On eve of New Hampshire primary, the status of the GOP and Democrat campaigns feels flipped

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The challenger has the muscle of an incumbent. The incumbent has the profile of the challenger. The President is all but arguing that the campaign is about a political figure who no longer is president. That former president is arguing he should still be president. Both campaigns say the issue is the survival of democracy, and blame the other for its peril.

There’s never been a New Hampshire primary like this.

Here, one party is fired with passion, the other all but snoozing on the sidelines. While the Republicans are deep in the machinations of the primary, the Democrats aren’t making it official, choosing to kick their race off later in South Carolina. So a non-binding write-in campaign for Joe Biden moves almost invisibly across the frozen landscape as audiences for the two remaining Republicans grow ahead of Tuesday’s voting.

Waits of 45 minutes or more in icy temperatures have been common for Donald Trump rallies. Nikki Haley has also been getting enthusiastic crowds here; so many people tried to attend one of her events on the primary’s last day of campaigning that the fire marshall told dozens of voters and news reporters to leave the Veterans of Foreign Wars hall.

The contest has turned politics upside down, the Republican “outs” campaigning like the “ins” and the Democratic “ins” struggling to show they shouldn’t be thrown out.

What will emerge from this state when the votes are tabulated three or four hours after nightfall on Tuesday is a political landscape that could persist until November.

Unless Ms. Haley pulls an astonishing upset in places such as this, the birthplace of Daniel Webster – who in 1842 negotiated the border with Canada.

Or unless she comes within, say, eight or nine percentage points statewide of Mr. Trump.

Or unless she is able to argue persuasively that beating expectations is tantamount to victory. Both remaining Republican contenders are erring by unnecessarily and recklessly setting expectations Mount Washington-high.

The argument has colourful precedent. Eugene McCarthy of Minnesota (1968), George McGovern of South Dakota (1972) and Bill Clinton of Arkansas (1992) all came in second at the New Hampshire and yet, in the funhouse mirror of history, all three are regarded as winners of it, not because they prevailed but because they exceeded expectations.

The state may pride itself on straight talk – candidates and voters have been repeating this mantra for weeks, so often that they almost believe it – but there is no straight line to the logic of politics here.

One thing we do know: The state’s verdict – whether based on fact, fantasy, wishful thinking or plain fabulist myth – has outsized meaning. “The winner here gets the momentum,” said Andrew Smith, a political scientist who heads the University of New Hampshire Survey Center.

In the old days, a triumph in the Granite State meant that the winner was on the cover of Time and Newsweek and thus given a huge boost. But Time magazine today is a shadow of itself, much like Governor Ron DeSantis’s image as a political giant, and Newsweek has disappeared, just like entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy and former governor Chris Christie of New Jersey did from the Republican race.

Political professionals here, obsessively protective of the state’s status as the site of the first-in-the-nation primary, like to cite the study by Northeastern University political scientist William Mayer showing that a victory in New Hampshire generally has increased a candidate’s total primary vote by 27 percentage points. Finishing second increases the rate by 17 percentage points.

“If nothing else,” Mr. Mayer said in an interview, “all those people in the Republican Party who dislike Trump know they still have a choice.”

But Mr. Trump is a candidate of unusual power, and his campaign style here has illustrated the difficulty that Ms. Haley, the former governor of South Carolina, faces in continuing to battle for the nomination. His bluster and belittling comments, along with his enduring popularity, put the woman he appointed as United Nations ambassador in a difficult position – and will continue to do so even if she has a strong performance Tuesday.

“She’s on a knife edge,” said Democratic Representative Annie McLane Kuster of New Hampshire. “She cannot afford to alienate the Trump people. It’s a cult-type environment.”

Which is why Ms. Haley has waded only gingerly into anti-Trump rhetoric. “Chaos follows him,” she said of the 45th president last week. “We can’t have a world on fire and an administration of chaos. We won’t survive it.”

Mr. Trump has not been reticent in criticizing Ms. Haley, mocking her birth name (Nimarata Nikki Randhawa) as part of his offensive against immigrants even though she was born in South Carolina. He has also continued his verbal assault against his likely November presidential opponent, speaking Friday night of “Biden and his radical thugs.”

And in an extremely unusual departure from ordinary political form, the Trump campaign has even taken on former Republican leaders. His team flashed an image on the SNHU Arena video screens Saturday night tying Ms. Haley to the 2012 GOP ticket of former governor Mitt Romney of Massachusetts and onetime representative Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, subliminally portraying them as enemies to his movement. Mr. Romney, who now serves as a senator from Utah, voted twice to convict the impeached Mr. Trump.

Both Mr. Trump and Mr. Biden are eager to consign Ms. Haley to what Ronald Reagan – once but no longer a Trump-era GOP hero – referred to in a 1982 speech as the “ash heap” of political history.

When Mr. DeSantis departed the race, “Write-In Biden” campaign spokesperson Aaron Jacobs released a statement saying the Florida Governor’s withdrawal “simply reinforces that this is a two-person race: Joe Biden and Donald Trump.”

He added: “There is no path for Nikki Haley to overtake Trump – and even if she could, her record of supporting a national abortion ban and pledging to pardon Trump makes clear that she’s just as bad as him.”