Donald Trump is as immovable at the top of the Republican Party as a block of New Hampshire granite.
The ex-president on Tuesday became the first non-incumbent Republican in the modern era to win the first two presidential nominating contests, adding the New Hampshire primary to his Iowa caucuses landslide from last week.
His general election rematch with President Joe Biden – which few Americans want – seems inevitable.
Trump has all but cleared the GOP field at an astonishing clip. Despite a crush of criminal liability and the memory of his assault on democracy on January 6, 2021, he is consolidating his party around him at a rate unprecedented in modern primary elections.
"We had one hell of a night tonight," Trump said in his victory speech in Nashua.
At her own election night event, his last standing opponent, former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, congratulated Trump on his win. But after coming last in a two-horse race, 11 points behind the ex-president, she insisted the race was far from over – even though it's hard to pick a state where she might triumph if she didn't win New Hampshire, where the electorate was more favorable to her.
"In the next two months, millions of voters in over 20 states will have their say. We should honor them and allow them to vote," Haley told her crowd at her election watch party, as several supporters chanted, "Trump is a loser." The former US ambassador to the United Nations advised her old boss to take a mental competency test and suggested he was afraid to climb on a debate stage alongside her.
Unfortunately for Haley, New Hampshire did not — as she told its voters it would — "correct" the result of last week's Iowa caucuses, where she came a distant third to Trump. Whether she got "smoked" in the Granite State — as her former opponent Chris Christie predicted she would on a hot mic — depends on whose spin you accept.
The problem for Haley is that as the race turns toward her home state, and big southern state primaries on Super Tuesday in March, she's tackling Trump in his strongholds and her chances to pick off wins and convention delegates seem slim.
"The more she runs, the more support she's getting," said Lisa Kent, a Haley supporter from Connecticut at the election night party in Concord, where Haley's crowd chanted, "Trump is a loser."
But unless the former South Carolina governor can pull off a miracle next month in a state where she was elected governor twice – but that is now a Trump bastion – her shaky rationale for continuing her campaign will face a terminal reality.
