Moderate and independent voters are key to Nikki Haley’s chances of winning in New Hampshire. Many won’t stick with GOP in the general election.
With a frigid and anticlimactic Iowa caucus night behind them, the Republican presidential field moved Tuesday to New Hampshire, where Nikki Haley has her best — and perhaps only — chance to prove that Donald Trump can still be beaten in a GOP primary.
The shift means more than a change of scenery: For a brief moment, the spotlight will be on independent voters and non-Trump Republicans, who have only limited sway in most GOP primaries but are a force here and may also play a major role in the November general election.
The prominence of moderates means three things for the GOP:
Only 10% of New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie’s supporters and 22% of Haley’s backers said they would vote for Trump in a general election matchup against Biden, according to a Suffolk University survey of New Hampshire voters released before Christie dropped out of the race last week.
The general election threat the GOP faces comes from voters like Christine Stover of Strafford, in eastern New Hampshire near the border with Maine, who went out on a recent snowy evening to see Christie conduct a town hall at a barbecue restaurant in nearby Rochester — the last public event he held before quitting.
Stover, a project manager at the local telephone company, said that until recently she had split her votes between Republicans and Democrats. In the 2022 midterm election, she voted a straight Democratic ticket for the first time.
She shifted her vote because of the decision that year by the Republican-appointed justices on the U.S. Supreme Court to overturn Roe vs. Wade, the ruling that had guaranteed abortion rights in the U.S. for nearly half a century.
“At this point, I don’t see myself ever actually voting for another Republican again” for president, she said, although she was attracted enough by Christie to consider voting for him in the primary.
Her husband, Paul Stover, who voted for Trump in 2016, said he was less certain of his choice this time around, but “I really don’t want to vote for Trump.”
Like many voters, he’s put off thinking about the likelihood of another Trump-Biden choice, hoping it might somehow be avoided.
“I’ll admit it, I haven’t thought that far ahead,” he said when asked what he would do if the rematch occurs. “I’ll think about it more when I have to,” he added. “That could be part denial.”
Moderate voters form a much larger bloc here than in most Republican primaries: Recent polls by Suffolk University of voters in both Iowa and New Hampshire found, for example, that 41% of likely voters in New Hampshire’s Republican primary defined themselves as moderate or liberal compared with 23% of likely caucus goers in Iowa.
