New Hampshire takeaways: Trump and Biden win, Haley to stay in race

Tonight the general election effectively kicked off. The two candidates seem like they will be the same ones as in our last presidential election. But it would be a mistake to assume that this election will play out the same way the previous one did — including a Biden victory.

Biden’s popularity has declined since 2020. This time around, he has a serious presidential policy record to run on, which makes him more trustworthy to certain segments of the electorate while, in the eyes of others, serving as the prime case against him. Within the Democratic Party, voters are split on whether Biden did enough to tackle the social issues he set out to solve, and over the U.S. support of Israel as it dominates Gaza. Among independents, some voters probably have mixed or unclear feelings about Biden’s stewardship of the economy compared with Trump’s.

As far as Trump’s threat to democracy, it’s possible that it has grown more abstract in the eyes of many — most voters are not political junkies, and many may not reflect often on what happened on Jan. 6, 2021. The only thing clear right now is that taking a Biden win for granted is the surest bet the Democrats will lose.

Steve Kornacki speaking on MSNBC moments ago:

In modern history, how many former presidents have turned around four years after losing the office, and tried to reclaim it? In modern history, the answer is zero. 

The closest parallel we have is Gerald Ford explored running for president in 1979 after losing in 1976. He was an unelected president. He was polling second place in the fall of 1979 to Ronald Reagan. Ford saw the polls and didn’t run. That’s your closest parallel.

We’re in a very different place. I think one of the things we’ve seen pretty consistently here is I think a lot of people have already been looking at this as an inevitable Trump vs. Biden race. That is why opinion on both of them is so strong and, in my view, is so set in place.

There are up-for-grab voters, there are swing voters, there are potential voters — are they actually going to be motivated to turn out? I think that’s going to be one of the biggest questions as we head into the fall.

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As Chris Hayes wrote tonight for MSNBC:

“Trump has looked like the de facto nominee for so long that political junkies and neophytes alike might be forgiven for viewing the aspirations of replacing him as the leader of the Republican Party as delusional.

But I’m not quite so sure. We know Trump was politically weakened by the disastrous performance of his handpicked candidates in the 2022 midterms. He was even losing in some head-to-head polling with Ron DeSantis at one point.

In the end, there are lots of reasons why we’ve ended up with Trump back in a position of party dominance. The indictments that perversely enabled a kind of martyrdom irresistible to the GOP base and DeSantis’ utter lack of charisma and cringey, ham-fisted campaign both had a lot to do with it. But fundamentally, the reason Trump won is that you can’t beat something with nothing, and the non-Trump wing of the Republican Party still hasn’t come up with something to offer.”

Read more below.

The president just provided MSNBC with an exclusive statement:

“It is now clear that Donald Trump will be the Republican nominee. And my message to the country is the stakes could not be higher. Our Democracy. Our personal freedoms — from the right to choose to the right to vote. Our economy — which has seen the strongest recovery in the world since COVID. All are at stake.

“I want to thank all those who wrote my name in this evening in New Hampshire. It was a historic demonstration of commitment to our democratic process. And I want to say to all those Independents and Republicans who share our commitment to core values of our nation — our Democracy, our personal freedoms, an economy that gives everyone a fair shot — to join us as Americans.

“Let’s remember. We are the United States of America. And there is nothing — nothing — we can’t do if we do it together.”

Steve Kornacki speaking on MSNBC moments ago:

It’s very plausible that Donald Trump will end up winning the state by double digits. When Nikki Haley took the stage earlier ... we were looking at that exit poll and it looked like this might be a 5-, 6-point race and she’d go and make some noise. If this ends up 10, 11, 12 points for Donald Trump, and he’s winning essentially three-quarters of the Republican vote and she’s only getting 25% of the Republican vote, what is she walking out of this state with tonight to go be competitive in any other state? ... It’s very hard to find other places where she could where she could actually post a win based off this, if it ends up being double digits.

