Special coverage of the New Hampshire Republican primary 02:21:11

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Welcome back to our special coverage of the New Hampshire primary. I just wanted to make sure you see this. This is a sample ballot from Nashville, New Hampshire, Ward 1. Just want you to just take a moment to recognize how many names are on this ballot. It's not hard to see.

It's not hard to get on the ballot in New Hampshire. Basically, it takes a thousand dollars and a pen. And so every every voter who's going into the polling place tonight, we scroll down. You can see all the names there. Thank you. Has a lot of choices. Do we also have the Democratic ballot on the Democratic ballot? There's been a lot of discussion tonight about how President Joe Biden is not on the ballot.

which is true. He is not on the ballot, but paper boy love Prince is. And, um, and a lot of other people there. Um, there's a person whose name is listed as if his or her first name is president. Um,

But that is not President Joe Biden's name. So there is a little of a sort of gremlin in the mix factor just with the length of the ballots. Again, not difficult to get on the ballot in New Hampshire. The Democrats have decided that New Hampshire's primary will not allocate any delegates tonight. They wanted New Hampshire to go next month. New Hampshire said, no, we're going now. And so the party punished them and said, well, your primary then is meaningless. People will be writing in Joe Biden's name tonight.

tonight on the Democratic side. But long ballots will be confronting the voters in both of these primaries that are being held tonight. We're now going to go to Hanover, New Hampshire, where NBC News campaign embed Alex Tabet is there. Now, Alex, as far as I understand it, the polls have actually closed where you are, but you were able to wrangle a voter and convince him to stay with you.

That's right, Rachel. Polls are closed here in Hanover, which is really a liberal stronghold here in New Hampshire. It's actually the town where former President Donald Trump did the worst in back in 2016. And I've been speaking to voters all day, and there's really been two types of voters generally who I've been speaking to. One, registered Democrats who are writing in Joe Biden as a show of solidarity, a symbolic show of solidarity with the president.

And the other, which is an undeclared voter, who has a more liberal leading ideology and who seems to be voting for Nikki Haley almost strategically. And one of those voters is with me right now, Christian, a freshman from Dartmouth College. Christian, who did you vote for and why?

Yeah, so thank you. I voted for Nikki Haley and it was certainly a strategic vote. I think the DNC is fairly resolute in their nomination for Joe Biden.

And while I wouldn't vote for her in a general election, particularly on our differences with climate change solution, a woman's right to bodily autonomy or incarceration rates, I think a vote for Nikki Haley helps diminish Trump's influence in the RNC and their nomination, but it's also a vote towards democracy. And Christian is emblematic of so many conversations that I've had here throughout the day. Rachel?

Alex, Christian, thank you very much. Appreciate it. It's good to have that perspective from Hanover. Again, if you're a registered Democrat, you can only vote in the Democratic primary. If you're a registered Republican, you can only vote in the Republican primary. But there's a lot...

of voters who are not registered in either party and they can cross over. People could also change their registration as long as they did it by October to cross over and vote in the other party's primary if they wanted to. There won't be another primary for a long time yet in which voters from the Democratic Party can cross over and decide to re-register in order to cast a ballot in the Republican contest. That won't happen again in this primary process until I believe Michigan—

So it's a unique experience tonight in New Hampshire and gives us a very unique snapshot in terms of the voters of that state. Now, Ali Vitale is at Nikki Haley's campaign headquarters, which is in beautiful Concord, New Hampshire. Ali, how are things at Haley HQ? It seems to us a very open question as to how she's going to do tonight.

And I think that hope is the palpable emotion that I feel here among the Haley supporters that have gathered in the room. It's a very different sense here than what I felt in Iowa. I think the general mood of that caucus night party was that they knew she was going to do okay, well enough to come to New Hampshire, but

here, there is a real sense that she could make this an actual race, closer than many people had anticipated. And it does sort of prove Haley's point that she's been saying all week, that this is not a race that is done just because Donald Trump won dominantly in one state. It's something that Haley herself has said to me when I've asked her about

if second place is enough to say that she should continue running in this primary. In my conversations with my sources in Haley World tonight, it's clear they're feeling good. It's clear that they're looking at key places on this map and seeing margins that give them a reason to think that their defiant tone has been worthwhile, specifically looking at places like Portsmouth, like Exeter, like Rye.

All of those key places on the map are places that the Haley campaign is watching closely in hopes that they can run up a margin there. It tracks

tracks closely with where she's spent her time in this last week of the campaign, campaigning arm-in-arm with the popular New Hampshire governor, Chris Sununu, here. He has been running this campaign all over the state. My understanding is he's been a driving force in the stops that she's been making, changing the campaign style here from one that's just been standard town halls and Q&As to one that's become much more dynamic with retail stops at diners and coffee shops. And you can hear the crowd here, guys, as

the results keep coming in they're liking what they're seeing especially if they see haley campaign h_q_ pop up on the screen because this is a race now where especially if haley comes within single digits of the points

It becomes very difficult for the Republican Party writ large to argue that she should be dropping out or at least dropping out immediately. The campaign is already fighting against that, especially in light of a statement from the RNC chairwoman, Ronna McDaniel, which effectively said that if Trump runs away with it tonight, the next thing the party has to think about is unity. Nikki Haley, still defiant in the face of statements like that, a campaign source telling me,

that their general mood is just, let's take a beat. Only two states will have voted. More people need a chance. And Rachel, it's important that you bring up places like Michigan because the idea of an open primary is one that the Haley campaign is really banking on, yes, here in New Hampshire, but also down the stretch. Their campaign manager, Betsy Ankeny, released a memo today, and what caught my attention is the way that they explicitly call out

Semi-open or open primaries going down through Super Tuesday as states that they feel are fertile territory for them. And you look at the vote demographics here in New Hampshire, the number of independents and undeclared that came out. That's why they're making that point. And especially if we see results here that are closer than people anticipated, it only gives more credence to their theory of the case.

Yeah, and closer than anticipated, again, is the key, Ali. I'm glad you put it that way because it is an expectations game. With the last polls, after Ron DeSantis dropped out of the race, the last tracking poll was 20-plus point margin. If you're talking about the Haley campaign hoping for a single-digit margin between her and Donald Trump, that's setting the expectations game potentially in a way that Trump's going to find hard to push back against. Well, I'm saying the last minute.

I think certainly that's true. And look, the real expectations game that they're playing is with their donors because, of course, we know that all candidates want to stay in. They want to run these races through to the finish line. What Nikki Haley has to do next is, yes, she's going back to South Carolina. I will be up bright and early trying to get to that

campaign event so we can be live with you tomorrow but she's also going to be doing a slew of donor meetings throughout the major cities that we know donors tend to congregate in. I'm talking New York, I'm talking Texas. She's going to have to be making the sell and a sell is much easier, we all know, if you are within single digits and striking distance of the former president. I think the thing that's going to be tough is a month is an eternity in politics, we all know that.

South Carolina is a month away, and we know that it's less fertile territory for Haley than it used to be when she ran statewide. Now, her campaign has reminded me time and again, this is a state that knows what it's like to be under Nikki Haley's governance, but this is also a state, I remember being in the ballroom in Greenville, South Carolina in 2016, when we watched Trump just utterly sweep the map

end the Bush era of Republican politics and really establish himself atop the Republican Party. That was in 2016. South Carolina was the state that, at least for many of us covering that campaign, it really felt like a sea shift. It's unclear that it's going to do the reverse this time for Haley, but it is a much tougher climb there. But then again...

We were saying that about New Hampshire. It remains a tough climb. We'll keep watching these polls coming in. But at the same time, it is something that they're looking at, that if it's closer than people expected, they feel that they have a leg to stand on and that they can keep pushing forward through this campaign.

Ali Vitale at Nikki Haley campaign headquarters in Concord. Ali, I know we'll be back with you. Thank you. Right now, there's about three minutes until polls close in New Hampshire. Secretary of State's office has told us explicitly anybody who is still in line when polls close will be allowed to vote. If you are in the sound of my voice right now, within the sound of my voice right now in New Hampshire, and you are just getting to your polling place, as long as you are in line when polls close in two and a half

minutes, you will be allowed to vote. Now, basically what we've got as we've been watching the results come in from polling places that closed in the last hour at seven o'clock, it's been sort of a mixed bag as for Nikki Haley's prospects, as Steve Kornacki has been explaining. The reason there was a lot of hope for Nikki Haley's prospects was because of the first wave of exit polls. Now, we've just had the second wave of exit polls come in. Steve Kornacki looking at that second wave of exits.

