Trump won the Republican primary in New Hampshire

Donald Trump soundly won the Republican presidential primary in the state of New Hampshire on Tuesday.

Trump continues his dominance of the party en route to a likely rematch against Democratic President Joe Biden in November.

But his only rival, former U.N. Permanent Representative Nikki Haley, told supporters after the primary in Concord, “This race is not over”. She congratulated Trump but added that she would fight on and challenged him to a debate.

With 78 percent of the vote counted, Trump was at a slim 55 percent to Haley’s 43.5 percent, who was hoping that the significant number of independent voters in the northeastern state would help her pull off a surprise victory that could loosen Trump’s iron grip on the Republican Party.

The polling results show that Trump has become virtually unassailable to his rival.

Trump will become the first Republican to win primary votes in both Iowa – where he won by a record margin eight days ago – and New Hampshire since 1976, when the two states adopted their primary election primacy in both parties.

While the final margin is not yet clear, the results are likely to intensify calls by some Republicans for Haley to drop out of the race, though her staff pledged Tuesday to continue the fight until Super Tuesday, held in early March, when Republicans from 15 states and one territory vote on the same day.

The next round is scheduled for Feb. 24 in South Carolina, where Haley was born and was a two-term governor. Despite that, Trump has received support from most of the state’s Republican leaders, and opinion polls show him winning South Carolina by a wide margin.

Haley came in third in Iowa, slightly behind Florida Governor Ron Desantis, and focused much of her campaign on New Hampshire, where a more moderate electorate was expected to help her compete with Trump.

New Hampshire became the first state to feature a direct contest between Trump and Haley after Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, once considered Trump’s most serious rival, dropped out of the race on Sunday and endorsed Trump.

Still, despite Trump’s victory on Tuesday, exit polls hinted at his potential vulnerabilities in the national election campaign. He faces multiple criminal charges for a range of offenses at once, including his attempts to overturn his 2020 election defeat and his violation of classified document retention rules after leaving the White House in 2021.

Nearly half of voters in the Republican primary said Trump could not become president if convicted in court, according to exit polling from Edison.

A similar number of voters said they don’t believe Biden will legitimately win the 2020 election, supporting Trump’s false claims that the results were rigged.

Biden is projected to win the Democratic Party primary in New Hampshire.

However, there were some troubling signs for Biden. More than two-thirds of Republican voters in the primaries said the state of the economy was either bad or poor. The economy is an area in which Biden has had difficulty emphasizing his administration’s accomplishments.

Republicans made up a smaller share of voters in the primary compared to primaries held in the state in 2016, exit polls showed. About 47% of voters considered themselves Republicans, down from 55% in the 2016 primary. 8% said they considered themselves Democrats, up from 3% in 2016. The share of independent voters was virtually unchanged at 45%.

Biden was not listed as a candidate in New Hampshire’s Democratic primary because he supported the party leadership’s initiative to move his primary to South Carolina.

However, Biden’s supporters in New Hampshire could vote for him by writing Biden’s name on the ballot, which could be a barometer of his political strength.

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