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Jen Psaki speaking on MSNBC moments ago:

There are statements flying out from the Biden team tonight — and none of them have anything to do with the outcome in New Hampshire. I’m sure they’re relieved with what the outcome was on some level, but they’re ready to move forward, basically. ...

Whether Nikki Haley is staying in or not, they are moving on to the race against Donald Trump. And let me read you just two of the key sentences that stuck out to me. The first is: “Tonight’s results all but confirm that Trump has locked up the GOP nomination. And the election-denying, anti-freedom MAGA movement has completed its takeover of the Republican Party.” Lots of messaging in there obviously, but they’re saying “we’re running against him.” The last line of the statement is: “One thing is increasingly clear today, Donald Trump is headed straight into a general election matchup where he’ll face the only person who has ever beaten him at the ballot box: Joe Biden.”

So the race is on for them. They’re moving to the general election, whether Nikki Haley stays in or not.

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Rep. Dean Phillips and his allies spent close to $5 million on his efforts to give Biden a run for his money in New Hampshire. The Minnesota Democrat and his well-heeled supporters hoped that a surprisingly strong performance in the Granite State — which Phillips devoted tremendous attention to in the run-up to the contest — could spark nationwide attention and kick off a competitive Democratic primary.

It was always an extremely far-fetched theory of launching a major challenge against Biden, and it has failed. The president wasn’t even on the ballot, but due to overwhelming write-in ballots he’s not only the projected winner, he’s also currently thrashing the congressman in the vote count. (And Phillips has virtually no nationwide recognition.)

It’s certainly not a bad thing for the president to face primary challenges, but in Phillips’ case, it has never been clear why exactly he was running and how he came to the conclusion that he was the answer to Biden’s supposed “electability” problem. The Democrats — and America — would have benefited from a serious challenge to Biden. This wasn’t it.

House Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi joined MSNBC in the 9 p.m. ET hour to make her case for Biden.

“We have to get out there and get the job done,” she urged, arguing that it was time to focus on the general election and the consequences of Trump’s policies. “Listen when he speaks,” she said. “Make sure you know how you are affected by some of what he says ... whether it’s guns, whether it’s climate, whether it’s a woman’s right to choose, whether it’s health care.”

The next few months will be about Democrats’ “message, mobilization and money,” Pelosi noted, before praising Biden’s policy accomplishments and fundraising abilities.

Rachel Maddow speaking on MSNBC moments ago:

Let’s be really clear about this: Trump saying tonight, after having won the New Hampshire primary (which he’s done twice before), having then gone on to say that’s not enough, you can’t just claim credit, you have to falsify the election results in the two times that you lost the state. It’s a form of reality bullying, and he’s done this around Iowa as well. For example, he doesn’t have bragging rights about winning the Iowa caucuses. He lost the Iowa caucuses in 2016 to Ted Cruz. But after winning the Iowa caucuses this time, he said: “Oh, it’s really great to have won it three times in a row.” And he knows that it’s not true, and he knows that everybody listening to him knows that it isn’t true.

It’s like his insistence on the date of the Spanish flu epidemic, or his insistence on what the hurricane track was going to be that he had to draw it in with the Sharpie. It’s an exercise in bending reality to his will and insisting that others follow. It’s an exercise in making people who love him, denounce reality and endorse his view instead as a form of fealty, as a form of loyalty. And it’s a way of breaking the truth in this country, and showing that his most loyal people will do that in a performative and effacing way.

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Trump isn’t alone on stage tonight. He’s got Tim Scott and Vivek Ramaswamy with him, two of the candidates who ran against him before leaving the GOP primary. The symbolism there is potent: Trump has subjugated his former opponents and made them his vassals. They are there for his supporters to see them giving him their supplication — and he is so unafraid of them that he could have them stand at his back without fear of any (metaphorical) dagger coming down on him.

But it makes sense beyond bolstering Trump’s ego. Scott, as I mentioned earlier, is there to highlight that he is backing the former president over his fellow South Carolinanian ahead of the next election with both Trump and Haley on the ballot. Ramaswamy, to whom Trump turned over the mic during his speech, was the candidate who sparred with Haley the most during the debates. Having them there in New Hampshire was really all about looking ahead to South Carolina.