Is it in keeping with the first wave or is it telling us a different story? It's moved a little, but I think that little could be significant here. We talked about eight percent of the of the electorate identifying as Democratic in the first wave. That number with the second wave, we have a bigger sample size now comes down to six. Given that Nikki Haley, that's a group that we expected her to do very well with. The lower that number gets in the Republican share of the electorate is up now. It's still not a majority, but it's up.

to 49%. So again, we talked about Haley leaning on independence. This electorate a little bit skewing now towards the Republicans more than it was before. Moreover, though, it's the results that we have coming in that we have the complete results from the city of Concord, third largest in the state. And again, this is a place Haley didn't didn't just need to win. She needs to win this big. She wins it.

But I think she, you know, we thought a benchmark for here would be 57 percent or higher in terms of to make this a real race statewide. So she falls a little short in Concord, but she's falling short. She's falling much shorter when you get outside of a place like San Borton here. You know, about three quarters of the vote is in a

benchmark for here would be somewhere in the low mid 40s. She's sitting there at 38 percent. Here's one, the city of Claremont. Again, we talked about Rochester on this side of the state being a sort of an old working class Trump city. Claremont, a bit of its equivalent, I

along the Connecticut River here. And again, Haley, she'd want to be somewhere about 45% here running at just 33.7 with two thirds. And the bottom line is this. There's a pattern that's clearly developing here with these results so far. In areas with high

high concentrations relative to the state average of college degrees we talk about the college non-college divide in those areas Haley on average is running three points better than the benchmark we established for her but in areas with low college she's running nine points short

That noise and that big guillotine coming down on Steve Karnacki means that polls are about to close. We are less than 10 seconds away from the polls closing in the New Hampshire primary, both in the Democratic primary and in the Republican primary. And now at 8 p.m. Eastern time, I can give you the characterization of the race. We're going to start with the Republican primary in New Hampshire. NBC News at this hour.

can characterize the New Hampshire Republican primary as such. It is too early to call, but Donald Trump leads. Again, too early to call, but Donald Trump leads. That is the characterization in New Hampshire at poll closings at 8 p.m. Eastern. But now look at the Democratic primary. NBC News now projects that the winner of the Democratic primary

presidential primary in New Hampshire is Joe Biden. Now, this is interesting for lots of reasons. This has no delegates associated with it. The Democratic Party told New Hampshire, you cannot be first in the nation this year. You can only go later in the process. Democrats decided to hold their primary in New Hampshire anyway.

Joe Biden was not on the ballot, but even as a write-in candidate with 21 other people whose names were on the ballot, President Joe Biden, it is projected, will win the New Hampshire Democratic primary. Back to Steve.

Yeah. And just picking up on that here, too, look, the sort of the biggest one in the state is the Queen City, Manchester is the largest city in the state here. And we now have more than half the vote in for Manchester. And Donald Trump continues to lead here. It is about a 10, 11 point lead for Donald Trump in Manchester. And this I mean, it's it's obvious to say, but it's the largest in the state. And it really is one of the swingiest in the state. We thought it's

Coming into the night, if Nikki Haley is going to have a chance here statewide to actually beat Donald Trump, this would be a city that would be a jump ball. It'd be 50-50 pretty much. Now, there's still more vote to come in right here, but you see Haley is running short of 50-50.

with nearly 60% of the vote in. If she's going to be falling short in a city the size of Manchester, if that ends up being the case here, she has to make up for it somewhere. Where can she make up for it? Well, again, the obvious place we just told you is Concord, but basically all the votes in in Concord, and it's a good night for her, but we think, you know, especially if she's coming in short in a place like Manchester, she needs...

better than this. She needs 57, 60 percent somewhere in that area. Here might be an interesting telling one, too. Let's go down to Peterborough, picturesque Peterborough. This is the setting for the play Our Town. Thornton Wilder was right up the road, I think, when he wrote it. This is supposed to be the heart of Haley country here. Again, a benchmark for her here on a night where she's winning statewide would be probably close to two thirds of the vote. Again, she's winning it. Just about all the vote is in in Peterborough. But

She's not quite hitting that number. So we're seeing her do well in place. She's doing well in Congress. She's doing well in Peterborough. For that matter, we could go over here to the city of Portsmouth. She's doing well in Portsmouth with nearly 50 percent of the vote in. But again, we thought going into the night to win, to be in position to win statewide, Haley would need to be more at about two thirds of the vote in Portsmouth. So even in those areas, those sort of core

areas where we expect her to run up a number. She's doing well, but she's not quite hitting those benchmarks. And then again, you compare it to just as we start to get more of the small town New Hampshire. And here's a good one. Antrim. We start talking about, you know, towns that are sort of socioeconomically different than a portion is one of the wealthiest places in New Hampshire. Here in Antrim, you're talking about what the median income is lower. You're talking about lower college degree attainment. Those are demographics that have not

been good for Haley. They were terrible for her in Iowa. And those are demographics that for eight years now have been terrific for Donald Trump. So here, small town, but in Antrim, you see Trump hitting, it's basically 58 to 40 here, 57 and a half to 40. Again, we thought going in, if Haley's going to be having a great night where she could actually win statewide, her number would have to be close

closer to 50 here, high 40s. So again, we're just seeing it. We see it here in Antrim. We see it in Hillsborough. We talked about this one earlier. Again, she'd want to be in the 40s here. We talked about it in the city of Claremont. She'd want to be probably, you know, mid 40s there. We're waiting, I think, more on Laconia. We still haven't got much more in. But again, this is one she'd want to be doing much better than a third. So the statistic we've been tracking here is you're so crucial to any story about the

And really in the general election, too, is that college non-college divide. OK, so voters with a college degree, the places that have reported in New Hampshire where the concentration of college degrees is higher than the state average. OK, in those areas, Haley is actually surpassing the benchmarks that we set for her by about three points on average.

In the areas of the state, though, where the college, the reported where the college attainment rate is lower than the statewide average, Haley's pulling nine points short of the benchmarks that we established for her. So that's becoming a very clear pattern here as more of these cities and towns report. You take a look at East Kingston here. Now, we've got all the vote in here. We're getting into that southeast corner. A lot of these are eight o'clock poll closing times.

And I just want to look here to see what we had. Yeah, again, this is Haley did well. Again, she did well. 48%. We thought she needed to be in the low 50s. You notice a pattern in the good areas. She's not quite getting there. And in those smaller towns, in those rural places with lower median income, with lower college attainment rates, she's falling far

They're short. So you add that all up together here. We got 14 percent in statewide. Trump has a lead here of about six points over Nikki Haley. And for Haley, you saw the characterization from our decision desk for Haley to overcome that. What would she need? Look, I mean, in the remaining vote in Manchester, she needs to get it closer. We've now gone up over 60. She's fallen a little bit further behind in Manchester.

a core, core area for Nikki Haley is going to be these four cities and towns right here. City of Lebanon, directly north is Hanover, Lyme, Orford. It's tiny, but it's high income, high college, all of that. This was John Kasich's best section of the state in 2016. Hanover was Donald Trump's worst town. So Haley, she can run up some big numbers here. There are some college towns. We're waiting on Durham, where the University of New Hampshire is. Again, you'd expect a

Big Haley number there. Hanover, a college town. Keene itself, the city of Keene. And we got most of Keene in. OK, so Keene, Keene State College, more than 20,000 people here. All the vote is in. Haley wins it again to be winning statewide, to have a shot to win statewide. We thought she needed it.

54, 55 percent of the vote here in Keene. So it's a win. It's a good showing. But I'm not seeing places here where she's just blowing through that number that we had established for her. And on the other hand, we are seeing in some of these rural, smaller towns, we're seeing her miss the targets. You know, as Fremont, we start to get a little bit of Fremont in here and I could just quickly cross check again. Yeah, this

This is one, Haley, we thought needed 45 here, 39% and she's at 48.5. But again, that's a little different. Oh, I think this is Littleton we've got now. Littleton, one of the larger areas in northern New Hampshire. It's not a ton of votes, but up in that part of the state, that's a lot of votes. All of Littleton is in. You see Trump, 56. Haley, just a touch under 40. And I'm just going to look at

the number here. I think she's low again in Littleton. Yeah, we thought she needed to get an outright majority. We thought she needed to be about 51% here. And again, what are you talking about when you're talking about lower median income? You're talking about lower college degree concentration. So the pattern...

