Haley Faces Long Odds Against Trump as New Hampshire Voters Finally Get Their Say

New Hampshire voters streamed into polling sites Tuesday as the candidates and their campaigns made last-minute appeals in the first presidential primary of 2024.

Nikki Haley started the morning at a high school in Hampton, New Hampshire, and she was expected to visit several more voting locations. Former President Donald Trump was on the ground in Londonderry, New Hampshire, and his campaign dispatched surrogates, including Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina and Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, across the state.

On the Democratic side, Rep. Dean Phillips of Minnesota was barnstorming polling locations in his long-shot quest against President Joe Biden, who has a large lead in polls despite not being on the ballot in New Hampshire. Biden’s supporters were also outside precincts, urging voters to write in his name even though he is formally skipping the primary after New Hampshire leapfrogged the Democratic National Committee’s new schedule of early voting states.

The race for the Republican nomination, once 14 candidates strong, has narrowed to Trump, who faces 91 felony charges and is dominating in national polls, and Haley, the former United Nations ambassador and governor of South Carolina. Though Haley and her campaign manager said she would stay in the race no matter what happened Tuesday, New Hampshire is her best, perhaps last chance to beat Trump — it’s a moderate state that allows its many independent voters to participate in the primary.

Trump supporters suggested that the race should be over if he won New Hampshire. “I hope Trump slaughters her,” Connie Toussaint, 91, said outside her polling place in Lancaster.

Trump, for his part, said in Londonderry that he did not care if Haley stayed in the race because he would eventually win the nomination anyway.

The first ballots were cast in Dixville Notch, where polling opened briefly at midnight for the town’s six registered voters, all of whom went for Haley. Voting locations in most of the rest of the state will be open until 7 p.m. Eastern, with far less forbidding weather than caucusgoers in Iowa endured, and initial results will most likely arrive soon after that.

Here’s what else to know:

— At least anecdotally, it looks like Republicans’ predictions of high turnout Tuesday could be spot on, though official numbers will not be known right away. But our colleagues were seeing long lines at some polling places, and election officials at some other locations said their sites seemed busy. High turnout would be a change from Iowa, where the showing for the Republican caucuses last week was anemic.

— Even a victory for Haley in New Hampshire would be just the first step in an arduous path to the Republican nomination. The most fertile ground for her is likely to be in states, like New Hampshire, that allow independent voters to participate in primaries. But in the next state that fits that bill — Michigan, which votes Feb. 27 — Haley is polling below 20%.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times .