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Nashua, New Hampshire Spirits were high at the Sheraton in Nashua as Donald Trump claimed victory in the New Hampshire Republican primary for the third consecutive time. Local Trump fans and Republicans poured into the hotel ballroom — a number of whom made the very short trip up from Massachusetts. “That’d be huge, if Trump signed my Zyn,” said one young New Englander to another as they headed back into the melée.
Nashua, New Hampshire Former president Donald Trump won the GOP primary contest in New Hampshire on Tuesday night, dulling any perceived momentum behind former UN ambassador and South Carolina governor Nikki Haley. A crowd of supporters at an election night watch party in Nashua cheered as Fox News called the race for Trump shortly after 8 p.m. The Associated Press pulled the trigger a few minutes earlier for the former president. The Beatles’ “Revolution” played on speakers (“You know it’s gonna be alright”) as the group celebrated.
Bedford, New Hampshire The scene at Bedford High School is orderly but very crowded, requiring repeated requests from town moderator Brian Shaughnessy to curve the line of waiting voters round the corners and down hallways, creating a centipede-like chain of puffy coats and Timberlands chattering politely about how they've never seen so many people this time of day. The concerns about apathy after the low turnout in Iowa seems utterly absent here, formerly a Republican stronghold that has trended more Democrat in recent years. The crowd of sign-waving Nikki Haley supporters outside is chanting happily at the handful of Trump supporters, who are quieter and more grim.
In the waning days of 2023, the last weeks of the before-time — the moments before the Republican Party would inevitably crown the once and future king who rules upon high from Mar-a-Lago — the billionaire donor class of the Republican Party decided en masse that it would endorse a candidate in a final desperate attempt to block Donald Trump. They settled on Nikki Haley, the erstwhile South Carolina governor turned United Nations ambassador, whose star had risen oh-so-very slightly in early state polling, if you squinted hard enough. She would be their choice for a last stand against The Donald Redux, whose return they publicly claimed to fear and loathe as a threat to democracy while privately admitting they would unanimously support him. The question is: why?
Although they called a ceasefire on Sunday, Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis are already back in the trenches. Just one day after dropping out of the Republican primary and endorsing Trump, DeSantis announced his intention to block a Florida House bill that would give financial support to the former president’s legal woes. So much for Republican unity... The “Freedom Fighters Fund,” which was introduced by Florida state senator Ileana Garcia on January 5, would have provided up to $5 million for Floridian presidential candidates facing legal actions. The bill didn’t name anyone in particular, but Cockburn can only think of one Sunshine State resident currently running for president and embroiled in a lawsuit — four actually.
Wisconsin was the Democratic establishment’s Waterloo in 2020. Even with the field consolidated behind Joe Biden, liberal operatives couldn’t shake the memory of Senator Bernie Sanders’s trouncing of Hillary Clinton. They needn’t have worried. On April 7, Biden cruised to victory with two-thirds of the vote; Sanders exited the race the next day. But beating back one worst-case scenario revealed a second. Primary turnout plummeted from 1 million in 2016 to a mere 875,000 in 2020 with the steepest drops coming in the voting blocs Democrats would need come November.
In the salad days of early 2023, when Ron DeSantis was the clear insurgent candidate to wrest the GOP nomination from Donald Trump, the Florida governor boasted of his ability to rise above the chaos and office politics that had derailed the populist agenda under Trump’s watch. “In terms of my approach to leadership, I get personnel in the government who have the agenda of the people and share our agenda. You bring your own agenda in, you’re gone,” DeSantis said. “The way we run the government, I think, is no daily drama, focus on the big picture and put points on the board.” He has since dropped that line; it’s been too obviously overtaken by actual events.
There was a time when the relationship between the United States and China had a bright future. While bilateral relations have never been particularly rosy since the two countries formally established diplomatic ties on January 1, 1979, US and Chinese leaders have long worked on the assumption that they had much to gain by deepening their cooperation and, if possible, expanding it to new heights. This was a widespread sentiment in Washington, reflected in speeches given by presidents from both parties. “I know there are those in China and the United States who question whether closer relations between our countries is a good thing,” President Bill Clinton told students at Beijing University in June 1998.
Ron DeSantis didn’t just drop out of the 2024 presidential race this Sunday — he also endorsed former president Donald Trump, the opponent who had bested him in Iowa. That pragmatic act made sense for him in terms of self-preservation, but was sure to frustrate some of his early supporters and “influencers,” who had been engaged in a lengthy online war with Trumpworld for months. Where will they turn now that the GOP primary is a two-horse race? "My view on every election has always been to vote for the best available candidate,” ex-Trump lawyer Jenna Ellis told The Spectator. Now that DeSantis is out, she is not sure if that candidate will be on the Republican ticket. “At this point, I am considering third-party options, including Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
The big question that every New Hampshire personality is ready to answer, expecting it before each conversation with an out-of-state journalist, is some form of “will your state still matter after this?” The absence of a truly competitive primary nags at them, and local officials bristle at the notion that in this new era of celebrity politics, where approaches are measured in virality and meme potential, the old skills of glad-handing at small-town gatherings is declining into a memory. “They’ll be back,” Chris Ager, the New Hampshire Republican Party chairman, tells me. “This is a special place, and it’s not going anywhere.
