Donald Trump has been projected to have secured a decisive victory in the New Hampshire Republican presidential primary.
“Minutes after polling closed, The New York Times and Washington Post both projected that Trump will win Tuesday's primary over former Ambassador Nikki Haley. But Haley proclaimed it a ‘great night’ while congratulating Trump on his win.
‘New Hampshire is first in the nation, it is not the last in the nation’, Haley said at an election night rally in Concord, New Hampshire. ‘This race is far from over. There are dozens of states left to go’.
Perhaps as a result of Haley's finish, Trump spent the early night railing over the fact that independent voters could cast a ballot in the race.
Haley's campaign made clear long before the results were released that she's not going anywhere. But New Hampshire offered her favorable ground that will be difficult to come by in the weeks ahead. The pair won't formally face off again until South Carolina's February 24th primary. It's Haley's home turf, but polls show Trump is favored to beat the former governor in what would be an embarrassing result.
Her best hope is to stay afloat until Super Tuesday when the delegate race will begin in earnest. She is also openly using Trump's 2016-era playbook of trying to get independent voters into the GOP primary process.
Top Republicans are already calling for the primary to effectively end. Just before New Hampshire, Trump trotted out a series of South Carolina-related endorsements to further illustrate that he will take it to Haley.
Trump is nowhere near the number of delegates needed to actually be his party's ‘presumptive’ nominee. By design, none of the early states offer incredibly large delegate hauls in straight up a winner-take-all contest. But Trump and his allies are using the early victories to further the narrative that trying to stop him is futile”. -Brent D. Griffiths, Business Insider
It seems Trump’s victory has dealt a critical blow to Nikki Haley’s campaign ambitions when one takes into consideration the likelihood that most of the upcoming primaries will have less favorable demographics for her than the Granite State, where a majority of voters in the New Hampshire Republican primary identified as either Independent or Democrat in exit polls.