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Republican presidential candidate former UN Ambassador Nikki Haley, seen through a storefront window, shakes hands with guests while visiting Kay's Bakery and Cafe, during a campaign stop on Friday in Hampton, N.H. Charles Krupa/AP hide caption

Republican presidential candidate former UN Ambassador Nikki Haley, seen through a storefront window, shakes hands with guests while visiting Kay's Bakery and Cafe, during a campaign stop on Friday in Hampton, N.H.

When former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie dropped out of the race for the Republican nomination last week at a town hall event in Windham, N.H., Norm Olsen was there. And Olsen knew immediately who would get his vote.

"It was very clear: If it wasn't him, it was going to be Nikki," he said. "So I didn't get to ponder it very long."

That's exactly what former South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley is hoping for. She's counting on a big day in next week's New Hampshire primary. But if she's going to catch up to former President Donald Trump, she'll need the support of voters who previously backed Chris Christie.

Voters like Olsen, who hosted a meet-and-greet with about 30 people for Christie at his home in Portsmouth shortly before Christmas. The Republican appreciated that Christie was the only candidate in the GOP primary race willing to say what he felt needed to be said about Trump.

Christie leaving the race is widely seen as a boon for Haley, who benefits from New Hampshire allowing undeclared voters to vote in the Republican primary. Olsen says his Christie-backing friends have largely shifted to Haley.

"Well, out of ten people that I know, eight of them were about as quick as I was to go to Nikki," he said. "And two of them haven't made up their mind yet. That's just the folks I know."

Olsen quipped that he knows his isn't a scientific study, but a more scientific University of New Hampshire poll, taken before Christie dropped out, found that 65% of Christie voters had Haley as their second choice.

Christie pointedly didn't endorse anyone when he left the race. In fact, he was critical of Haley for saying that if Trump is the nominee she would support him, even if convicted of a crime. Rather than openly court Christie voters, on the campaign trail Haley refers to the New Hampshire primary as a "two-person race" with Trump.

Catherine Johnson calls herself a super volunteer for Chris Christie. The registered Democrat is now attending events for Nikki Haley since Christie dropped out. Tamara Keith/NPR hide caption

Catherine Johnson calls herself a super volunteer for Chris Christie. The registered Democrat is now attending events for Nikki Haley since Christie dropped out.

Hanover resident Catherine Johnson fashioned a role for herself on the Chris Christie presidential campaign that was essentially a Walmart greeter but for town halls and candidate meet and greets. She was a super volunteer for the former New Jersey governor. As he crisscrossed the state, she was there with a friendly welcome, and she has the mileage on her car to show for it.

"I'm thinking about 5000 since October," Johnson estimated.

On the day Christie announced his campaign was over, she had already driven about two and a half hours. She was supposed to be manning the mic for the question and answer portion of the event.

"And at the very last second, they had me sit down," she recalled.

There would be no more of Christie's trademark Q and A, and no more of Christie on the campaign trail standing up to Trump things that Christie did which made Johnson really believe in him. She is a registered Democrat and admits it's kind of weird to be so dedicated to a Republican candidate. But she cried right there at the town hall.

"I knew the campaign was going to come to an end on Jan. 23rd, but I still thought I had two weeks," she said.

Like Johnson, most of the supporters NPR talked to thought Christie would drop out after the New Hampshire primary.

Dawn Hartnett, an IT project manager from Hookset, is an independent who has never voted for a Republican at the national level, but that's about to change. She says she can't stand the chaos of Trump and after Christie dropped out, she attended a Haley event at a small store near her home.

"We really need to get Trump off the ballot," said Hartnett. "She is our last, best chance, but a very good person to vote for. I think she'd do a great job."

Harnett praised Haley's emphasis on term limits and shares her concerns about two elderly men facing off in November.

Corinne Pryor, with her husband, Jeff Pryor at Robie's Country Store in Hooksett, NH. They were there to see Nikki Haley speak alongside N.H. Gov. Chris Sununu who has endorsed Haley. Jeongyoon Han/NPR hide caption

Corinne Pryor, with her husband, Jeff Pryor at Robie's Country Store in Hooksett, NH. They were there to see Nikki Haley speak alongside N.H. Gov. Chris Sununu who has endorsed Haley.