As my colleague Hayes Brown noted earlier, Biden’s 2020 campaign manager, Jennifer O’Malley Dillon, is joining his 2024 campaign from her current role at the White House (though current campaign manager Julie Chavez Rodriguez will remain in her position). After that news first broke, NBC News also reported that another veteran Biden aide, Mike Donilon, will make the same transition. Donilon was a chief strategist for the 2020 campaign and has advised the president for decades.

“The expected staff moves,” reports NBC News, “will have Donilon playing a central role in the campaign’s messaging and paid media strategy and O’Malley Dillon in the organizing and execution of the campaign’s path to 270 electoral votes.”

Graham and Tim Scott, the junior senator from South Carolina, have both endorsed Trump. Scott’s support is especially sad given that until November he was running alongside Haley to challenge Trump for the nomination. But as Haley said during her speech tonight, she has won before when running statewide in races where the “political establishment” was against her.

Biden wasn’t on the Democratic ballot today due to a disconnect between the Democratic Party’s primary schedule shake-up this year and New Hampshire’s state laws. Yet the president is projected to win the state primary — by a huge margin — because the overwhelming majority of New Hampshire Democrats wrote in his name anyway.

It’s a sign of Biden’s dominance within the party — and the weakness of his challengers. Technically, he did have more than 20 primary challengers in New Hampshire, though almost all of them were completely obscure. The two exceptions were progressive New Age guru Marianne Williamson and billionaire lapdog Rep. Dean Phillips, D-Minn., the latter of whom poured a ton of resources into trying to pull off a surprise win in New Hampshire. That Biden was able to easily outstrip them without even being on the ballot speaks to the broader reality that he faces no serious competition within his party this primary season.

Yes, South Carolina is Haley’s home state. It might seem odd, however, that she didn’t mention Nevada’s primary, which is scheduled more than two weeks before the Palmetto State’s primary. That’s because — and stick with me here — Nevada’s primary isn’t the only GOP contest in the state this year. 

After difficulties surrounding the state’s 2020 Democratic caucus, Nevada’s Democratic-controlled legislature ditched its traditional caucuses for primaries. But even though the bill had bipartisan support, the Nevada Republican Party wanted to keep the caucus format, which would likely favor Trump’s more committed supporters. So on Feb. 6, there will be a Nevada Republican primary, where ballots will include Haley and some other candidates who have dropped out like former Vice President Mike Pence — but not Trump. Then two days later, we'll see the Nevada Republican caucus, where caucusgoers can choose between Trump and pastor Ryan Binkley.

Confused? You’re not alone. But the upshot is that Trump will almost certainly come away from Nevada with the state’s 26 delegates.

Rachel Maddow speaking on MSNBC moments ago:

Usually, what ends up happening is money dries up. And also, political pressure is a real thing. Haley is a member of the Republican Party, who presumably wants a future in the Republican Party. ... And it’s not like the Trump people are going to be subtle about that pressure. The pressure is going to be unbelievably intense.  

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Alex Wagner speaking on MSNBC moments ago:

This has been a presidential campaign cycle unlike any other. Nikki Haley said that she’s a fighter — that she’s scrappy.

But, you know, Rachel, you’ve seen this, you’ve seen this state play out in previous presidential races. It is bare-knuckle brawling in South Carolina. This is the state that had the whisper campaign against John McCain. ... I mean, Donald Trump is already started going for the jugular with the birtherism stuff. It is going to be a bruising next month for this woman, who very clearly did not want to talk about being the daughter of immigrants, did not want to talk about being the governor that took the Confederate flag down from the state capitol in the wake of the Mother Emmanuel shooting.

I think it’s going to get really, really ugly. 

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“New Hampshire is first in the nation,” said the former South Carolina governor, “it is not the last in the nation.” Though polls have her anywhere between 20 and nearly 40 percentage points below Trump in her home state, Haley projected confidence in her speech just now.