“Many are called, but few are chosen.” That verse from Matthew (22:14) certainly applies to presidential aspirants. The latest to be called but not chosen is Ron DeSantis, who ended his campaign Sunday. Technically, he “suspended” the campaign, but that was simply to comply with campaign finance laws. In practice, the run is over. The campaign was a brief, unsuccessful effort by a candidate who began with high promise, based on his success as Florida governor. He won that office, just barely, in 2018 after a decisive endorsement from Donald Trump. He was reelected overwhelmingly in 2022 against a well-regarded Democratic opponent.
Manchester, New Hampshire The Republican and Democratic primaries in New Hampshire are two sides of the same coin. New polls released this morning show the 45th and 46th president leading their respective fields comfortably. The latest Boston Globe/Suffolk survey has Donald Trump on 55 percent, with Nikki Haley on 36 percent and Ron DeSantis on 6 percent. The new CNN/UNH poll is a similar story: Trump on 50 percent, Haley on 39 percent, DeSantis on 6 percent.
Vintage news outlets, with lots of time to kill and space to fill, are desperately trying to say the Republican primary contest is still open. It’s not. Ron DeSantis’s campaign is already filled with embalming fluid. True, he finished second in Iowa, but that was his most favorable terrain, and he failed to win outright. DeSantis’s basic strategy was to draw away Trump voters by taking strong, socially conservative positions, such as banning abortions after six weeks in Florida. It didn’t convince primary voters. That spells the end for DeSantis nationally because it failed in a state where he spent a lot of time and money and where Republicans are very conservative. To invert the song, "New York, New York," if he can’t make it there, he can’t make it anywhere.
You’ve probably seen a clip of Cenk Uygur, founder and host of the progressive online news network the Young Turks. Whatever clip you watched, he was probably shouting. Rarely soft-spoken or caging for clarifications, Uygur is a perennially viral figure in the online drama of right versus left; a passionate progressive advocate who GOES OFF on CORRUPT ELITES and so forth, as such videos are titled, or a hyper-emotive epitome of the “triggered-lib,” who MELTS DOWN to the tune of hundreds of thousands of views for the online right. In the clips and tweets, Trump is a fascist, his supporters are racists, Israel is genocidal, “Establishment” Republicans are corrupt and establishment Democrats are no better.
Former president Donald Trump delivered a resounding 30-point victory in the Iowa Caucuses Monday night and, according to polls, seems likely to take New Hampshire as well. This is with the exception of one poll released Tuesday that shows Nikki Haley tied with Trump at 40 percent, but it has a sample size of only 600 voters and shows Haley winning with men and Trump winning with women. Seems unlikely. Provided Haley is unable to ride her establishment donor wave to victory in New Hampshire, then, the race will be all Trump by South Carolina. Florida governor Ron DeSantis’s campaign proved to be a huge disappointment; as strategist Ryan Girdusky helpfully laid out in a recounting of his meetings with Team DeSantis over the past year.
Over the last few weeks, about half a dozen reporters told me they were getting ready to write the obituary on DeSantis’s campaign and wanted to include comments I made in off-the-record meetings. I had no intention of ever sharing these comments with the media, but seeing how they would come out anyway, I felt it necessary to get the story straight from my mouth. For months, I warned Governor DeSantis and his team about their campaign strategy; everything from the super PAC to his message seemed wrong, and I made it known. So here’s what happened. On May 10, I boarded a Delta Airlines flight to Tallahassee to meet the governor, his wife and his campaign team.
The podcast that was the Vivek Ramaswamy campaign breathed its last late Monday evening in Iowa. It had aired in one uninterrupted stream for a little over eleven months. Ramaswamy came fourth in Iowa, securing 7.7 percent of the vote and three delegates, or just over 8,400 people at latest count. He suspended his campaign as the margin of his defeat became apparent: this was more than an edging-out. The biotech millionaire and author of Woke Inc. was always a long shot in the 2024 Republican primaries — Heavens, any candidate not named Donald Trump is a long shot. He announced his campaign on Tucker Carlson’s Fox News show in February 2023, back when Tucker Carlson had a Fox News show, and did media appearances more or less continuously from then on.
The back-to-back nature of the Iowa and New Hampshire contests has in the past fulfilled an important function for Republicans as they choose their presidential nominee: they've made clear who the top-tier candidates are for the job, and in several key points, dramatically changed the race. This time around, Iowa failed to do so — and New Hampshire may follow suit. For Donald Trump, the caucus win went as expected, with a slim majority of the overall vote, in what looks to be the lowest turnout competitive Iowa caucus in a quarter century.
Numbers are mysterious things. According to orthodox Roman Catholicism, there are instances in which 3 = 1. You might get by with that formula in your theology seminar. Don’t try it in your arithmetic class. Unraveling the reason why both might be right would take me far afield. But since numbers are in the air tonight — the night of the Big Deal Iowa Caucus Race — I thought I would remind you that numbers, and the reality behind them, can be mysterious. In the run up to the Caucus, lots of pundits put on their best owlish eyeglasses and explained that even though Iowa had only forty delegates to send to the Republican National Convention, it was nevertheless important because it was the first contest in the primary season.
It was former New Jersey governor Chris Christie who ended up getting smoked. His share of the Republican primary vote had dwindled to the single digits. His fusillades at Donald Trump proved as ineffective as the Ukrainian counteroffensive against Russia. He could only skedaddle... but not before delivering a lengthy departing address bewailing the manifold sins of Donald Trump, expressing his regret at conniving to advance Trump’s political fortunes and pledging, “I will make sure that in no way do I enable Donald Trump to ever be president of the United States again.” Christie was an enabler in 2016, when, to the surprise of the Republican establishment, he broke ranks to endorse Trump, hoping to secure the vice presidential nod, or at least a cabinet position.