But not everyone is ready to commit to Haley. Former Christie-backer Corinne Pryor has some doubts. Pryor is an undeclared voter and wants to see if Haley can stand up to Trump's Republican party like Christie did.

"Nikki Haley sometimes said it, but not in so many words," she said. "It did feel like it was a little softer landing. He was Chris Christie was much more verbal and forthright."

But what she really craves above Christie's no-nonsense sensibilities is someone who is a true moderate, and someone who brings the country together. She's wondering if Haley can provide that for her.

"Well, she's... she's more in the middle than Trump is," Pryor said. "If I have to compare, it depends who I'm comparing her to, I guess."

As for Christie super volunteer, Catherine Johnson, she's swapping out the Christie events that she made sure to never miss, for Haley events. But, at the end of the day, she won't budge on her vote.

"I'm going to vote for Governor Christie on a write-in ticket for the Democratic New Hampshire primary," she said. "And then I'm going to spend the rest of the day driving anybody who needs a ride to the poll."

The first person she'll drop off: her 91-year-old mother.

Original post:
Christie is out. His voters aren't. Now they need a new candidate in N.H. - NPR

Former President Donald Trump speaks at his caucus night event Monday in Des Moines. Trump handily won the caucuses. The next contest of the primary season is in New Hampshire on Jan. 23. Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images hide caption

Former President Donald Trump speaks at his caucus night event Monday in Des Moines. Trump handily won the caucuses. The next contest of the primary season is in New Hampshire on Jan. 23.

For more than a year, former President Donald Trump has been seen as the overwhelming front-runner for the Republican nomination.

It's not just because of polls. The party apparatus still seemed to be deferential to Trump. He has the most endorsements by far. And few Republicans are willing to criticize his conduct.

Trump's decisive win in Iowa on Monday further cemented his standing in the party.

There are many more ballots to be counted before a Republican presidential nominee is declared, but a week away from the nation's first primary in New Hampshire, Trump's rivals are facing uniquely long odds.

The candidates who were most critical of Trump former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie and Asa Hutchinson, the former Arkansas governor have dropped out. Both directly took on Trump for his conduct, and both never really stood a chance at the nomination.

"I would rather lose by telling the truth than lie in order to win," Christie said when he bowed out of the race a week ago. "And I feel no differently today because this is a fight for the soul of our party and the soul of our country."

After getting just 0.2% of the vote in Iowa Monday, Hutchinson also announced in a statement that he, too, was waving the white flag.

"My message of being a principled Republican with experience and telling the truth about the current front-runner did not sell in Iowa," Hutchinson said. "I stand by the campaign I ran."

There are some who believed in those principles in Iowa. In addition to the 191 people who voted for Hutchinson, 29 others braved sub-zero temperatures in Iowa to caucus for Christie, even after he'd dropped out.

In fairness, Iowa was never really a focus of Christie's, but the lack of support for the two most vocally anti-Trump candidates underscores a familiar story that we've known to be true for years.

Republicans largely haven't spoken out against Trump, and the ones who have are often punished.

For example, of the 10 Republicans in the House who voted for Trump's impeachment after the Jan. 6 insurrection, only two remain in Congress. The others were either ousted in GOP primaries or retired rather than face a challenge.

Indictments, 91 felony counts of federal and state charges, continuing to say increasingly anti-democratic things on the campaign trail none of it has mattered with Republican voters.

Actually, those things have all helped Trump with Republican voters.

His lead has only expanded with primary voters through this campaign. Back in May, 45% of Republicans said they preferred Trump over any other candidate, according to an average of the polls.

Now, that's up to 63%.

The Iowa entrance polls made clear that Republicans have latched on to Trump's lies about the election and his victimhood claims about the charges against him.

Just 3 in 10 said Biden was legitimately elected, and two-thirds said they think Trump would be fit to be president even if he's convicted of a crime.