And she took shots at both Biden and Trump’s age. That attack had an extra twist, as Haley suggested that if Trump is so confident about his mental acuity, he should debate her. The former president, of course, has refused to debate other GOP candidates this entire primary.

That’s exactly the kind of pressure to drop out that Haley was clearly seeking to counter in her defiant speech just a few minutes ago. And when you look at how close she’s managed to keep these results tonight, you can see why she’s feeling resistant to the idea that she needs to bow out immediately.

I’d honestly forgotten that Biden didn’t just lose New Hampshire in 2020 — he got his clock cleaned. He came in fifth that year, receiving no delegates, while independent Sen. Bernie Sanders of neighboring Vermont snagged the win. It wasn’t until Biden won in South Carolina in late February that things began to really swing his way in the races that followed on Super Tuesday.

NBC News exit polling shows that New Hampshire Republican primary voters are significantly more likely than Iowa caucus voters to believe the 2020 election results were legitimate. In Iowa only 29% believed that Biden legitimately won the 2020 election, and 66% did not. In New Hampshire those camps are matched evenly: 49% believe the election was legitimate, and 49% don’t.

A couple of takeaways here: First, it speaks to how radical the Republican Party is that even within New Hampshire’s relatively “moderate” GOP primary electorate, roughly half of voters have bought into evidence-free disinformation. Second, these numbers help explain why Haley, who says Biden was the legitimate winner of the 2020 election, fell short of the critical mass of more educated and Trump-skeptical voters she needed to pull off a win.

Haley is projected to place second in the New Hampshire primary, NBC News reports. Her failure to topple former President Donald Trump from his front-runner position effectively cements his status as the future Republican presidential nominee and ends any realistic hope of her own shot at it.

Everything was riding on New Hampshire for Haley, the only state in the polls where she ever appeared to get close to Trump in the polls. The political terrain in the Granite State was uniquely favorable to her: New Hampshire Republicans are by a number of measures more moderate and secular than the overall Republican electorate — the exact kind of Republican that Haley has outsize appeal to. If she couldn’t win there, where else can she win?

The polls now suggest that Haley could be on the brink of her being humiliated in her home state, where Trump is leading her by over 30 points in the polls. And she trails him by a far larger margin in national polls — a bad sign for her Super Tuesday prospects.

Trump has won the New Hampshire primary, NBC News projects. His win cements his status as an untouchable frontrunner in the GOP race for the White House. Barring an extraordinary event like a prison sentence from one of his criminal charges, Trump is on track to secure the Republican presidential nomination.   

If there was anywhere that Trump was at serious risk of losing an early contest — and control of the narrative that he’s unbeatable — it would’ve been New Hampshire. New Hampshire Republicans are idiosyncratic: they skew more secular, educated and libertarian than most of the Republican electorate. Haley invested a lot of resources in the state, and at her peak was trailing him by around 10 points there. But in the end she wasn’t able to pull off a win. 

The road ahead looks like easy riding for Trump. All evidence indicates that the Republican base is ready to go all in for Trump one more time. 

NBC News projects that Donald Trump has won the New Hampshire Republican primary, securing at least 11 of the state’s 22 delegates.

See the latest results here.

As polls close statewide, NBC News projects that the president has won the Granite State. Because the Democratic Party did not sanction this year’s primary, Biden’s name was not on the ballot and he will not receive any delegates toward this summer’s convention. But his supporters organized a write-in campaign, defeating Rep. Dean Phillips, D-Minn., and author Marianne Williamson.

See the latest results here.

Steve Kornacki speaking on MSNBC moments ago:

These are basically what you would call ‘toss-up numbers.’ If she’s hitting them consistently, it probably means the statewide vote is a toss up. That’s what we were kind of looking for putting these benchmarks together. ... What’s the target number we’ve established for Haley, that we think she needs to be hitting for this to be a real race statewide? The answer is 57. She’s running at 60, with a quarter of the vote in in Concord. This is a city she’s got win; she’s got to win big.

