be facing in South Carolina. And for much of the country, actually, it's a pretty moderate Republican base. But she didn't really win those people either. If you're an identified Republican, you almost certainly voted for Donald Trump. Right. And you can't win the Republican nomination without Republican votes. And just put a number around that. How much did Trump essentially crush her among Republicans here? The numbers are overwhelming.

Trump won about three quarters. Three out of four Republicans who went to vote voted for Donald J. Trump. Which is really interesting because what that would seem to tell us was that Nikki Haley's 44% or so second place finish in New Hampshire is kind of misleading

because so much of it is, as you have gotten at, unique to the scale of independent voters in that state. And the reality is she did pretty poorly among Republicans who make up the rest of the primary season electorate that she's going to have to contend with in the next few races. And all of that makes a certain sense given that her campaign became increasingly anti-Trump, whose main appeal was to the faction of Republicans ready to move on from Donald Trump,

which turned out, in a place like New Hampshire, to be smaller than the group of Republicans that very much want him to be the nominee. Yes, from a message standpoint, she was really in a bind. Remember, she first started this as pretty respectful of Trump. But she said, you know, it's time to turn the page. It's time for a new generation of leadership. I'm the new face of the Republican Party. Then she started being a little more critical of him on policy and talking about he ran up the debt by $8 trillion. He's leaving behind our allies in Ukraine.

That didn't work very well either. Then she started sharpening her message about Trump personally. And by the end, she was talking about Donald Trump as an agent of chaos with a brain that seemed to be addling. I mean, she was getting tougher, and that didn't work either. Because the harder you go at Trump, the bigger the backlash is against you. But if you don't go at Trump, people will say, well, why are you even running? I'll vote for the original guy. Right. And if you're an independent, why would I turn to you at all if you're not willing

to criticize Trump? And so, Jonathan, what we have witnessed, stepping back, over the past two nomination contests, Iowa now New Hampshire, is that you can't beat Trump by running as his political heir, which DeSantis tried, didn't work. You can't beat Trump by running as ultimately his nemesis or critic, which Nikki Haley just tried. You just can't beat him as a Republican, pretty much, period. Yes. This is Donald Trump's party. And that's why, after tonight, Donald Trump has this Republican nomination wrapped up. We'll be right back.

So, Jonathan, with the caveat that Nikki Haley does remain in the Republican race for however long she decides to stay in it, we are now effectively in the very strange position of a general election that basically begins now, 10 months before Election Day. that basically begins now, 10 months before Election Day. Yeah, and you know what's really crazy about it is it feels to voters like these are two incumbent presidents. You have an incumbent president in Joe Biden running against a former president who was only president less than four years ago in Donald Trump. And people are making a judgment based on, you know, what kind of presidents they were.

It feels like an incumbent on incumbent election already. And we should say this is a general election that improbably pits not just two incumbents, as you're describing, but the exact same two candidates who ran against each other four years ago, one of whom sought to overturn the results of that last election, 2020, and is now relying on that same system to elevate him to become his party's nominee and then will seek to have that same system to elevate him to become his party's nominee and then will seek to have that same system elect him president. And that race, that last race where Biden faced Trump and its aftermath, was a complete national trauma.

And yet our political system is recreating that same race. Yeah, and remember, after January 6th, the Republican Party had their moment. They could have been done with Donald Trump. At that time, this would be Speaker of the House. Kevin McCarthy went down to the floor of the House to actually say, no, we are not going to support the impeachment of Donald Trump. Then we had Mitch McConnell going to the well of the Senate. He had the opportunity to convict Trump in that impeachment. And after the conviction, the Senate could have easily voted with just a simple majority to bar Trump from ever holding federal office again. Instead, they acquitted him. So here we are now, and the entire Republican apparatus is coalescing around him. They're

looking at the Republican electorate and saying, well, if you can't beat him, join him. We saw Tim Scott right behind Trump in his victory speech. We saw John Cornyn, who might be the next Senate majority leader from Texas, endorsing Trump. We saw people like Representative Nancy Mace from South Carolina, who endorses Trump over Nikki Haley. Carolina, who endorses Trump over Nikki Haley. And it's not because Nikki Haley has alienated all these people. They don't hate her. They just see the handwriting on the wall, and they fear crossing Donald Trump. They feel like now is the time they have to unite behind the eventual nominee. Right. We should say on the other side of a 2024 ballot and contributing to this rematch we're talking about is a Democratic Party apparatus and leadership that decided that Joe Biden should be the nominee again. And they worked pretty

tirelessly to ensure that there would not be a robust fight over that question. And so we now end up with a Democratic nominee that has real questions around his popularity in a general election against Trump, who has real questions about his popularity against Biden. It is a truism that incumbent presidents are very difficult to defeat. They almost always win reelection. And it was kind of natural for the Democratic Party apparatus, its leadership,

to rally around Joe Biden as the incumbent. But this is a weak incumbent. You can look at any polling. You can see he's weak with young voters. He's weak with progressive voters who right now are very angry at the war in Gaza. He is weak with black voters who were really stung by inflation and feel like they didn't get all the things that they were promised. And he's really weakened among Hispanic voters. He is looking like a weak incumbent. And yet the party powers rallied around him. And now we have two candidates running for president that are not particularly popular with the American people.

