What the Polls Say Today: Trump Poised to Win New Hampshire Handily

Since late last year, Republicans (and Americans generally) who were unhappy with the prospect of a Donald Trump comeback have been focused on the New Hampshire primary as the first and perhaps the last real chance for any rival to trip him up on the path to a third consecutive presidential nomination. That’s because the Granite State is uniquely ill-suited for Trump, thanks to its low number of evangelicals, relatively high number of college-educated Republicans, and a primary system that allows independents to fully participate. Plus, Nikki Haley, backed by popular lame-duck governor Chris Sununu, was slowly gaining strength in the polls there.

As the January 23 primary grows nigh, however, the former South Carolina governor’s momentum has clearly stalled, though she is in a head-to-head contest with Trump now that Ron DeSantis has exited the race. That means the 45th president in a strong position to supplement his landslide win in the Iowa Caucuses with a potentially decisive (if less overwhelming) victory in New Hampshire.

As in Iowa, observers will closely watch whether the front-runner wins a majority of the vote as a way of assessing whether there is some theoretical anti-Trump majority in the primary electorate somewhere in America. In the RealClearPolitics polling averages for New Hampshire right now, Trump has 54.9 percent of the vote as compared to 36.7 percent for Haley. His 18.2 percent lead in the averages is up from 13.2 percent the day after Iowa, indicating that the cumulative effect of his win in the caucuses and the withdrawal of Chris Christie on January 11 and Vivek Ramaswamy on January 15 has been to modestly increase his support. Most of the polls were taken before DeSantis dropped out and endorsed Trump on January 21, but second-choice preferences suggest that will help the former president a bit (DeSantis was mired in the mid–single digits in New Hampshire before withdrawing) as well. One data source helpful in assessing the trends is the Boston Globe-Suffolk daily tracking poll, which has shown Trump’s lead steady at 17 to 19 percent for the last four days.

The internal dynamics of the Trump-Haley race are clear from multiple surveys: He’s winning overwhelmingly among registered Republicans, particularly the more conservative among them, while Haley is actually winning the independent vote, which is expected (unless all the talk of Trump’s lead discourages some of them from voting) to represent nearly half of the primary turnout. For example, a St. Anselm College survey on January 16 showed Trump winning 65 percent of registered Republicans while Haley had 52 percent of registered independents. Similarly, a January 20 Washington Post-Monmouth poll gave Trump 64 percent of registered Republicans and Haley 48 percent (a ten-point plurality) among registered independents. Trump was drawing 77 percent of “very conservative” voters in the St. Anselm poll and 78 percent in the WaPo-Monmouth survey.

Polls have also consistently shown Trump with more committed and enthusiastic New Hampshire reporters than Haley, though there are some signs Haley’s support is firming up: the WaPo-Monmouth survey showed 85 percent of Trump voters “definitely” supporting the former president as compared to 69 percent of Haley voters with minds made up. There just aren’t any real signs of late momentum for Haley of a dimension that would signify a big upset (for which New Hampshire is famous) is in the offing. Indeed, there’s a lot of talk of this being an unusually stable — even boring — first-in-the-nation primary. But as they say in sports, we don’t know for sure, and that’s why they play the games.