Absolutely continuing there in Littleton. And again, you factor this stuff in statewide. That's what you're looking at in terms of the results so far. So there are some, you know, Durham, you know, Lebanon, Hanover. You've got some big haily areas, relatively speaking, which will do very big that are yet to come. You've also got a lot.

of little small towns here where the pattern that's quickly emerging is that Haley is falling short in those areas. And if that continues, the numbers just aren't going to be there for her. And again, as you can see, the Trump number here, it's up over seven points statewide right now. And it could get potentially higher. The big thing here at eight o'clock,

is that the polls have now closed in Nashua, the second largest city in the state. And not all, but most of these towns right here along the Massachusetts border are 8 p.m. poll closing times. And they are there's a lot of population down there. So we'll get good readouts there. But again, some of these, again, do not just assume it's a bedroom community. It's a suburb. Don't assume that means Haley country, because some of these we showed you Salem, New Hampshire earlier. Some of these were Donald Trump's.

best towns in New Hampshire in 2016, and we expect them to be among his best here in 2020. A town like Pelham nearby, as we say, Salem is one of them. It's a little bit different and it defies a little bit of our sort of conventional thinking about how the suburbs line up when you're talking about this part of southern New Hampshire here. Steve, let me ask you, can you show us, like, give us the biggest...

where Haley could make up, not even necessarily to overtake Trump, but where she could actually run up

enough of a vote total that she could close that gap even a little bit? What are the biggest places that she could actually score some votes? Right here in this region here, city of Lebanon, you expect her to win even if she's losing statewide. You expect her to win. So the question is, what's the margin she can get out of here? Hanover, where Dartmouth is, again, we said this is Donald Trump's worst town in 2016. There are far bigger towns in New Hampshire than Hanover, but this is a place where even on a bad night, Haley was going to win it. So the question is,

Can she just drive up an astronomical number in Hanover? Also, Hanover, remember, one of those towns where they asked the secretary of state for more ballots earlier in the day. That trend would continue in Lyme, smaller. It would continue right up to Orford, this sort of section of the Connecticut River Valley here.

Very, very liberal. Very, very anti-Trump. It's not a huge number of votes, but you'd expect Haley to be driving big numbers there. Again, coming into the night, we also thought some of these communities in the seacoast should be among her best. Portsmouth among them. We'll see. I'm just seeing if more vote came in in Portsmouth. Again, she'd want to be in the high 60s. But whatever comes in in Portsmouth is going to benefit her. Some of these other some of these other towns we met. This is Durham. This is where the University of New Hampshire is.

Go down here. This is Exeter, you know, Exeter Academy, a prep school town. Again, you expect big numbers for her there. Nashua, for that matter, you take a look, the second largest city in the state. I think Haley, you know, we said in our in our estimates for this, she'd want to be winning it by five to 10 points.

I still suspect she'll do pretty well in Nashua and have a chance to win it. It's just a huge number of votes there. So even if she's only winning it by, say, two, four points, she'd be making some gains there. You look right outside Nashua, you look at Merrimack. This could be a decent place for it. This could be very good for Amherst, a town of about 11,000, very wealthy, among the wealthiest in the state, among the highest concentrations of college degrees in the state. So, too, Hollywood.

Hollis, you saw Nikki Haley have a rally in Hollis the other day. That's where former Senator the late Warren Rudman actually spent his retirement. Hollis has really been it's been growing and it's extremely wealthy, median income, high college degree concentration. So there are places like that where she can where she can make some votes. But.

Sorry to have to interrupt you, but we have an important projection to make. NBC News at this hour is 8.11 p.m. on the East Coast. Poll's been closed for 11 and a half minutes. And NBC News can now project that the winner of the New Hampshire Republican primary is Donald Trump. Earlier, the projection had been that it was too early to call, but that Trump was in the lead.

11 minutes after a poll closing, Trump has been projected the winner. Steve, it does, forgive me for interrupting you there, but that's the only reason I would. That does, I mean, it seemed like all the, everything that you were coming up with, when you're talking about those benchmark numbers you had in mind for Nikki Haley, that was about her pulling out a win and not hitting those benchmarks in town after town after town, pretty much all telling that same story.

Yeah, exactly. And so now I think really the question for Haley becomes, you guys have started talking about this. It's that, what can she take and say, it's not a win, but it's progress. It gets me to South Carolina. What, and I,

I don't know. To my eyes, it's at the very minimum, she wants to keep this in single digits. Right. And so right now you see Trump with a margin of eight points right there. And again, Nashua, you know, almost 100,000 people in Nashua. She could win Nashua. You know, I think even on a bad night here, she'd probably break even in Nashua. So she could get some substantial votes out of there. We were talking about the Connecticut River Valley. There are some, you know, some decent sized places on here where I think she's going to run up a lot of the vote. The

question is what she gains in those places, and there's a fair number of them, population wise, what she gains, is it going to be offset by what we've been showing you in places like Claremont, what we've been showing you in places like Littleton, in Hillsboro, in Antrim? Is it going to be offset? Because again, those all

really start to add up here. They're not individually huge. You see only about 600 votes or so, but there's a lot of them around the state. Here's a small one, Milton, New Hampshire. Again, I'll just give you a sense here of what we thought the number Haley needed to get here to be competitive statewide. Yeah, we thought she needed 35, 36 percent. She's not quite at 30 percent. So you just continue to see that pattern. And if it falls, you

If she's falling further than this in a lot of these small towns and it's getting, you know, Claremont's a small city, but she's double digits short of her benchmark in Claremont. That's where you start to get in danger if you're her of this thing going into the high single. It is in the high single digits right now, but of actually hitting double digits. There are some

bigger sized places to come to relative to this that are going to favor Trump. I see the city of Berlin up here in northern New Hampshire. We expect that to be a big win for Donald Trump just in terms of margin. We'll check in on Rochester again. Trump, two thirds of the vote here is close to and he's close to two thirds of the vote. And the

big one, really, the big one left is what, and again, this is bad news for Haley. Now you've got two-thirds of the vote in Manchester, and she's fallen almost 13.5 points behind Donald Trump in Manchester. I'm not sure which wards and precincts are still to come in Manchester, but if that remaining one-third of the vote in Manchester sees Trump's lead expand even further, again, those votes add up real fast in a place that size.

So, again, the big news is that NBC News has projected that the winner of the Democratic primary in New Hampshire is Joe Biden.

And the winner of the Republican primary in New Hampshire is Donald Trump. What that means is that all eyes now turn to Nikki Haley. How will she react to this loss? What will the margin be and how will she characterize the margin in terms of what it means for the prospects of her campaign going forward? Um, closest we can get to laying eyes on Nikki Haley right now is to lay eyes on Ali Vitale, who is at Nikki Haley headquarters, uh,

in Concord, New Hampshire. Ali, we've just had a call here from the NBC News decision desk that Donald Trump has won in New Hampshire. Got to check in with you as to how that news is or isn't being received in the room.

Look, I gave up on candidate impressions a long time ago, Rachel, so I'm just going to give it to you straight reporter style. This is a room that's starting to fill in, that's starting to feel the excitement, despite the fact that there was big news of us calling this race for Trump. That was not the shocking thing that voters in here were waiting for tonight. Instead,

There is still a hopeful and excited attitude here, in large part because the margins are just not what people expected them to be. I've run into several senior campaign advisors and allies tonight. Many of them are just walking around giving me the sign of crossing their fingers and hoping that those closer than expected margins are what sticks.

Again, we'll look at a lot of the areas that Steve was talking about, but places like Exeter, where she campaigned in the waning days of this campaign, Hollis, Lebanon, all of those are areas that I've been told to expect to keep a close eye on. As far as what's going on in the room here, you can see that it started to fill in

But you can also see that on stage behind me, they're starting to check the podium. We've got people on stage. They're filling in. And my sources in the campaign tell me soon, however ominous or non-precise of an expectation that is for you guys there in the studio. But until then, they're going to try to keep high hopes in here as they wait to see these results come in. I do think we can read into the fact that Nikki Haley could speak earlier in the night than others.

as opposed to waiting for more of these results to come in. Speaking early, I'm expecting her anyway to declare a victory that at least allows them to push ahead because as we were talking about at the end of your last hour, that was really the only thing that they wanted to prove that they could do tonight. They wanted to prove that they could make a go of it in a one-on-one race with Donald Trump. They want to argue that her trajectory over the course of the last year has been the only person to challenge Trump who's seen their stock rise

rise in the eyes of the electorate as opposed to all of these other rivals, the so-called fellas, as Haley would often call them, who have dropped out and now turned to endorse the former president. That's a big current for her to fight against, but it's one that we're watching Haley and her campaign continue to push against as they continue to be defiant, I think is the best word that I can use to describe my congressman.

conversations with this group of people who feel like they are fighting the establishment here. Even if we don't agree that Trump is establishment or that Haley doesn't qualify as that, they are trying to cast Haley as the outsider here. Perhaps the ultimate irony going against someone like Donald Trump, who rode a wave of outsider status into the presidency in 2016.

