New Hampshire primary 2024: Trump projected to win, Haley vows to fight on

Primaries are a race for delegates, but the early primary states don’t actually have many delegates up for grabs. Their real value is in their potential to give favorable media coverage, and thus a polling boost, to candidates ahead of delegate-rich Super Tuesday. That’s why you hear so much about the importance of “beating expectations” in states like New Hampshire. But where should those expectations be set for each candidate? It’s subjective, but I’ll try to give you a data-driven idea.

For Trump, finishing first today would obviously be a win after the media hyped up New Hampshire as a competitive contest between him and Haley. Even a respectable second-place finish would be good news for Trump. According to our modeling, Trump needs to win only eight out of 22 delegates — about one-third of the vote — in New Hampshire to be on pace to win the nomination nationwide. (This is because New Hampshire is one of his worst states demographically.) That said, if Trump gets only 33 percent of the vote, he would probably get a bunch of bad headlines for underperforming his polls so badly. So let’s split the difference and say that Trump needs to win at least 40 percent of the vote — regardless of whether he finishes first or second — to be satisfied with the result in New Hampshire.

Meanwhile, if Haley wins New Hampshire, her team will try to chalk it up as a huge win. And in many ways, it would be: Apart from, you know, literally being a win, it would represent a significant overperformance of her polls (she currently trails Trump by 18 percentage points) and would surely give her a bunch of free media attention that could translate into votes in later states. That said, our modeling says that Haley needs to win all 22 of New Hampshire’s delegates in order to be on pace for the nomination nationwide, so even a regular-sized win in New Hampshire would be insufficient for her. And a second-place finish would be unambiguously bad news for her viability in the race, no matter how much her team tries to spin it.

—Nathaniel Rakich, 538

Last week in Iowa, Haley made history as the first Republican woman to win more than one delegate in the Iowa caucuses — she finished with eight. Haley is just the fourth Republican woman to win any primary delegates at all (the others are Carly Fiorina in 2016, Michele Bachmann in 2012, and Margaret Chase Smith in 1964). To put that into perspective, three Republican men won delegates in Iowa last week.

Today in New Hampshire, Haley will likely make more history by adding to her delegate count (though she’s still most likely to come in second to Trump in the state). But running for the presidency as a woman presents unique challenges, and running for the Republican nomination is arguably even more complicated. For one, the GOP is less outwardly committed to electing women. According to a 2023 Pew survey, 75 percent of Democrats, but only 29 percent of Republicans, say there are too few women in politics. In that same survey, only 14 percent of Republicans (versus 57 percent of Democrats) said it was somewhat extremely important to them that the U.S. elect a female president in their lifetime. If Haley continues to present a challenge to Trump, his campaign might start exploiting his gender advantage.

Republican women may also face higher hurdles and harsher scrutiny from those within their own party: According to a 2022 poll from PerryUndem, 28 percent of Republican men and 20 percent of Republican women (compared to 10 percent of Democratic men and 1 percent of Democratic women) said that men generally make better political leaders than women. In a Republican electoral context, a candidate discussing how her experience as a woman enhances her leadership abilities risks putting off voters who prefer stereotypically male leadership traits or who shy away from “identity politics.” But ignoring those experiences can hurt their chances too, because Republicans have more traditional beliefs about women’s roles. It’s been a tough needle for Haley to thread.

Another hurdle that women running for the presidency face, regardless of their party, is questions about their “electability,” whatever that means. In the 2020 Democratic primary there was no shortage of think pieces and polls about Elizabeth Warren’s and Kamala Harris’s electability, particularly after Clinton’s loss to Trump in 2016 (e.g., “Warren battles the ghosts of Hillary”), when sexism undoubtedly played a role. When Haley announced she was running, Trump made a swipe that she is “overly ambitious,” a trope often weaponized against women who seek all kinds of power and authority, and she has faced other subtle attacks that invoke her gender.

Overall, the electability discussion seems to be plaguing Haley less than it did the women in the 2020 Democratic primary. But she’s still guarding against it. That’s why Haley, in her closing Iowa speech, claimed she would beat Biden by 17 points in the general election (a number she advertises often, including in her latest ad, “Haley wins, Trump loses”). That number comes from a Wall Street Journal poll from last year. But as Elliott mentioned during the Iowa the live blog last week, a 538 preliminary general-election polling average as of that night found Haley up by only 2.7 points versus Biden, and Trump ahead of Biden by 1.8 points). So, her electability argument is slimmer, but still standing. She just has to get by Trump to test it out.

—Meredith Conroy, 538 contributor

Since the beginning of 2023, Republicans have spent nearly $78 million on advertising in New Hampshire, a sum that includes significant expenditures from candidates no longer in the race, such as Chris Christie and Tim Scott. As in Iowa, the top spender on TV in New Hampshire has been Stand for America, the Super PAC supporting Haley, which has run $23.5 million in advertising in the Granite State, according to AdImpact. No other candidate or group comes close to matching that number — the next-closest is Trump-supporting MAGA Inc., at $8.4 million. Haley herself has spent $5 million, while Trump has spent $7.4 million (candidates can buy ads on TV at a more favorable rate than outside groups).

You can see how big a priority New Hampshire has been for Haley and her allies, who began advertising in New Hampshire back in August. Just half of the pro-Haley spending in the state — $15.8 million of $31 million total between her campaign and supportive super PACs — has come within the last month of the race. Trump, meanwhile, is a relative newcomer to the airwaves. Of the $15.7 million in pro-Trump spending all cycle, almost all of it, $13.6 million, has come since Dec. 19, coinciding with Haley’s surge in the state’s polls.

A glance at TV spending also helps explain why DeSantis’s campaign floundered in New Hampshire, where the governor once polled as high as 25 percent but has fallen to less than 6 percent in the final 538 average before his exit from the race on Sunday. From an advertising perspective, DeSantis had effectively given up on the state in recent months. His Super PAC, the aptly named “Never Back Down,” spent $8 million in New Hampshire from April to November 2023, but hadn’t spent anything since.

—Jacob Rubashkin, Inside Elections

DeSantis was polling at only about 6 percent in New Hampshire when he dropped out of the race on Sunday, but 6 percent isn't nothing, and DeSantis's departure could help Trump on the margins tonight. According to an average of crosstabs from national primary polls, 48 percent of DeSantis supporters nationwide said that Trump was their second choice, while only 28 percent said Haley was. In New Hampshire, though, it was a little closer: 48 percent of DeSantis supporters there said Trump was their second choice, while 34 percent said Haley was.

If you take those numbers literally, we'd expect Trump to gain 3 points (48 percent of 6 percent) in New Hampshire from DeSantis's withdrawal, and Haley to gain 2 points (34 percent of 6 percent). However, DeSantis's endorsement of Trump on his way out of the race could mean Trump will gain even more ground. Overall, DeSantis's withdrawal is probably not good for Haley — although one New Hampshire poll, from Emerson College/WHDH-TV, did go against the grain and say that most DeSantis supporters would turn to Haley. These crosstabs all have very small sample sizes, and thus come with larger-than-usual margins of error, so we'll just have to see which of them is closest to the mark!

—Nathaniel Rakich, 538