Sure, national polls don't reflect what's happening in state races, but even in those early states with hundreds of millions of dollars spent and miles of retail campaigning Trump leads by a lot.

These primaries are not a national campaign yet. But they soon will be.

Super Tuesday is March 5, less than seven weeks from now. Sixteen contests take place that day in states and territories that give out 874 delegates in a single day.

To get the Republican nomination, a candidate needs a majority of delegates to the national convention. This year, that magic number is 1,215.

And unless something extraordinary happens, this all could be over a lot sooner than people probably think.

Trump and his team have stacked the state parties with loyalists, and over the last year, leveraged them to change the rules in their states to favor Trump.

Take a state like California, for example. It's a huge state with the most delegates in any single state. Trump's team successfully lobbied the state party to change their rules to give out all their delegates to whomever clears 50%.

In a one-on-one race, that's whoever wins. And there are about a dozen states until the middle of March that will allocate their delegates that way now.

After Super Tuesday, the next big day is March 19. Let's call it Winner-Take-All Tuesday. That's because five of the six states that vote that day give out all their delegates to whoever wins, no matter the total.

All of it is designed to get the primary process over with as quickly as possible. Seventy percent of the delegates will be allocated by the end of March, and if Trump wins at the clip he won by in Iowa, this could all be a wrap by then.

That's why New Hampshire is now so important in this race. It's likely the last real chance for former Trump U.N. ambassador Nikki Haley to show she has a path to the nomination.

She has gained ground on Trump in recent weeks there, and New Hampshire has the kind of profile that's tailor-made for a candidate like Haley.

She appeals to moderates, for example, which she won in Iowa. And there are historically more self-described moderates in New Hampshire, because independents are allowed to vote in the Republican primary unlike in Iowa, which only allows registered Republicans to cast a ballot.

Despite Haley's climb, Trump is still ahead in the polls by an average of double digits.

That, of course, can change. Half of New Hampshire voters said in 2016 that they made their decision the week of the primary. (That year, it was in favor of Trump, by the way.)

But if Haley can't win or come reasonably close to Trump in New Hampshire, it's going to be tough to see how her longshot campaign can be viable.

Read more from the original source:
New Hampshire's next: Where the Republican field stands after the Iowa caucuses - NPR

Republican National Committee Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel gives a speech in 2023. The RNC is urging Republican voters to embrace early voting, even as conservative leaders continue to rail against the practice. Jae C. Hong/AP hide caption

Republican National Committee Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel gives a speech in 2023. The RNC is urging Republican voters to embrace early voting, even as conservative leaders continue to rail against the practice.

When Madison Gesiotto Gilbert ran for Congress in Ohio in 2022, it was in a fairly competitive district that Republicans were hoping to flip. Gilbert thought she had good odds of winning that race.

She lost. And she has a theory about what happened.

"We got killed on the early vote," Gilbert said. "And this is something that I think across the country there's been a stigma within the Republican Party about voting early."

Gilbert, who is now a spokesperson for the Republican National Committee, said too many Republican voters that year waited to vote in person on Election Day. That includes voters who live in states with weeks of in-person early voting and no-excuse absentee/mail voting.

"I personally am not the biggest fan of early voting, of election season, as we call it now," she told NPR. "But the reality is, it's here and in a lot of places it may be here to stay. So until things change in the states prospectively, we have to be playing the same game that the Democrats are playing in order to win."

Ahead of this year's elections, Gilbert and the rest of the RNC are trying to get GOP voters comfortable with early and mail voting. But to do that, they have to counter a stigma, particularly against mail voting, that was created by Republicans themselves, including most notably former President Donald Trump.

To get Republicans comfortable with those voting methods, the RNC has launched a "Bank Your Vote" campaign. As part of the initiative, the RNC launched websites for all 50 states, as well as websites in different languages aimed at various minority communities. And GOP candidates are being asked to direct their voters to the websites.

This past summer, Trump recorded an ad for the campaign.

But despite endorsing Bank Your Vote, Trump has continued to cast doubt on the legitimacy and security of mail voting in particular.