Ali, watching the room, hearing you talk, hearing you describe what you've been told, it seems clear, if nothing else, that we're going to hear soon from Nikki Haley. And so I have a feeling we're going to be back with you sooner rather than later. We'll take her as soon as she hits the podium. Thank you, Ali, at Nikki Haley campaign headquarters in Concord, New Hampshire. Now let's zip over to Nashua, New Hampshire, to another campaign headquarters where NBC News correspondent Vaughn Hilliard is.

is with the Trump campaign at their HQ. Vaughn, let me ask how things are in that room, whether there's been any response to the NBC News projection and how things seem tonight. Just about three minutes ago, Rachel, they made the call here inside of the room and it was met by cheers. Of course, though, this is the expectation at this point. And what the folks in this room, as well as the surrogates who are here, everybody from Vivek Ramaswamy to Kerry Lake to George Santos,

all wanted the primary to come to an end tonight. And for Donald Trump, over the course of the last several days, he has continually up on stage made the statement that the Republican Party should unite. It's resources around taking on Joe Biden here. I'm sorry. I'm sorry I have to cut you off. I hate doing that. But Nikki Haley is just starting her remarks, and we're going to take them. We'll be back with you, Vaughn, at Trump campaign headquarters. Here's Nikki Haley live from her headquarters in Concord, New Hampshire, tonight. I love it.

What a great night. God is so good all the time. Thank you, New Hampshire, for the love, the kindness, the support, and a great night here tonight. Thank you so much. I want to first say thank you to my husband, who I know is watching right now. I love you. We're excited to have you. Thank you.

I want to thank my kids who are here, Rita and Nalen and Josh, who have really kind of stepped up and just given me the support I need. You know, you really pull on your family when something like this happens. And I am incredibly blessed by their support. I have my parents at home. And I will always say that the way they raised me to know that we lived in the best country in the world,

but to also know that the best way you appreciate your blessings is to give back. Thank you, Mom and Dad. I love you so much.

To my siblings, to my in-laws, to everybody back at home, to Vicki for helping me take care of mom and dad, thank you for that. You know, I will tell you, it has been, it feels like it's been a lifetime, but it has been almost a year that we've been campaigning in New Hampshire, touching every hand, answering every question, being the last person to leave. And we had the most amazing thing happen.

is the second that we got the endorsement from Governor Chris Sununu. I mean, a true governor that doesn't stand behind a podium. He shows up at a diner. He shows up at the brewery. He loves the people of New Hampshire. He has been with me every single day at every single event. Chris, I couldn't have done it without you. And I want to thank someone who was with me on day one.

He's a patriot. He's a hardcore conservative. And he is my friend, General Don Bolduc and Sharon. Thank you so, so much. I want to congratulate Donald Trump on his victory tonight. He earned it. And I want to acknowledge that. Now, you've all heard the chatter among the political class. They're falling all over themselves, saying this race is over. Well, I have news for all of them.

New Hampshire is first in the nation. It is not the last in the nation. This race is far from over. There are dozens of states left to go. And the next one is my sweet state of South Carolina. At one point in this campaign, there were 14 of us running and we were at 2% in the polls. Well, I'm a fighter and I'm scrappy.

And now we're the last one standing next to Donald Trump. And today we got close to half of the vote. We still have a ways to go, but we keep moving up. For a lot of people, politics is way too personal. It's not personal for me. I voted for Trump twice. I was proud to serve America in his cabinet. I agree with many of his policies.

I decided to run because I'm worried about the future of our country and because it's time to put the negativity and chaos behind us.

We have an economy that's crushing middle class Americans. We have a border that is totally open and dangerous, creating a disaster in our country. We have schools that are failing too many of our children. And we have a world on fire with a war in Europe and the Middle East and a huge and growing threat from China. And then you look at Washington, D.C.,

We have a Congress that fights about everything and accomplishes nothing. And we have Joe Biden in the White House making one bad decision after another. When he's making any decisions at all, our country's in a real mess. And the question is, who's going to fix it?

With Donald Trump, Republicans have lost almost every competitive election. We lost the Senate. We lost the House. We lost the White House. We lost in 2018. We lost in 2020. And we lost in 2022. The worst kept secret in politics is how badly the Democrats want to run against Donald Trump. He's a loser!

They know Trump is the only Republican in the country who Joe Biden can defeat. You can't fix, you can't fix the mess if you don't win an election. A Trump nomination is a Biden win and a Kamala Harris presidency. Trump. I defeat Biden handily. Trump.

With Donald Trump, you have one bout of chaos after another. This court case, that controversy, this tweet, that senior moment. You can't fix Joe Biden's chaos with Republican chaos. The other day, Donald Trump accused me of not providing security at the Capitol on January 6th.

Now, I've long called for mental competency tests for politicians over the age of 75. Trump claims he'd do better than me in one of those tests. Maybe he would. Maybe he wouldn't. But if he thinks that, then he should have no problem standing on a debate stage with me. Most Americans do not want a rematch between Biden and Trump. No!

The first party to retire its 80-year-old candidate is going to be the party that wins this election. And I think it should be the Republicans that win this election. So our fight is not over because we have a country to save. In the next two months, millions of voters in over 20 states will have their say. We should honor them and allow them to vote.

And guess what? In the next two months, Joe Biden isn't going to get any younger or any better. We'll have all the time we need to defeat Joe Biden. When we get to South Carolina, Donald Trump's going to have a harder time falsely attacking me.

The great people of South Carolina know I cut their taxes. They know I signed the toughest illegal immigration bill in the country. They know we passed voter ID and tort reform and ethics reform. And they know we moved 35,000 people from welfare to work. Every time I've run for office in South Carolina,

I've beaten the political establishment. They're lined up against me again. That's no surprise. But South Carolina voters don't want a coronation. They want an election. And we're going to give them one. Because we are just getting started. Thank you for the energy.

Thank you. Thank you for the love, New Hampshire. We're going home to South Carolina. Nikki Haley with an energized speech to her campaign headquarters in Concord, New Hampshire tonight. She congratulated former President Donald Trump on his victory in New Hampshire. She said he earned it. She said the political class says it is over. The

crowd then screamed, it's not over. Nikki Haley then said, it isn't over. New Hampshire is first in the nation, not last in the nation. It is not over. There are dozens of states to go. She then went on to give her sort of standard stump speech against both President Trump, excuse me, President Biden and former President Trump. But notably, she says she's looking forward to the contest moving next to her

home state of South Carolina. And she says that if it takes a few months, takes a couple of months for the Republicans to pick their nominee, they will still have, in her words, plenty of time to take on Joe Biden thereafter. Now, when Nikki Haley began her remarks, we are speaking with Vaughn Hilliard, who is in at Donald Trump's campaign headquarters in New Hampshire. Vaughn, I'm sorry to have had to step on you. I hate doing that.

You were giving us, before Nikki Haley started her remarks there, you were giving us a sense of what's happening in the room there at Trump HQ and what you're hearing from the campaign.

Right. Rachel, at this point, we're waiting for Donald Trump now to take the stage now that Nikki Haley has given her remarks here. For Donald Trump and his campaign, they have maintained that a win would be a win here, but they clearly wanted to end this tonight. Donald Trump on stage at his closing primary eve rally in Laconia, New Hampshire, saying that he sought to end this Republican primary today so that they could focus the party's resources around beating Joe Biden in November.