We’ve got Keene in southwest New Hampshire, a small city here. This is a college town: Keene State College is here. Again, a little bit more than a 5th of the vote in: Haley 54, Trump 45.5. What is the target we established for Nikki Haley here to make this essentially a tie race statewide? The answer is 54. She’s running right at her target in Concord and Keene right now.

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A campaign pushing Biden to support a ceasefire in the Israel-Hamas war has encouraged New Hampshire voters to write in “ceasefire” instead of voting for a candidate or writing in the president’s name. It’s unclear what kind of numbers this campaign could marshal, but reporters on the ground are encountering people — especially young people — who have supported the cause. 

Calvin George, a 21-year-old voter, tells NBC News that he hopes his “ceasefire” ballot sends the message that it’s “unacceptable” that any candidate “could be supporting implicitly or explicitly the current genocide happening in Gaza.” He also expressed apprehension about “sacrificing’ his “values” if he had to choose between Biden and Donald Trump in the general election.

The “vote ceasefire” campaign has gotten enough attention that outlets in Israel are covering the issue. The Democratic Majority for Israel PAC has even lobbied New Hampshire’s secretary of state to not tally those ballots. However many votes the ceasefire campaign garners, defenders of Israel’s brutalization of Gaza clearly are concerned about pro-Palestinian activists getting organized and potentially affecting Biden’s positions on the issue as he anticipates Election Day.

Here’s an interesting tidbit from the NBC News exit poll: a supermajority of New Hampshire Republicans are opposed to a federal abortion ban. Two-thirds of those asked today — or 67% — said they were against the idea, while only 27% said they were in favor. Compare that with last week, when those numbers were almost reversed: 61% of Iowa Republicans said they would favor a nationwide ban, while only 35% wouldn’t.

That tracks with the political and demographic makeup of the two states. Iowa’s caucuses are dominated by the strain of evangelicals who have crusaded against abortion as a moral sin. Pretty much anything preceded by the word “federal” would historically have a hard time in New Hampshire, the only state in the country that believes in individual freedom so much that it still doesn’t have a seat belt law for adults.

Way back in August, when there were eight candidates nominally jockeying against Trump for the Republican nomination, I wrote the following in a profile of Haley:

Nothing we’ve seen since then has dissuaded me of that, even as she has risen in the polls and become the last woman standing against the Trump juggernaut. New Hampshire’s particular brand of conservatism provides the best chance she’ll get to have voters embrace her attempt to walk the tightrope between the pre-Trump GOP and the MAGA crowd. She has sharpened her attacks on Trump as things have come down to the wire, but the results will have to be extremely close to change the calculus and keep the race going.

Imagine yourself back in mid-2022. Trump was weakened after leaving office and plotting his comeback. The biggest obstacle at the time was assumed to be DeSantis. After all, he was using his vise grip over the state legislature to wage a “war on woke.” It was clear that he assumed framing himself the champion of MAGA Republicans’ culture wars would endear him to the GOP base.

Fast-forward to today and it’s wild that for all the hype at the time, DeSantis didn’t even make it to New Hampshire before dropping out. There have been plenty of autopsies of his doomed campaign since Sunday, but for him to have performed so poorly when he had the best shot of anyone to claim Trump’s mantle shows the challenge of trying to offer yourself up as Trump Lite.

With Trump having to attend to his many legal cases, and Haley keeping a light-ish campaign schedule (she held a few more events in the state since being criticized for being MIA), and DeSantis opting to focus his energy elsewhere before he dropped out, this has been a more low-key campaign season than New Hampshire voters are used to. 

In addition, two scheduled GOP debates were canceled in the past week, after Haley said she wouldn’t participate if Trump didn’t.

The Republican presidential nominee is decided based on the votes of delegates at the national convention in August, where a candidate needs a majority — 1,215 votes — to win. How those delegates are doled out depends on the rules of each state’s contest. The Iowa caucus, for example, split the 40 delegates available proportionally among the candidates. Trump’s share of 20 reflected his receiving half the votes cast; Haley’s third place finish netted her 8 delegates.