Just on Monday, in a speech after winning the Iowa caucuses, Trump criticized both mail and early voting.

"You know, we have these elections that last for 62 days," he said. "And if you need some more time, take as much time as you want. And so many bad things happen. We have to get rid of mail-in ballots because once you have mail-in ballots, you have crooked elections."

This is baseless. There's no evidence that mail voting leads to widespread election fraud.

GOP state lawmakers across the U.S. have also continued to propose and pass legislation aimed at restricting access to early and mail voting. That includes states like Texas, which passed new ID laws for mail ballots. Florida and Georgia are among the other states to pass new restrictions on mail voting.

Aaron Scherb, senior director of legislative affairs for government accountability group Common Cause, said members of the GOP mostly have themselves to blame for the growing stigma around early in-person and absentee voting.

"Getting voters to unlearn or unhear those messages is, you know, it's tough to undo that damage," Scherb said. "And so I think that's what this Bank the Vote program is trying to essentially do. It's somewhat analogous to getting a jury to unhear extremely damaging information that's presented against the defendant."

Charles Stewart, a political science professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who studies how Americans vote, said there are a slew of reasons why the RNC's campaign might not render the results Republican officials are hoping for. He said skepticism about mail voting in particular is fairly deep-seated among some voters.

"Republicans have always been much more likely to believe that fraud was a problem, that it occurred and much more likely to believe it's more important to secure the election than it is to pass laws to expand participation," he said. "So, I mean, in some ways it's kind of surprising it took Republicans so long to develop a skepticism about voting by mail."

Stewart said he also isn't sure the RNC is the right messenger for this campaign.

That's because messages about voter fraud and mail voting aren't just coming from political campaigns. He pointed to grassroots organizations across the U.S. warning voters that ballot "harvesting" and mail voting are fraudulent.

"And they're going into mostly rural counties, Republican strongholds, and giving this message," Stewart said. "And so the other set of people that [the RNC] needs to corral are the grassroots activists who are making millions of dollars selling the message of voter fraud. And the problem in reining them in is that they are almost as skeptical of the RNC as they are of the Democratic Party."

But Gilbert said it's essential for the RNC to figure out ways to tackle this problem ahead of this year's elections.

For one, she points out the GOP spends a lot more money on voters who wait until the last day Election Day to cast a ballot.

"If they get out early, we're not going to spend as much money on them," she said. "So it may be around $5 that we spend on that voter. If they don't get out early, however, if we keep having to chase them, we keep having to phone them to nail down, to reach them, to try to get them out to vote, we're continuing to spend money over and over and over on the same voter."

Gilbert says if more core Republican voters cast their votes early, the party could use its resources on voters who might need more persuading.

"It's all about conserving resources that we can then use to transfer to a different chase," she said. "Yes, we want you to vote early, but why? Because we're able to target others as a result. And that's how we can change election results."

And, Gilbert said, it's very risky for the party to have so many voters planning to vote on one day. "Sometimes things do happen on Election Day and you can't vote," she said.

Just look at Monday's Republican presidential caucuses in Iowa, where there were subzero temperatures throughout the state. This year, roughly 110,000 people showed up to vote at the in-person events. That's compared with the caucuses in 2016, when a record 186,743 Republicans voted.

And in battleground states, just a few votes could make all the difference.

Jay Heck, the executive director of Common Cause Wisconsin, said he thinks that Republicans lost recent state Supreme Court elections and a recent gubernatorial election partly because of their voters' aversion to early voting.

"There is, I think, a realization on the part of some of them that they had better begin to do the things that progressives and Democrats are doing to turn out the vote if they want to carry the state for Trump or if they want to win a gubernatorial election in the near future," he said.

Heck also predicts there will be a lot of "tension" within the party over early and mail voting as November gets closer.

"I think there's going to be, if not an outright rupture, at least some pretty serious words back and forth between Republicans who are trying to encourage early voting and then those who just claim that early votes and absentee votes are all fraudulent," he said. "So it'll be interesting to see how that plays out."