Tim Scott, Vivek Ramaswamy, Doug Burgum, all former rivals joined him on stage last night. And this was a moment that the campaign wanted to avoid here. And it is clear that Nikki Haley does not intend to go anywhere. But when you look at the calendar, this is where Trump's senior advisors have consistently told me these last days is that they feel like they are in good shape. If you fast forward to Nevada, there is a primary election.

on February 6th, but no delegates are actually coming out of that primary. Nikki Haley's name will be on that primary ballot, but because of some party rules in that state, the only delegates that will be awarded out of Nevada come from the Nevada caucus two days later on February 8th, and Donald Trump is participating in the caucus, not Nikki Haley. So he is going to win those delegates out of Nevada. Then you fast forward to South Carolina. When we're talking about those independent voters, that

anti-Trump, even Republican resistance. This is a moment where when you look at South Carolina, yes, the polling numbers are not great. She has a month long to make inroads. But that is the state where Joe Biden and the Democrats have focused their attention on turning out Democratic primary voters for the first time to come take part in the Democratic primary because

Unaffiliated voters and Democratic voters could take part in the Republican primary in South Carolina on February 23rd if they so choose to. But the Democrats are telling their voters to go take part and vote for Joe Biden. And so that is where you look at the map here. Come Super Tuesday on March 5th, another state, California. If Donald Trump gets 50 percent or more of the votes in the state of California, he wins it.

all of the delegates out of California because of new GOP rules in that state. California is also a closed primary, meaning no independents can go and vote in the Republican primary. You also have the state of Florida. It's also a closed primary as well. This is where the map becomes complicated. And I was right here in New Hampshire eight years ago, Rachel, when at the time I was covering Ted Cruz's campaign. And we heard time and again that South Carolina

would be the southern wall for him. But what happened? Donald Trump survived with a surprise with the evangelicals. He got the endorsement of Jerry Falwell Jr. He won big. And overwhelmingly, throughout the South, was able to win states like Alabama and South Carolina and send a message that the Republican Party was much greater than the northeastern part of the state or northeastern part of the country, but that he had mobilized a movement around the country. And that is what Nikki Haley is going to be up against here, because

There is questions around that energy among independent voters and whether they were going to be inspired to come out. A woman, you know, she told me yesterday, or I should say two days ago over the weekend at a Nikki Haley event when she walked out, she goes, I guess I'll vote for Nikki Haley.

because she's the only alternative at this point. What Nikki Haley now has the opportunity to do, though, is work on inspiring an anti-Trump movement. And if these results are closer than expected here, this would be a signal that this is not only Donald Trump's Republican Party at this point, but there is a faction of it

stemming from the Liz Cheney's, from the Bob Corker's, the Jeff Flake's, that there is a surge that could potentially challenge him and his grip hold on this Republican Party. Because this summer at the convention, Rachel, is not a likely place in which they would be able to unseat him because of the loyalty of these delegates. So this is really a last gasp opportunity over the month ahead. And we could expect a great amount of resources going behind Nikki Haley to challenge Donald Trump in his attempt for this third nomination.

Fawn, let me ask you about one of the charges that Nikki Haley is increasingly making about Donald Trump. And she really hit this quite hard tonight in her remarks from her campaign headquarters in Concord. She referenced senior moments.

She talked about her demand that candidates over the age of 75, which would include Donald Trump, should have a mental fitness test. She talked about his confusion on the stump recently. I know from reporting about his last rally that he did in Laconia, New Hampshire, yesterday that there was again a moment of him appearing to—

Best case scenario, maybe lost his place in the teleprompter. Worst case scenario, seemed to be slurring, seemed to not know what he was talking about. Ended up sort of spitting up a kind of gobbledygook of words that nobody knew, except that it involved something about the death penalty. That attack from Nikki Haley obviously is meant from her to land on both Joe Biden and on Donald Trump. But she's really hammering it now when it comes to Trump and his mental fitness and his age and his

essentially mental stamina. How is the Trump campaign handling that criticism from her?

Donald Trump, he doesn't run away from it. Number one, Rachel, almost every speech over the last days is Nikki Haley is focused on his mental fitness. He has gone back to talking about the fact that he has passed two cognitive tests, including one from the former White House, Dr. Ronnie Jackson, who, of course, is a MAGA loyalist who is currently serving in Congress. But for Donald Trump, this is, you know, he's sort of all but brought this upon himself. You know, Don Jr., just before Donald Trump took the stage last night, was

was calling Joe Biden a Roomba and mocking Joe Biden's mental fitness here. And so this is a moment in which clearly the target has been put on Donald Trump's back by Nikki Haley. The issue is over the course of her 11 months of campaigning, she did not attack the

Donald Trump's mental fitness. Literally just one month ago in an interview, she explicitly said that she believed that he had the cognitive ability to serve as president again. And so the question is, can she change course like she did over the last week and hammer that home? It's not clear. But now that she can tie these two together over the last 11 months, she has consistently, Rachel, said that it would be a President Kamala Harris, not a President Biden, that the country would have.

And so clearly she has made the decision to tie these two individuals, Joe Biden and Donald Trump together in her quest to try to differentiate herself and her generation from the potential to 80 and nearly 80 year olds that could be running against each other in November.

Vaughn Hilliard for us in Nashua at Trump campaign headquarters. Vaughn, I know we'll be back with you. We're waiting at this point to see if the candidate himself is going to make remarks there. We appreciate it, Vaughn. We will be back with you. We are joined now on set here by our colleagues Stephanie Ruhl and Alex Wagner. Alex, you get first word responding to this news that Trump has

Has won the New Hampshire primary. And we saw a very defiant speech there from Nikki Haley saying, I'm not going anywhere. Yeah, I believe Trump is the first Republican candidate since 1976 to win both Iowa and New Hampshire in an open campaign. That's right. Since Gerald Ford. That's right. It is a big victory for him. I was struck by Nikki Haley saying he earned it.

I mean, I guess it's your what is your definition of earn? This is someone who spent more time in courtrooms in the last few weeks and months than he has campaigning in New Hampshire. It has been a presidential campaign cycle unlike any other. You know, Nikki Haley said she's a fighter, that she's scrappy. She's going back to her home turf of campaigning.

South Carolina. But, you know, Rachel, you've seen this you've seen this state play out in previous presidential races. It is bare knuckle brawling in South Carolina. This is the state that had the whisper campaign against John McCain and the supposedly illegitimate president.

black daughter. This is Strom Thurmond territory and Lee Atwater. I mean, Donald Trump has already started going for the jugular with the birtherism stuff and Nikki Haley. I mean, it is going to be a bruising next month for this woman who very clearly did not want to talk about being the daughter of immigrants, did not want to talk about being the governor that took the Confederate flag down from the state capitol in the wake of the Mother Emanuel shooting. I mean, this is all stuff that I

I think for the general election could be, you know, important data points for Nikki Haley. But in a in a in a primary process that where nativism and xenophobia and latent, if not explicit racism has proven to be mana. I you know, I think it's going to get really, really ugly. Yeah. And she has a case to make as she made in her speech tonight. We don't need to decide this right away. It can take a couple of months. We'll still have plenty of time to take on Joe Biden. What is unsaid there is we don't have to decide this right away. Our guy may

Our guy might be going to prison. It'd be good if there was somebody else running against him still at that point. So we still had an opportunity to choose somebody else before the convention. But she's not wrong when she says Trump earned it. It doesn't matter how we feel or what he's done or the amount of charges against him. In the last three presidential elections, Republicans have chosen Donald Trump as their guy. Before I came to this, I was actually at an event tonight, not a political event, but it was filled with big,

Nikki Haley, New York donors. They're giving her lots and they'll continue to give her more. But the issue is they are these classic George Bush Republicans waiting for their moment to come back. And they're not right. When you look at how Nikki Haley performed tonight, Republicans didn't vote for her. These George Bush Republicans might have money, but they're not.

Republican voters. And it was independence that helped her tonight. And that's the issue for Joe Biden to focus on his messaging. And when she says things like the economy is crushing the middle class, everyone here at this table knows that's not a fact. The challenge is for Joe Biden to convince Americans of that. But you know what? Can I just give this sort of

The donors who are in La La Land and who are dreaming that they can go back to a George W. Bush. Can I just give you the case that they are probably making to each other? You're probably hearing. I don't know if you're hearing it. Tell me if I'm wrong. The case they're going to make is 2008.

And the case is about delegates. Right. So if you go back, let's go back to May of 2008. In the time machine in May of 2008, what was the fight in the DNC? It was about Michigan and Florida having gone early and having lost all of their delegates because they went out of turn. Hillary Clinton then gets to May and Barack Obama is real, real, real, real close to clinching the magic number of delegates. Right. So they have this huge fight over whether they get half delegates or whole delegates. Why was that a thing? Proportionality.

The case that can be made if you are in if you want to live on the planet that says that you can take down Donald Trump with a former South Carolina governor who, as Lawrence O'Donnell said, has governing experience. She was at the United Nations. Say what you want about her politics. But she seems normal to most people and would probably be a fairly strong general election candidate. The case you make is that she can thug it out.

