In the first-in-the-nation primary election for the 2024 presidential race, former President Donald Trump shattered numerous records with his landslide victory on Tuesday, defeating former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley (R-S.C.).
As detailed by Breitbart, President Trump is currently leading Haley by approximately 11%, with 95% of the vote reporting in. Just as in the Iowa caucuses one week prior, President Trump won all but one county in the state, with Haley taking Grafton County. In Iowa, Haley won Johnson County over Trump by a single vote, while Trump took the other 98 counties.
Just as Florida Governor Ron DeSantis (R-Fla.) staked his entire campaign on Iowa, Haley bet everything on New Hampshire as the state that could deliver her an upset win over the popular former president, due to a high population of anti-Trump Republican voters. However, despite a number of Democratic voters casting ballots in the Republican primary for Haley just to spite Trump, the former president still defeated Haley by a sizable margin. Unlike DeSantis, Haley decided not to drop out following her defeat and vowed to remain in the race, although she acknowledged her defeat and congratulated Trump on his victory.
President Trump’s victory made history in several ways. Following his landslide Iowa victory, he became the first non-incumbent Republican candidate to win both the Iowa caucuses and the New Hampshire primary. Following his previous wins in New Hampshire in 2016 and 2020, he also became the first presidential candidate in the history of the modern presidential primary and caucus system to win the New Hampshire primary three times.
With votes still being counted, President Trump’s current vote total at the time of publication, 170,454, is also a record-breaking result. With this total, Trump surpassed his own performance in 2020 to set another record for the highest vote total ever received by the winner of a Republican primary in New Hampshire. When he did so in 2020, as the incumbent President with minimal challengers, he beat Bill Clinton’s record in 1996 for the highest number of votes received by an incumbent President in a New Hampshire primary, with 129,734 to Clinton’s 76,797.
Trump also broke the all-time record for the highest number of votes ever received in a New Hampshire presidential primary by a candidate of either party, surpassing the previous record held by Senator Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), who received 152,193 votes in the 2016 Democratic primary.
Meanwhile, on the Democratic side, Joe Biden ran a successful write-in campaign and currently leads the New Hampshire primary with 51% of the vote. Biden refused to appear on the state’s ballot out of protest of the New Hampshire Democratic Party’s refusal to let the state move its contest back further in the primary season calendar; the Democratic National Committee (DNC) had voiced its support for moving Iowa and New Hampshire further back in favor of states like South Carolina and Georgia, with the expressed intention of prioritizing black voters over White voters.
Nonetheless, Biden’s top challenger, Congressman Dean Phillips (D-Minn.), has garnered 19.8% of the vote, just shy of 21,000 total votes, with 90% of the state reporting in. This marks the strongest performance by the challenger to an incumbent Democratic president in a New Hampshire primary in modern history, and the second-strongest challenge to any incumbent president in New Hampshire for either party, only behind Pat Buchanan’s 37.5% in 1992 against President George H.W. Bush.
Compared to his predecessors, Biden’s percentage is the lowest received in the New Hampshire by an incumbent president in modern history. President Reagan garnered 86%, while Presidents Trump and Clinton both got 84%; Obama got 81% while George W. Bush received 79%. Only George H.W. Bush’s 53% comes close to Biden’s percentage.
The next election in the primary season is Nevada, with the state-organized primary taking place on February 6th and the state party-sanctioned caucuses being held two days later on the 8th. The Nevada GOP has confirmed that it will ignore the results of the state-held primary and instead allocate its delegates based on the results of the traditional caucuses. Haley is the only candidate left on the ballot in the primary, while President Trump is the only candidate left on the ballot in the caucuses.