Like Iowa, New Hampshire is splitting its 22 delegates proportionally based on the results. If Haley actually ekes out a win she’ll probably take one or two more delegates than Trump to the GOP convention in Milwaukee. The proportional setup is also in place for Nevada, where Trump is projected to win handily. But South Carolina has a winner-takes-all system: the top vote-getter walks away with all 50 delegates. 

If Haley doesn’t win there, it’s hard to see any route for her picking up enough delegates to blunt Trump’s likely haul on Super Tuesday in early March. So while a win would definitely give her momentum, it won’t be enough to guarantee the race stays competitive.

Joy Reid speaking on MSNBC moments ago:

I mean, going through these exit polls, this is not an overly pessimistic, angry electorate that Haley is facing in New Hampshire. She’s facing a sort of more normal, kind of an-anti Trump electorate. But the question is, is there enough passion among anti-Trump Republicans? You know there is among Democrats. But that's what Haley is testing now.

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Trump is hyperventilating and doubling down on lies about the New Hampshire primary results being sabotaged by Democrats.

In all caps on Truth Social, he posted: “So ridiculous that Democrats and independents are allowed to vote in the Republican primary, especially since Crooked Joe Biden has abandoned New Hampshire.”

This is false. New Hampshire has a semi-closed primary, and only registered Republicans or voters who are enrolled in a party can vote in the Republican primary — registered Democrats cannot. And there is no evidence or reason to believe that there is some secret army of Democrats looking to switch their registration and infiltrate the Republican primary to change the results.

Trump has strong prospects in New Hampshire, but he’s always looking for ways to use lies about election-rigging in case he doesn’t get the results he wants.

Steve Kornacki speaking on MSNBC moments ago:

Let’s take a look at ideology: 6% in this Republican primary right now identify as liberal, and 31% call themselves moderate. That is a combined total of 37% saying moderate or liberal. In 2016, the last competitive Republican primary in New Hampshire, that total number was 29%. This is 8 percentage points higher. ... If you’re having far more non-Republicans participate, it might follow that you have the ideology move away from the conservative side. Again, the key question: Is this a red herring, or are the numbers going to remain like this?

Other key findings I think we can show you here. … We asked this question in Iowa, and we asked it again here tonight: Do you consider yourself to be part of the MAGA movement? And the answer here in the first wave of New Hampshire exit polls is 64%, basically two-thirds, say they do not consider themselves that. In Iowa last week, the number of no’s was 50%. So it has jumped up double digits here in this first wave.

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Jennifer O’Malley Dillon, who ran Biden’s 2020 campaign, is leaving her job as White House deputy chief of staff to join his re-election campaign, NBC News reports. (The New York Times first broke the news.) Dillon isn’t going to take on her old job, though. One source “familiar with the decision” told NBC News that current campaign manager Julie Chávez Rodríguez will stay in her role. 

Earlier this month, The Washington Post reported that former President Barack Obama has suggested that Biden put more of his top decision-makers in place at the campaign’s headquarters in Delaware rather than staying in their White House positions. With Dillon’s move, it looks like Biden might be taking his predecessor’s advice.

Rachel Maddow speaking on MSNBC moments ago:

If Trump finishes tonight with the margin of victory the latest polls predict, Haley says she won’t drop out, but it will start to look like Trump has locked up the nomination. Which of course is what you would want too, if you too were facing 91 felony charges and four criminal trials. ... You too, in such circumstances, would presumably want to lock in your nomination before potentially being convicted anywhere, and before any of your various trials could reveal more to the American people about your alleged crimes. A not-inconsiderable number of Republican voters tell pollsters that if Donald Trump is convicted in one of trials, they will not vote for him in the general election.

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DeSantis’ decision to suspend his campaign might’ve sounded like a gift to Haley, since it narrowed the number of contestants in New Hampshire. But in reality, his departure might be more of a boon for Trump.

Two recent polls show that a majority of DeSantis supporters favored Trump as a second choice, while only about a third of them preferred Haley as their backup option. Especially after DeSantis endorsed Trump, that means that Trump is likely to secure more former DeSantis diehards looking for someone new in the Granite State. And that’s not even factoring in a recent Trump endorsement from recent dropout Vivek Ramaswamy.