If she wants to through July, even losing South Carolina, which is a winner take all state, because other than South Carolina, which is real weird, ironically unfortunate for her, most of these states are proportional.

So she's not going to get any delegates out of Nevada because she's not in the caucus. She's on the primary ballot. So that's those 26 delegates. Trump's going to get those. The 50 delegates in South Carolina. I mean, this is a highly evangelical state. She could lose her own state. But a whole lot of these other states. Let's talk about Michigan. Let's talk about Wisconsin. Let's talk about Missouri. Let's talk about North Dakota. Let's talk about.

The Virgin Islands, four little delegates. The way that proportionality works in American politics is that you can incrementally creep your way to the nomination. And what Barack Obama did in 2008 is he overtook Hillary Clinton through a series of unfortunate events, including Michigan and Florida, losing half their delegates. They wound up making a compromise. They got half of them back. But he delegated

creeped his way in caucuses in small states, getting proportional stuff in Texas. Now, I'm not saying she could actually get it, but if you're the donor class that wants Trump gone, you tell her, fuck it out for a few months. I'm going to put some more money in your bank account because if he gets convicted...

You do want to have a candidate with enough delegates to go with him. That's why this isn't 2008. Because the case that you just made, I can guarantee none of those donors who I spoke to tonight know a single bit of that. But they have...

pockets and they know Donald Trump is facing 91 charges. But don't they want somebody at the convention that could actually stay? You need somebody that's got delegates in hand at the convention. In both cases, it's the same thing. It's the rapture. The rapture option, right? There needs to still be somebody standing who's not going to get raptured in case there's a rapture. That's basically it.

- He was the Santa he wanted to be, but he was such a poor candidate who blew all of his money on private jets. - There's no reason for Nikki Haley to get out of the race ever unless by the time we get to the election, or by the time we get to the general election, Donald Trump has been acquitted in all of his cases. I mean, other than that happening, there's no reason for her to ever leave.

Right. Although usually what ends up happening is money dries up. So money dries up. And also political pressure is a real thing. I mean, she's a member of the Republican Party, presumably wants a future in the Republican Party. And usually what ends up happening is that people come and start to send some message. And it's not like the Trump people are like going to be subtle about that pressure. The pressure is going to be unbelievably intense. But it's going to be unbelievably intense starting tonight. I mean, you know what I mean? Like it's not going to get. I think you're right. I just think. Fire hose versus fire hose. I agree. I just think it's. Look.

Clearly, she came out of the gate tonight to speak early to send one message, which is I'm not getting out. Everything about that speech was to the donors in that room, to everyone else was, no, this is not like I'm fighting. And in fact, I think she turned up the attacks. It was a little bit of like burning the ships. Yeah. Because she turned up the attacks.

on Trump more than I've seen her in what will be her probably biggest national audience than she ever has, again, to reaffirm she's not getting out tomorrow. She's not going to come back tomorrow. And I think the reason for that is she has to right now, if you're her,

A, she's the last option left. B, she wants to preserve maximum options for herself. And C, to the point that we're all making, like the rapture might come. Right. People are not total idiots. And they understand that there's this huge sort of Damocles hanging over the entire. By the way, the argument that she's making, as much as it may infuriate the Biden team.

is the age argument actually has legs. Of course it does. Including with some voters that are on his side. So all she has to do is continue to be younger than them, which biologically she is going to get. And by the way, she's hitting Trump now on his loop-de-loop stuff. He's saying,

saying that makes it sound like he ain't all there. She doesn't face the same exact political pressures of other politicians. Here's the other reason why. Do you remember what happened when she was done being the U.N. ambassador? She got paid. She got paid from corporate America. She got paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to give speeches. I think she joined Boeing's board. And that's who she's being courted by right now. Ron DeSantis didn't have an exit strategy to join a corporate board, I assure you of that. Disney? Not available? She's now obligated

Yeah.

purposes right here. We need to talk to you because you understand the kind of pressure that can be put on a Republican candidate who may want to stay in forever, who nevertheless is nevertheless is getting pushed by some donors one way and getting pushed by the rest of the party the other way. What do you think of this discussion we're having about Nikki Haley's options, Michael? Well, I think it's spot on in a number of ways. And it's really interesting because

Alex and Joy kind of hit that sweet spot in their comments about where Nikki is right now. And the reality is a very straight up one for her. She did well. OK, South Carolina is ahead. You are 30 to 40 points down, depending on the polls in your home state. Your two state U.S. senators have endorsed the other guy. Your congresswoman and other members of your congressional delegation have come out and endorsed the other guy.

the state apparatus is forming around the other guys. So that begins to bubble up a great deal of pressure, as you were talking about. It's not just about how you perform in New Hampshire. It's how you're going to do in the upcoming states. To the conversation around proportionality, it's important to understand that up until March 15th in our Republican primaries, you can get a proportional amount of that vote. Super Tuesday is a part of that.

So what you then have is that pressure sort of galvanizing, starting with South Carolina and then ending up on Super Tuesday among three interest groups here. The first, of course, are those who love Nikki. Nikki, stay in. We love you. Love you. You're doing fine. Don't worry. You can increment your weight through this process. Then there's the donor class. You're like, OK, I'm

I think I want to write you another check. Give me another reason. OK, you did OK in New Hampshire. I'll give you another check. That goes to a lot of what Stephanie was just saying. But then the third piece, which is the more important one, is the rank and file members of the Republican Party. We know them affectionately as the base. They're not voting for Nikki. They don't want Nikki.

They've made it very clear now in two states, even one that is supposedly where Democrats and independents could have a strong hand in the outcome. Well, we see what that strong hand meant. It brought out for us, you know, an early call for Donald Trump.

The base is lined up exactly where the base wants to be. And Nikki's problem is going to be she doesn't have a game plan or a strategy to crack that base. All of the nice hot rhetoric about Donald Trump's age tonight and now swinging at him. Where was that six weeks ago, six months ago?

Where was all that vim and vigor to take on Donald Trump when you were asked directly about his mental acuity and you demurred, right? So you're not credible now. And you're not credible for the reason that the base looks at you and go, "Okay, is that how you really feel? Are you lying to us now or were you lying to us then?"

And so the trust factor for her becomes a real problem, which again, field pushes into that pressure. The donors get nervous, Rachel, they're going to get nervous. You're going to see them start getting nervous pretty soon. And that's, that's going to be a different kind of pressure. The political establishment, uh,

is not lined up with her by, as I just mentioned, her delegation and her U.S. senators standing with Trump. And that base vote is just not going to reorient itself. There's what, give me the number that she could come out of New Hampshire with that's going to move 20, 30 points in her home state of South Carolina. Yeah, I mean, I don't think anybody thinks she's going to... She can't win. She can't win in South Carolina. So the question is...

How does she move forward and how does she resist the pressure to leave? And my question, Michael, I mean, she has had a lot of money in this race, even though she hasn't been contending with Trump one for one vote for vote. How come she's never run an anti-Trump ad?

You know, I mean, we've seen her start to criticize Trump in her speeches and in her remarks. But has there been a Nikki Haley negative Trump ad? And will that start and will that make a difference? At this point, it really doesn't because the narratives are set in. Seventy five percent of the electorate in South Carolina is evangelical. What kind of ad do you run?

That's going to move the needle off of them. And then when you look at the states that make up Super Tuesday, even there, even in places like Michigan, where she could reasonably do well, there's a very strong core of Republican support. So, you run at this stage, given the success that Donald Trump has had in this primary season,

You didn't go after him in that first debate where he didn't show up, right? You sort of softballed it and then you raised your hand and said, if he's a convicted felon, I'll support him. Okay. Okay.

Oh, thank you. What are you doing? Right. So so now what do you do? How do you make the case to to the base of the party? What do you think the RNC is going to do? I mean, have you taken a poll of the 168 that make up the National Committee? Seventy five percent Trump. So there are a lot of walls that have been built up.

And they weren't in the process. She and her team weren't in the process of taking those bricks out of the wall as they were trying to build it. And so now she finds herself in a very difficult race, one that if she played it a little bit different in the beginning, could be very different for her on this back end. Yeah. And the question is whether she will restart, whether she will reset, restart and take a different tack from here on out. Former RNC chairman Michael Steele, our beloved colleague. Thank you for your time this evening. Good to have you here.

All right. This hour, Nikki Haley has congratulated Donald Trump on his victory in New Hampshire. And she also promised to keep going with her campaign, as we have been discussing. Steve Karnacki is going to take a look at the road ahead from here, starting with how big or how small a victory Trump has just won in New Hampshire tonight. Interesting poll, interesting results coming in to give us a sense of Trump's win tonight. That's after the break. Stay with us. Now you've all heard the chatter among the political class.