See original here:
Republicans' 'Bank Your Vote' campaign is complicated by Trump - NPR

LIKLIHOOD THAT STEFANIK WILL MAKE IT ONTO THE 20-24 PRESIDENTIAL BALLOT MEANTIME IN THE GREEN MOUNTAIN STATE. GOVERNOR PHIL SCOTT ENDORSING NIKKI HALEY FOR PRESIDENT TODAY. SCOTT BELIEVES AMERICA DOES NOT NEED FOUR MORE YEARS OF FORMER PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP. ADDING-- ITS NOW A TWO HORSE RACE... AND ITS TIME FOR AMERICA TO MOVE FORWARD

Vermont Gov. Phil Scott endorses Nikki Haley in the Republican primary

This comes as the campaign trail has brought Republicans to New Hampshire which will take place on Tuesday.

Updated: 4:42 PM EST Jan 19, 2024

Vermont Gov. Phil Scott has officially endorsed Republican Nikki Haley in the Republican primary. This comes as the campaign trail has brought Republicans to New Hampshire, which will take place on Tuesday. In a statement on Friday, Scott said, "America has a decision to make, and our friends and neighbors in New Hampshire have an opportunity to showcase their deep-rooted independent streak. After years of controversy, violent rhetoric and growing polarization, the very last thing we need is four more years of Donald Trump."Scott also feels it's now a two-horse race between the former president and the former South Carolina governor and ambassador saying, "In my view, the Republican Primary is now a two-person race. Governor Haley is our only chance to ensure America has the choice it deserves in November. Whether you're a Republican or independent, I encourage you to vote for Governor Haley in the Republican Primary. It is my sincere hope that the good people of New Hampshire will send a clear message."

Vermont Gov. Phil Scott has officially endorsed Republican Nikki Haley in the Republican primary. This comes as the campaign trail has brought Republicans to New Hampshire, which will take place on Tuesday.

In a statement on Friday, Scott said, "America has a decision to make, and our friends and neighbors in New Hampshire have an opportunity to showcase their deep-rooted independent streak. After years of controversy, violent rhetoric and growing polarization, the very last thing we need is four more years of Donald Trump."

Scott also feels it's now a two-horse race between the former president and the former South Carolina governor and ambassador saying, "In my view, the Republican Primary is now a two-person race. Governor Haley is our only chance to ensure America has the choice it deserves in November. Whether you're a Republican or independent, I encourage you to vote for Governor Haley in the Republican Primary. It is my sincere hope that the good people of New Hampshire will send a clear message."

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Vermont Gov. Phil Scott endorses Nikki Haley in the Republican primary - WPTZ

Neither of the two Republican debates planned for the days before the New Hampshire primary will be happening.

CNN canceled the debate it was set to host because only one candidate agreed to participate, the network said on Wednesday, a day after ABC News did the same.

The CNN debate had been scheduled for Sunday, and the ABC News/WMUR debate for Thursday. CNN said it would host a town-hall event with Ms. Haley on Thursday instead, after hosting one with Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida on Tuesday.

Only Mr. DeSantis, who finished second in the Iowa caucuses, had said he would debate. Former President Donald J. Trump, who won Iowa overwhelmingly, has skipped every debate throughout the campaign. And Nikki Haley, the third-place finisher in Iowa, said on Tuesday that she would not do any more unless Mr. Trump participated.

Weve had five great debates in this campaign. Unfortunately, Donald Trump has ducked all of them, Ms. Haley said on X. He has nowhere left to hide. The next debate I do will either be with Donald Trump or with Joe Biden. I look forward to it.

Ms. Haley is trying to present the race as a two-person contest between her and Mr. Trump despite her third-place showing in Iowa. Her campaign has noted that Mr. DeSantis focused on Iowa largely to the exclusion of other states. He is polling far behind Ms. Haley in New Hampshire, which holds its primary on Jan. 23, and in South Carolina, where Republicans vote on Feb. 24.

Mr. Trump, who is far ahead in polls of both states, has been uninterested in debating either of them. He has cast the race as over and himself as the inevitable nominee.

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CNN and ABC Cancel Republican Debates Ahead of New Hampshire Primary - The New York Times