Unlike the Hawkeye State, New Hampshire has historically had a better track record at predicting the eventual GOP presidential nominee. Since 1976, six non-incumbent GOP candidates have triumphed in New Hampshire and then gone on to win the party nomination.

The early results of the NBC News exit poll in New Hampshire are in, and the biggest question mark is how the independents who swarmed to the polls actually voted. Almost as many self-identified independents (45%) have shown up to vote as those who identified as Republicans (47%). Here’s what they had to say about their preferences when choosing between Haley and Trump:

Now … if you can look at that and tell me for sure which way this mass of voters broke, let me know. Because none of those criteria sound like they lean towards Haley or Trump, despite how different the two of them are.

Chuck Todd speaking on MSNBC moments ago:

Trump’s making today’s Republican Party what the Democratic Party was in the ’30s and ’40s: populist, middle-class, a little isolationist, segregationist. And I am mindful that political parties change. There was a time that the Republican Party was the party of McCarthy; they weeded that out. Democrats were the party of segregationists; they weeded that out.

A party can evolve, over time. Right now, the Cheneys, the Romneys, they’ve been shoved out of this version of the party. And Nikki Haley, she grew up wanting to be a leader of that wing of the Republican Party, and that wing is descendant.

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While all Republican eyes are on New Hampshire, Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris are revving up the crowd at a rally for reproductive rights in the battleground state of Virginia. Both Harris and Biden have wisely chosen a strong framing in a preview of one of their key general election themes: focusing on the right to abortion as essential to freedom in American life — and identifying Republicans as an existential threat to it.

“In states across our nation, extremists have proposed and passed laws that criminalize doctors and punish women — laws that make no exception even for rape and incest. And let us all agree, one does not have to abandon their faith or deeply held beliefs to agree the government should not be telling her what to do with her body,” Harris said. “If she chooses, she will consult with her pastor, her priest, her rabbi, her imam. But it should not be the government telling her what they think is in her best interest.”

Biden promised to veto any federal abortion ban passed by Congress, and described his task as “defending freedom in America.” 

Throughout his remarks, Biden was constantly interrupted by protesters calling on him to “stop genocide” or describing him as “Genocide Joe.” It was a reminder that Biden’s position on the Israel-Hamas war is a divisive issue within the Democratic electorate — and that he can’t control the messages that could define him in their eyes.

But for the most part they were inaudible, as the crowd shouted over them: “Four more years!”

One of the most curious features of New Hampshire’s primary is the handful of votes that are cast hours before the rest of the polls even open. This year, six residents in the tiny town of Dixville Notch — four registered Republicans, two undeclared — all voted for Haley.

“It was certainly a good start,” Haley told NBC10 Boston’s Matt Prichard. “It gave us some good energy and momentum.”

If Haley sounded happy but not overwhelmed, perhaps it’s because these so-called midnight primaries bear little relevance to the final result. In 2020, the town’s voters backed former New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg in the Democratic primary; in 2016, they picked Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont and former Ohio Gov. John Kasich.

Perhaps the trouble of a small sample size is one reason Dixville Notch is the only small town to hold a midnight primary this year. Another community known for this contest, Hartsfield’s Location, declined to hold midnight voting this year, citing difficulties with the write-in campaign for Biden on the Democratic side.

Jacob Soboroff speaking on MSNBC moments ago:

The thing that was enlightening to me about the challenges that President Biden faces here is the time that I’ve spent with those voters on the bus at the University of New Hampshire in Durham. Virtually every one of the young people who I talked to who are Democrats on that bus going to participate in the primary said they weren’t going to vote for Biden; they were going to vote for somebody else. 

Many brought up the idea of writing in “cease-fire” in support of a cease-fire in Gaza to protest the U.S. position supporting Israel in the war there. I saw that as troubling signs potentially in a general election for President Biden. 

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Not that it’ll be moving the needle much, but former Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson just gave his backing to Haley “tonight and into Super Tuesday.”