They're falling all over themselves saying this race is over. Well, I have news for all of them. New Hampshire is first in the nation. It is not the last in the nation. MSNBC Live Democracy 2024. Saturday, September 7th in Brooklyn, New York. Join your favorite MSNBC hosts at our premier live audience event. Visit msnbc.com slash democracy 2024 to buy your tickets today.

When news breaks, go beyond the headlines with the MSNBC app. Watch your favorite shows live. Get analysis from live blogs to in-depth essays and the latest updates on the 2024 election. Go beyond the what to understand the why. Download the app now at msnbc.com slash app. ♪

A Trump nomination is a Biden win and a Kamala Harris presidency. Nikki Haley giving remarks to her campaign headquarters tonight in New Hampshire.

After losing in the New Hampshire primary to Donald Trump. Now, how much has she lost by? What is the margin going to look like here? What will that do in terms of bragging rights and the case that she's making that she's not getting out of the race, no matter what the political class says? Let's go to Steve Kornacki for some of the metrics on this. Steve, what's it looking like in terms of the overall performance here? Yes, you can see we're close to 30 percent of the vote in statewide now, and Trump's lead is now

12 and a half points with what's been counted. And a couple of keys to this here. First of all, we can all of Concord is in. We showed you that earlier. These are the three biggest cities. Concord's number three. Manchester's number one. And you can see here now we're up to 80 percent in Manchester in the margin for Trump. It's been climbing a little bit each time we've looked at sitting at 15 points here.

in the state's largest city. And again, this was one where if this was going to be basically a toss up statewide, it would be a toss up in Manchester. So I think that's a gauge here of, you know, Haley's night here in terms of how far she's falling short of of making this a real game statewide. She probably need to be about forty nine percent here. She's missing by seven. Trump's going seven points over. That works in both directions.

Nashua, which closed at eight, is the second largest city. And this is one on paper that Haley wants to be winning. And she really wants to be winning it right now to get that Trump margin as low as she can get it. And 60 percent in, she's losing it by seven points to Donald Trump. Now, there is more to come. We'll see. We've seen, you know, there can be variance between these precincts and these wards. So we'll see in the rest of Nashua which parts come in and if it

elevates her. But she really needs to make up ground in population centers like Nashua right now to cut this lead down. A big, big source of votes for Haley, we can almost guarantee, still to be reported out, is going to be right here in Hanover, Dartmouth College, Donald Trump's worst town in 2016. It won't be a huge number of votes, but Haley, we are expecting, is going to get the

vast, vast majority of those. That'll help her cause so will the city of Lebanon south of it. We expect she'll do very, very well there. We're also still waiting on Durham, Collegetown University in New Hampshire. For that matter, we're waiting on Exeter. These are places where Haley can run up numbers and she needs to run up numbers because the problem

for Haley. We started to see this early in the night and I can tell you it has only continued and it is a continuation of what we saw in Iowa. When you get away from these population centers, when you get away from some of these suburban areas, places with higher concentrations of college degrees, uh, places with higher median incomes, she's significantly, significantly underperforming what we thought she needed to do to be in the game statewide. So again, you add that together right now, um,

And it is adding up to a 13 point Trump lead. And I don't think it's at all impossible from this vantage point. I mean, we will see. But if you look at these numbers, it's not impossible. Trump's going to still win this thing by more than 10 points by double digits. And in that sense, if if that were to happen and that's an if I'm just saying that is a possibility right now. You think back to what Haley just did. That was the Bill Clinton strategy in 92. The exit polls showed a toss up in 92. The early return showed a toss up.

Clinton ran downstairs, called himself the comeback kid. And then six hours later, they counted up the outlying areas and he lost by almost 10 points in 1992, but nobody remembered that they remembered early in the night. So I think that might've been the Haley playbook. We'll see again, these final returns. There is a chance she can keep this in single digits, maybe on the higher end, uh,

But I think what really stands out here and what really tells the story and I think might explain some of that rural and small town weakness that she's having is this. We show this at the beginning of the night. There is a very large number, a large number of independents and even, relatively speaking, Democrats. But look at this breakdown. OK, first of all, this is the current breakdown. Forty nine percent of the electorate calls themselves Republicans. Forty five percent independent. Six percent Democratic. Again, these are numbers you're not going to see in other states. But check this out.

Among Republicans, Donald Trump is beating Nikki Haley by essentially 50 points, 74 to 25. Among independent voters, Haley is beating Trump by 24 points, 61 to 37. That is a swing of 73 points.

between how Donald Trump is doing with Republicans and how he's doing with independents. And take it one step further among Democrats, the 6% who call themselves Democrats, it is Haley 84 and Trump 6%. So that is, you know, to rely on that kind of a...

I can't put it this way. The previous record that I'm aware of for a difference between the independent vote and the Republican vote in a New Hampshire primary was back in 2000. John McCain won the independent vote by 42. George W. Bush won the Republican vote by one as a 43 point swing. Now we're talking a 73 point swing. So the idea that this is.

a great result for Haley that gives her new life and everything. The core problem of her candidacy has been appeal within the Republican Party. And she's running at 25%. That core problem has not been addressed at all here in New Hampshire. She's just benefiting from a uniquely, massively high number of non-Republicans. And to take this one step further, if we start talking about the states that are coming next, obviously South Carolina is the next state where they're both going to be on the ballot. So

South Carolina does not have party registration. Okay? So you ask everybody, anybody can participate. Theoretically, every Democrat in the state, if they don't vote in the Democratic primary, could go and vote in the Republican primary. So it's a fair game for everybody to participate. But

We always ask in the exit poll in South Carolina, what do you think of yourself as? Do you think of yourself as a Republican, as an independent, as a Democrat? Now, the highest non-Republican mix we've seen in a South Carolina primary was 40%.

That was 31 percent independent and 9 percent self-identified Democrat. That was in 2000 when John McCain won New Hampshire with all of those independents. OK, and John McCain still lost South Carolina by 12 points to George W. Bush. If you apply the results I just showed you, you know, Trump's strength with Republicans, Haley's with independents and with Democrats. If you applied them to that 2000 demographic mix in South Carolina, the most non-Republican they've ever had.

Trump would win the state by 15 points. Right. So that is...

Again, Haley, this is... We'll see how strong the result ends up being for her. Now we're at 30%, and it's 13 points. But just thinking of South Carolina and then thinking beyond, because what happens beyond South Carolina, when you get to Super Tuesday and the big, massive states, they're not necessarily or on paper winner-take-all, but in a two-person race, which is what this is, they functionally are. Because those states, a lot of them have rules that basically say...

Every congressional district, there's three delegates. If you get 50 percent, you win them all. Well, in a two person race, you basically get 50. Someone's going to get 50 percent. And so if Trump is winning these states, even by small margins, he could very easily sweep the congressional districts. And then they have the same rule statewide. Hit 50 percent statewide. Get all the delegates. So functionally, you know, a lot of these states, you know, Michigan is...

Most of the votes are given out. If you get 50 percent in a congressional district, you win them all. It's about three quarters of the of the delegates in Michigan, California. You have 50 percent statewide. You take them all. Texas, 50 percent in a congressional district. You take them all. 50 percent statewide for the at large. You take them all. Alabama, you go on and on. It is designed the Republican process for a quick resolution. And it would be as

thing this year is that the Trump forces since 2020 have really taken control of some of these state party organizations and in some cases changed the rules. California, which I just cited, that's a rule change. That was a rule change implemented by the Trump forces since

With this exact scenario in mind, where if you get to California and it's still a game, how do you get that big pot of delegates? Well, you change it and you just need 50% plus one statewide. You get them all.

And that's why it helps to have an experienced political operation who is working the delegate game from the very beginning before even the first votes are cast. I know this is going to seem a little bit strange, but if it's possible, control room, can we look at the Democratic...

primary results. We had a projection as soon as the polls closed in New Hampshire that President Joe Biden would win. The unusual thing here, well, there's a number of unusual things. One is that there aren't 10 delegates that are being awarded on the basis of these results in the New Hampshire Democratic primary. This is a symbolic primary only. But the other part of it that's important here is that Joe Biden wasn't on the ballot.

And so for him to win, for him to even compete in New Hampshire, he had to be written in by people who were not seeing his name on a sheet of paper that had 21 other, 21, I think, other people listed on it, including two people who campaigned really hard in New Hampshire. Mr. Phillips, his name is Dean. Dean.

