Good morning, US politics live blog readers. We are coming to you today from Manchester, New Hampshire, the state where former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley is making what may well be her last stand to seize the Republican presidential nomination from Donald Trump. The race winnowed down to two main candidates yesterday, when Florida governor Ron DeSantis dropped out after his disappointing second-place finish in last week’s Iowa caucus. Haley has staked it all on winning in New Hampshire, which will vote in primaries tomorrow, and today, she has five publicly announced campaign events on her schedule. Trump, meanwhile, has one speech planned for 9pm eastern time, and may reportedly spend today testifying to the New York City jury hearing the defamation lawsuit brought against him by author E Jean Carroll.
Trump has functioned as a juggernaut in the race for the GOP nomination for more than a year, with polls showing him the frontrunner among Republicans both nationally and in most early voting states, New Hampshire included. While Haley has seen some momentum in polling recently, the gap between her and the former president remains significant. In a survey from the University of New Hampshire released by CNN yesterday, she’s running 11 percentage points behind Trump, who is polling at 50%. It’s quite the deficit to make up, and we expect to hear her give her closing arguments throughout the course of today.
Here’s what else is going on:
Today is the 51st anniversary of Roe v Wade, the supreme court decision that allowed abortion nationwide, which was overturned by conservative justices in 2022. Kamala Harris is traveling to Wisconsin for a speech to mark the start of what the Biden administration is calling its “Fight for Reproductive Freedoms” tour.
Senators have for weeks been negotiating a deal to tighten immigration restrictions in order to win the GOP’s support for aid to Israel and Ukraine. If an agreement has been reached, it could theoretically be announced today.
Democrats making a quixotic effort to unseat Joe Biden as the party’s presidential nominee will also be campaigning in New Hampshire today, including Minnesota congressman Dean Phillips and Marianne Williamson.
Money, endorsements, poll numbers: Ron DeSantis had it all, and then he lost it. Was it taken from him by the 800-pound gorilla of the Republican party Donald Trump, or did he cause his own downfall? The Guardian’s David Smith untangles the question, and finds that it’s a little bit of both:
It began in a glitch-filled disaster on Twitter. It ended with a misattributed quotation on X. Just like Elon Musk’s social media platform, efforts to rebrand Ron DeSantis’s US presidential election campaign could not mask its fundamental flaws.
When in May the Florida governor announced his run during a chat with Musk on Twitter Spaces, the platform’s audio streaming feature, there were technical breakdowns that drew comparisons with one of Musk’s space rockets blowing up on the launchpad.
Eight months, dozens of staff departures, tens of millions of dollars and one crushing defeat in Iowa later, DeSantis announced he was dropping out in a video posted on the renamed X that quoted Winston Churchill as saying:“Success is not final, failure is not fatal – it is the courage to continue that counts.” According to the International Churchill Society, the British wartime prime minister never said that.
Two days before the New Hampshire primary election, DeSantis’s humiliation was complete. “This is probably the biggest collapse of a presidential campaign in modern American history, if not all American history,” David Jolly, a former Republican congressman from Florida, told the MSNBC network on Sunday. “Ron DeSantis had everything going for him.”
It was only a few weeks ago that Republicans looking for an alternative to Donald Trump had a veritable cornucopia of big-league politicians to choose from. But, with the exception of Nikki Haley, all of them have dropped out, and yesterday, a big name announced his exit: Ron DeSantis, the Florida governor who once seemed like the best bet to unseat Trump from the helm of the Republican party.
His downfall was a mediocre second-place showing in Iowa last Monday, despite pouring everything his campaign had into winning the first state to vote in the GOP nomination process. There was clearly not backup plan for DeSantis, and yesterday, he announced his exit from the race with a video posted on X that included a fabricated Winston Churchill quote.
In it, the Florida governor takes one last jab at Trump, who has spent the past months pummeling him with insults, most notably the nickname “Ron DeSanctimonious”. DeSantis nonetheless endorsed Trump as he exited the race, and later on Sunday, the former president said the nickname was being retired. Here’s what DeSantis had to say:
“Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts.”
Good morning, US politics live blog readers. We are coming to you today from Manchester, New Hampshire, the state where former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley is making what may well be her last stand to seize the Republican presidential nomination from Donald Trump. The race winnowed down to two main candidates yesterday, when Florida governor Ron DeSantis dropped out after his disappointing second-place finish in last week’s Iowa caucus. Haley has staked it all on winning in New Hampshire, which will vote in primaries tomorrow, and today, she has five publicly announced campaign events on her schedule. Trump, meanwhile, has one speech planned for 9pm eastern time, and may reportedly spend today testifying to the New York City jury hearing the defamation lawsuit brought against him by author E Jean Carroll.
Trump has functioned as a juggernaut in the race for the GOP nomination for more than a year, with polls showing him the frontrunner among Republicans both nationally and in most early voting states, New Hampshire included. While Haley has seen some momentum in polling recently, the gap between her and the former president remains significant. In a survey from the University of New Hampshire released by CNN yesterday, she’s running 11 percentage points behind Trump, who is polling at 50%. It’s quite the deficit to make up, and we expect to hear her give her closing arguments throughout the course of today.
Here’s what else is going on:
Today is the 51st anniversary of Roe v Wade, the supreme court decision that allowed abortion nationwide, which was overturned by conservative justices in 2022. Kamala Harris is traveling to Wisconsin for a speech to mark the start of what the Biden administration is calling its “Fight for Reproductive Freedoms” tour.
Senators have for weeks been negotiating a deal to tighten immigration restrictions in order to win the GOP’s support for aid to Israel and Ukraine. If an agreement has been reached, it could theoretically be announced today.
Democrats making a quixotic effort to unseat Joe Biden as the party’s presidential nominee will also be campaigning in New Hampshire today, including Minnesota congressman Dean Phillips and Marianne Williamson.