Despite that, though, I wonder if there is a way of looking at tonight's results in New Hampshire, just to go back to the main event here, as any kind of a positive development for President Biden. If once Nikki Haley does eventually drop out of this race, does it feel correct or at all safe to assume that at least some of her supporters, especially these independent voters, might be comfortable voting for President Biden in a general election? Many of them have told our colleagues that they couldn't stomach voting for Trump. And this is for all kinds of reasons, right? For January 6th, because of

Trump's conduct, because of his criminal liability, and so on. And therefore, what Nikki Haley did well in New Hampshire bodes pretty well for Biden in November and pretty poorly for Trump. Is that how we should think about this? When I look at Nikki Haley's 44% of New Hampshire, When I look at Nikki Haley's 44% of New Hampshire, I don't think that's great news for Nikki Haley. I think it is really great news for Joe Biden. The fact is, Iowa is not a swing state. New Hampshire is a swing state. And I look at those Haley voters and see a lot of potential support for Joe Biden. I mean, the fact is, we talked to a whole lot of independent voters in New Hampshire who said they're going to vote for Nikki Haley because they wanted to stop Donald Trump. But they fully acknowledge they plan to vote for Joe Biden in the fall.

I think that what we see in those Haley voters in the exit polling is a real fear of another Trump term. And that fear is going to show up in a movement toward Joe Biden. That being said, we don't know what all these Haley voters are going to do in November. Some of them might fall in line with Donald Trump, just the way so many other people do. Some might just not go out and vote at all in November because they don't like their choices, and they don't have to make one of the choices.

Right, and to that point, on this night where we feel like we can say that this Republican nomination contest is basically over and that the general election has commenced, the reality is that polling right now, national polling, swing state polling, shows this to be an excruciatingly close general election race. Yes, it's 10 months out, but the closeness of it is kind of extraordinary. And those same polls tell us, each and every one, that voters, especially those who may end up being decisive in this election, are just not happy with their choices. Most Americans did not want a rematch between Donald Trump and Joe Biden. And that's leading to this real sense of dread, a fear of what is going to be coming

over the next nine, 10 months. And even a denial, you hear it all the time. Republicans saying, oh, Joe Biden isn't really going to be the nominee. Somehow there's some magical thing that he's going to pull that the Democrats are going to put up someone else. Or you talk to Democrats and they say, oh, there's no way Donald Trump's not really going to be the nominee. Somehow maybe he'll be put in prison. It could happen. Maybe he'll be knocked off the ballot by a constitutional intervention. But the fact is, underneath it all, everybody is really afraid about what is brewing for this coming election.

Right. What you're really saying is that there's some wishful thinking happening right now on the part of both parties, happening right now on the part of both parties, and it's born out of this sense of denial that you are diagnosing in the electorate. I mean, people are so determined to avoid this in their heads and in their worlds that they're basically engaging in fantastical thinking. We don't know what's going to be actually going on in this country by the time we actually vote for the next president. But right now, nobody wants this contest. And how both of these candidates navigate that dread, and perhaps propagate that dread, could determine who is victorious

on November 2nd. Well, Jonathan, it is now Wednesday morning. Get some sleep. Thank you very much. We appreciate it. Thank you for having me, Michael. We'll be right back. Here's what else you need to know today. We found some loose bolts on many of our MAX 9s. Many?

Yeah. So those are things that are going to be rectified through the inspection process. In an interview on Tuesday with NBC News, the CEO of Alaska Airlines disclosed that the company has found loose bolts on the doors of multiple Boeing MAX 9 jets in its fleet. It was a startling revelation from an airline that experienced a blown-out door on a Boeing MAX 9 mid-flight earlier this month. In the interview, Alaska's CEO, Ben Minicucci, publicly rebuked Boeing for the problem. It makes me angry. Boeing is better than this.

And Flight 1282 should never have happened. Should never have happened. And the film Oppenheimer, the subject of yesterday's Daily, won 13 Oscar nominations on Tuesday, the most by far of any film released last year. The movie, which tells the story of the race to build the atomic bomb, won nominations for Best Director, Best Actor, and Best Cinematography, among others, and is now the frontrunner for Best Picture. among others, and is now the frontrunner for Best Picture.

Today's episode was produced by Aastha Chaturvedi, Alex Starr, and Michael Simon-Johnson. It was edited by Rachel Quester and M.J. Davis-Lynn, and was engineered by Alyssa Moxley, and contains original music from Marion Lozano and Dan Powell. Our theme music is by Jim Brunberg and Ben Lansford of Wonderly. That's it for The Daily. I'm Michael Barbaro. See you tomorrow.