Haley turns fire on Trump as GOP primary shifts to New Hampshire

MANCHESTER, N.H. — Nikki Haley is trying a risky new tactic in the Republican presidential race: She’s mounting an attack on Donald Trump.

One day after her third-place finish in Iowa, the former South Carolina governor's campaign and a pro-Haley super PAC began promoting TV ads here depicting Trump as a bully and a liar. Her campaign released a memo calling the former president “more vulnerable than commonly believed.” And Haley announced she would not participate in two scheduled debates media outlets scheduled ahead of the New Hampshire primary unless Trump joined her on stage — suggesting she plans to ignore Ron DeSantis and train her fire on the frontrunner.

Together, these steps marked a pointed escalation from Haley’s tepid rebukes of Trump through the past year — and a new strategic approach as the race moves to New Hampshire, where she is polling closest to Trump and has her best, if not only, shot of wounding him.

“The race now moves to less Trump-friendly territory,” said Betsy Ankeny, Haley’s campaign manager, in a state of the race memo released just after the candidate’s less than overwhelming finish in Iowa.

New Hampshire is make-or-break for Haley, which likely explains the shift toward confronting Trump. Still, her offensive exposes her to significant risk — not only in the primary, where she is polling double digits behind Trump, but in a GOP where, if the former U.N. ambassador has any future, she cannot afford to alienate whole swaths of conservatives.

“It’s a crazy fine line she has to walk to not lose the small amount of Republican voters she has currently, but continue to drive out independent voters,” said Mike Dennehy, a veteran New Hampshire GOP strategist who is unaffiliated in the primary. “She cannot go nuclear on Donald Trump because she will lose any Republican support she currently has if she does so.”

Haley is trying to deliver her attacks in a manner palatable to GOP voters. Her campaign’s new ad couches her criticism of Trump with a hit on President Joe Biden, her modus operandi on the campaign trail.

But the more aggressive shift in her campaign was unmistakable even before she arrived in New Hampshire: Hours before the Iowa caucuses were held on Monday, both Haley’s campaign and the super PAC supporting her dropped new ads in New Hampshire. On Tuesday morning, they began highlighting them to reporters in news releases.

“Trump is lying about Nikki,” a New Hampshire voter says in the ad being aired by SFA Fund Inc., her aligned super PAC. “That’s what bullies do.”

In a separate ad, a narrator calls Trump and Biden “the two most disliked politicians in America,” saying “both are consumed by chaos, negativity, and grievances of the past.”

There are lines Haley will still not cross: She declined on Tuesday morning to say that Trump is unfit to be president. But she told CBS News, “I don’t think he needs to be the next president. I’m going to be the next president. And so we want to move forward so he’s no longer a part of the conversation.”

Haley has far more working in her favor in New Hampshire than she did in Iowa. The state is less conservative, less religious and more independent than in Iowa. She’s got the backing of the state’s popular Republican governor, Chris Sununu. She has polling that shows her closing the gap with — and in at least one case coming within striking distance of — Trump. And she has a growing base of more moderate Republicans and independents who are turning her way on the heels of former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie’s exit from the race last week.

Independents make up the largest voting bloc in New Hampshire, and are poised to play a major role in the GOP primary. Haley’s allies are already working in overdrive to secure Christie’s voters, a large majority of whom were expected, based on polling and interviews, to break for her.

Greg Moore, the New Hampshire director for Americans for Prosperity Action, the Koch-brothers-founded super PAC backing Haley, said her “immediate challenge is trying to consolidate the Christie vote.”

Tearing into Trump may help with that, given Christie’s near-singular focus on shredding the former president.

But Trump enters New Hampshire in a dominant position, having crushed his competition by roughly 30 percentage points in Iowa. His endorsement from biotech entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy, the longshot contender who had drawn support from some MAGA-aligned voters before dropping out on Monday, is likely to pad his vote total in New Hampshire’s primary.

On top of that, Haley is being forced to play defense here. She was already her Republican rivals’ prime target in New Hampshire, where TV ads and fliers flooding voters’ mailboxes in recent days have been almost entirely focused on the former South Carolina governor.

In one day over the weekend, at least one prominent Republican in the state received 11 pieces of mail from campaigns and super PACs — and every single one of them was about Haley, seven promoting her and four attacking her.

Haley, said Matthew Bartlett, an unaffiliated GOP strategist from New Hampshire, will have to carefully navigate between appealing to vehemently anti-Trump voters and Republicans who are less disillusioned with the former president.

“I am not convinced that the best way to get MAGA voters over to you is to attack them. If that was the case, Chris Christie would have had this nomination wrapped up,” Bartlett said. “You’ve got to be more of a magnet than a spear.”