Voters in the Granite State will make their choice on Tuesday in the first Republican primary of 2024. New Hampshire has picked more than one president. Could it happen again?
New Hampshire is about to test Nikki Haley’s theory that our state “corrects” Iowa’s vote. It may not have endeared her to the Hawkeye state, but the former South Carolina governor’s statement is grounded in history. It has been almost a quarter century since Iowa’s winner became the GOP’s nominee. By contrast, our state has picked the last three standard bearers in competitive contests.
The Granite State has also served as a launching pad and millstone for the two current frontrunners. In 2016, Donald Trump’s 20-point primary victory was jet fuel for his candidacy. After Trump left our state, he never looked back.
Four years later, Joe Biden finished a distant fifth in his party’s primary, more than 15 percentage points behind socialist, independent Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders. As Politico observed, Biden, “limped away from New Hampshire with a devastating fifth-place finish, zero delegates and the viability of his campaign in question.” Biden left the state before the polls had even closed.
Since then, our nation has endured a once-in-a-century pandemic, a once-in-a-generation inflation crisis, an embarrassing end to one global conflict and the start of two more in Israel and Ukraine. Illegal border crossings have reached historic highs, while antisemitism runs rampant among the leadership of our most venerable academic institutions.