That tracks as Hutchinson was, along with former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, one of the only vocally anti-Trump voices in the race until he dropped out late last month. He never garnered much momentum in the polls, but his endorsement is at the very least a welcome change to the embarrassing endorsements that some of the former Republican candidates have bestowed on Trump.

Ali Vitali speaking on MSNBC moments ago:

It’s no secret that getting undeclared voters in the largest amount that they possibly can is a key part of the Haley team strategy here. But what’s fascinating is as they’ve been laying expectations, they’ve been purposefully vague on what it means to win or succeeded here in New Hampshire. It seems the word of the day is not “winning,” it’s just “stronger.” 

We’ve even seen this from the guy who’s really been with her the entire time that she’s been barnstorming through the state, the popular governor here, Republican Chris Sununu, who of course has endorsed Haley. He was initially saying at the end of the year last year that she was going to win here by a landslide in his words and then, even just as recently as yesterday, saying that she was just going to do well here. 

So again, we’re seeing a shifting of the goalpost and expectation setting for the Haley campaign as they vow in a new memo that they’re staying in this thing not just through South Carolina but through Super Tuesday.

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Kristen Welker speaking on MSNBC moments ago:

There is a sense of wanting to endorse Trump at the right time, closing ranks around him before it’s a foregone conclusion, because they can say: “We were with you before you had this completely locked up, before it was completely obvious.” That’s part of the political calculation.

And that’s part of what makes these optics so powerful, part of what makes South Carolina so challenging for Haley. Yes, it’s her home state, so conventional wisdom is that you’d go home there and have sweeping support. That’s not the case because of these endorsements for Trump, because of the polls. And if she wants to run in 2028, it makes South Carolina and facing a potential loss there that much more challenging.

These comments have been slightly edited for length and clarity.

There are high hopes for turnout today, with New Hampshire’s Republican Party chairman suggesting that the total number of voters might reach 300,000. Independents in New Hampshire can vote in either party’s primary, and Haley is hoping to lean on them to counter Trump’s support among registered Republicans.

The former president, of course, is already spreading lies about New Hampshire’s primaries, falsely claiming that the state allows Democrats to vote in the GOP primary.

Recent polls conducted since the Iowa caucuses show Trump leading the GOP field by a wide margin. But while he polled strongly among registered Republicans, Haley is winning among independents, though in less dominant numbers than Trump has with Republicans.

Read more from NBC News on how the candidates are polling here.

The president’s name isn’t on New Hampshire’s primary ballot this year because of an awkward dispute with the Democratic National Committee. Last year at Biden’s behest, the DNC made South Carolina the first primary state for Democrats in 2024, a move that has angered New Hampshire voters who take pride in the state’s long history as the first presidential primary.

New Hampshire is forging ahead with its Democratic primary today nevertheless. But because it is “noncompliant” with the DNC’s new election calendar, the party has said it is “meaningless” and its results will not count.

So although today’s Democratic primary may not technically matter, how Biden fares still carries some importance. As NBC News reports:

Some Democrats have promoted a write-in campaign for Biden in lieu of his official appearance on the ballot, and some progressives are planning to write in “cease-fire” instead of the president’s name to try to exert public pressure on him to halt the Israel-Hamas war.

After a disappointing third-place finish in Iowa, the pressure is on for Haley to perform well tonight. Her campaign is banking on New Hampshire’s independent voters — who present a huge opportunity for Haley but are difficult to predict — to show up for her.

A commanding Trump victory tonight, however, could spell the end for Haley’s campaign. She has consistently polled behind Trump in the Granite State (as elsewhere), but her numbers have grown steadily, prompting Trump to launch increasingly vile attacks against her.

Still, New Hampshire Gov. Chris Sununu — a major Haley ally — has tried to temper expectations ahead of tonight’s results. He told ABC’s “Nightline” that Haley’s campaign “always wanted to have a strong second place” in the state — a pretty big walk-back from his comments in December, when he said the state would be “an absolute win” for her.