A voter fills out their ballots in the New Hampshire primary on Jan. 23, in Loudon, N.H.Tasos Katopodis/Getty Images
Another day, another Trump triumph.
Actually, it’s only been two days and two triumphs – the Iowa caucuses last week, the New Hampshire primary this week.
But they have been two days, and two triumphs, that have transformed the 2024 presidential campaign, established beyond reasonable debate that Donald Trump is the glowering face of the new Republican Party, and all but consolidated the fall election as a rematch that the country dreads and deplores between two political figures the country feels are too old and too extreme.
To be sure, there remains the possibility that former governor Nikki Haley of South Carolina could continue her fight against the 45th president. She never caught Mr. Trump despite running a creditable and credible campaign, a moral victory in a struggle where those don’t count, especially in an arena where the former president is the other pugilist. In recent days she made a US$4-million investment in media advertising in South Carolina, the next stop in the nomination fight, and planned to be in the Palmetto State Wednesday to continue her campaign.
Pre-election polls are of only limited value in primaries, but it is not insignificant that, to compare New Hampshire apples to South Carolina peaches, Mr. Trump’s lead in South Carolina polling is double the polling lead he had before the New Hampshire primary, according to the NBC Poll.
The odds, and almost every member of the South Carolina Republican establishment who served with and under Ms. Haley during her gubernatorial days, are against her as the campaign moves to her native state. Soon she may find herself joining the sad parade of presidential aspirants – Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida, former governor Chris Christie of New Jersey, entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy, former vice president Mike Pence, Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina and others – whom Mr. Trump has humiliated into submission, vanquishing them with glee and ease.
A handful of the vanquished appeared with Mr. Trump just before the balloting began, and the panoply of them – Mr. Ramaswamy, Mr. Scott and Governor Doug Burgum of North Dakota – made for a more impressive sight, and a more persuasive argument, than the thousands of roadside signs and media advertisements that poured millions of dollars into the state. As late as 4 p.m. on Tuesday, with only four hours till closing time in the voting sites scattered about the state, Ms. Haley was keeping up her offensive, arguing in a paid radio spot that it was time to move beyond both Joe Biden and Mr. Trump.
But the tropism of American politics this year has drawn the country toward the rematch it devoutly does not want – but that both principals are eager to engage.
“Both sides – Trump and Biden – figured all along that they would be running against each other,” Lee Miringoff, director of the Marist Institute of Public Opinion, said in an interview. “Our politics have changed. We have presumptive nominees in February. The only important unpredictable elements now depend on legal and health matters.”
The legal matters include 91 counts in four indictments against Mr. Trump.
The health matters include one man who is 77, the other who is 81, in a country where Thomas Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence at age 33 and where James Madison drafted much of the Constitution at age 36.
“We have two leaders of the past,” said Representative Dean Phillips, the Minnesota Democrat who fought a campaign in a non-binding contest in which Mr. Biden’s supporters mounted a write-in campaign. Hardly anybody paid attention, to him or to the result.
No presidential race in American history has hinged on variables related to health and legal matters. Then again, the United States has never seen a figure like Mr. Trump, a real-estate and casino mogul turned reality-show maestro and prince of the dark arts of politics, and Mr. Biden, a superannuated figure who became president only on his third try and seems rooted in an America, and a style and substance of politics, of an earlier generation, maybe two.
Either alone would have been a phenomenon in politics. Together they have prompted three-fifths of Americans to say they are unenthusiastic about the rematch, according to a Decision Desk HQ/NewsNation poll released this week that does not vary substantially from other public-opinion surveys.
Republican Governor Chris Sununu, who endorsed Ms. Haley in an effort to stave off a Trump victory in his state and disrupt the former president’s political momentum, predicted a seven-point Haley victory. That came in a spirited warm-up to a Haley speech, not in a considered estimate at his State House desk, and it amounted to wishful thinking or the notion that the thought might be father to the fact.
It wasn’t. The governor’s plan to winnow the GOP field to Mr. Trump and one other contender succeeded. But Mr. Trump’s hold on his base and the gravitational pull of his aura of inevitability were so great that it didn’t matter.
That wasn’t the only plan that went awry.
The insurgent stop-Biden campaign of Mr. Phillips did little but contribute talking-points for Republicans to employ against Mr. Biden – despite Mr. Phillips’s repeated comments that the President was, as he put it in a rally in Nashua, N.H., over the weekend, “a good man. I respect him.” The Republicans will ignore those two sentences and exploit the one that followed: “But he is in decline.”