And Ms. Williamson, her name is Marianne. Yes, nailed it. You can see the results there. Again, this is only 12% in with a lot of write-in vote. You would expect that this would take some time to get there. But no question as to whether or not President Joe Biden has won this purely meaningless election.

beauty contest in the state of New Hampshire. Let's bring in our colleague Jen Psaki, who knows former president, who knows President Biden, who is a former very important part of the Biden administration and its White House communications team. Jen is in Manchester this evening in New Hampshire. Jen, are we hearing anything interesting or substantive from President Biden's side tonight?

I mean, we are. I mean, there are statements flying out from the Biden team tonight. None of them have anything to do with the outcome in New Hampshire tonight. I'm sure they're relieved of what the outcome was on some level, but they're ready to move forward, basically. So, Rachel, a couple of statements, one from the campaign out tonight, which indicates to me that they are moving to the general election, whether Nikki Haley is staying in or not.

They are moving on to the race against Donald Trump. And let me read you just two of the key sentences that stuck out to me. The first is tonight's results confirm Donald Trump has all but locked up the GOP nomination and the election denying anti-freedom MAGA movement has completed its takeover of the Republican Party. Lots of messaging in there, obviously, but they're

saying we're running against him. The last line of the statement is one thing is increasingly clear today. Donald Trump is headed straight into a general election matchup where he'll face the only person to have ever beaten him at the ballot box, Joe Biden. So the race is on for them. They're moving to the general election. Uh,

whether or not Haley stays in. The other statement that came out from the White House tonight, Rachel, was from the president. And this was about news that leaked earlier this evening. My hunch here is this was not their intention for this news to get out today, which is that Jen O'Malley, Dylan and Mike Donilon, two very close advisors to the president within the inner circle, are moving from the White House to Delaware to help play senior roles on the campaign. So lots of news, lots of reaction, none involving the New Hampshire outcome.

Well, but involving the New Hampshire outcome on the Republican side. I mean, Jen, that's true. I mean, we're very focused tonight on Nikki Haley's prospects and how tight or distant the margin is going to be between her and Donald Trump. Steve Kornacki just laid out to us some very brutal numbers in terms of how poorly she did with self-identified Republicans who are voting in the Republican primary. And so the places she's

places she's getting numbers from tonight in New Hampshire are from people who self-identify as Democrats and people who self-identify as independents. And those, of course, are the people who the Biden campaign is trying to mobilize in the general election to support President Biden's reelection. So, I mean, it's just New Hampshire. It's just this electorate. It's just this one contest. But here's

Everybody who's sort of Biden inclined or potentially Biden curious saying like, we're going to get out and vote for Nikki Haley, even though it's awkward and we need to change our registration and do all this stuff. And it's not really our peeps. And here's the Biden campaign saying Nikki Haley is nothing. We are pretending she is not there. We know we are running against Trump. Nikki Haley's prospects mean nothing to us. So there is a little bit of a cross purpose here for people who like Joe Biden and people who are trying to elect Joe Biden at his campaign HQ.

Yes. And look, those Biden curious, Haley curious, Biden curious people are key to them. I mean, if you look at these numbers that Steve was just going through, one of the things that I bet is sticking out to the Biden campaign is that number of Democrats who turned out because the last percentage was three percent the last time, if I'm getting my numbers correct here. So it means it's much more than that. And what that means, Rachel, to them is that people were motivated to go out and participate in this to vote against Donald Trump.

Yeah, that is a good sign for the Biden team. It could because the concern has been people aren't excited. They're not energized. That's a good thing. We obviously don't know the entire breakdown of the independents, but those are all

are also potential voters for Joe Biden. I mean, they look a lot at this number that was in The Washington Post earlier this week. It's about 81 percent, I believe, of Haley supporters or people who are supporting Haley in that in that poll who think that Biden was legitimately elected. Now, the bar is low. I think we can all agree. But to them, those are all people who might be by

in voters in a general election. So they do look at these numbers and the outcome of the Republican primary as telling them. They're learning something from it as well. And I'm sure they'll be digging through the data in the coming days as well.

Jen, very, very, very good point in terms of how the Democrats have to look at these results from New Hampshire and who can who can cross over to being a targetable Biden general election voter who might have turned out for Nikki Haley today. It's not a it's not a single set. Right. It's an overlapping set. This thing happened. I think it was a week and a half ago whenever Asa Hutchinson withdrew from the campaign. Oh, I know. He was still in the campaign. Yeah.

And the DNC released this kind of snarky statement saying, oh, we had no idea you were even still in the campaign. I'm channeling their snark. And the White House immediately basically rescinded in an official way, if you will, what the DNC had said.

Karine Jean-Pierre was out there saying, you know, effectively, we don't condone this level of snark. I think, one, that's sort of principle in politics, but it's also a very canny strategy here. If you're voting for Asa Hutchinson, you sure might be Biden-curious. You are voting against Trump. Anybody who's against Trump, we will take you. Popular front.

I think it's not a coincidence that you're not hearing a lot about Nikki Haley and her voters and her lack of support or whatever, because as you and Jen just discussed, and those are the Biden curious voters. Also, Rachel.

We make fun of kind of like what a nothing burger the Biden result is. But there was some concern that Dean Phillips, who invested five million dollars in New Hampshire, was maybe going to beat Biden or come really close to him. And as much as the White House will say we're not worried about a 30 party challenge, the optics of the sitting president getting a run for his money in New Hampshire, even if he wasn't on the ballot by a by a gelato baron named Dean Phillips.

You know, Ro Khanna was there. Jamie Raskin was up there. Maggie Hassan, the senator, they were all

quietly doing the work to convince people that Joe Biden was worth writing. Somebody did an AI attack on the Biden campaign. If this was unimportant, someone saw fit to actually send out fake robocalls of Joe Biden's voice. We have no idea who did that. There was a little bit of drama, but I think

to the point that you're making a little bit off of that point, there's a good reason why the Biden team is probably glad Nikki Haley doesn't get out too, which is the longer she stays in, the more she triggers Donald Trump. And the more she triggers just with her physical presence, Donald Trump, the more he says the kinds of things that remind people why they'd rather have Joe Biden, because he's going to keep birthering her. He's going to keep digging into the very kinds of like antics that have made him unacceptable to some independent voters. But then why are they putting on

these statements tonight downplaying the effect of her results. Because they're not running against her. They definitely don't want to run against a much younger candidate who's making that very pointed argument about him on an age sort of area. So they don't want to run against her. They don't want to recognize her as a competitor. But I...

I promise you they don't mind if she stays in. Here's the thing. Every election night in the Trump era, basically the same trends pertain. And again tonight, like Haley is now the proxy for the anti-Trump vote. Like, where is she doing well? Well, she's overperforming in places with high degrees of college attainment and in denser areas, right? Those have been, when you control for other demographics, those are, and she's not doing

And she's clobbering him where Dartmouth is, of course. And she's getting clobbered in Berlin, you know, in the north, in these industrial places and rural places. We have seen this time and time again. Here's the thing about this.

Donald Trump is a uniquely polarizing figure in American politics and has been from the beginning. And sometimes, in certain contexts, like a Republican primary, that polarization cleaves such that he wins more voters off the polarization than he loses on it. At a national level, it has always lost him more voters than it's gained, which is why he lost the popular vote to Hillary Clinton. But polls

the Electoral College trade. In certain states, it's worked for him, like in Missouri in the 2018 Senate race, where his polarization absolutely got Josh Hawley elected. The math worked in Missouri. It didn't work at the national level in 2020. It didn't work at a congressional level in 2022. It's back to working in a Republican primary. But the same

dynamic is there and the math is clear as day staring you in the face when you look at that board there when he's losing independence by 40 points and winning Republicans by 50. It's the same math. Chris, that math is also why the Biden White House is happy to let

Nikki Haley stay in this fight. Let Donald Trump sink his money into her, sink his attacks against her because they look at the math and say at the end of the day, she can stay in this for a while, but we're still going to be running against Donald Trump. Let her bruise him. Let her empty his bank account. And then we'll take a look at him this summer. Let me put up one of the exit polls we haven't talked about yet. Do you guys have this fitness...

Exit poll, can we put this up there? And this is comparing between Iowa and New Hampshire. The question here is, if Trump is convicted, is he fit to be president? Iowa electorate and the Iowa Republican caucuses last week.

percent of them said if Trump is convicted, he's still fit to be president. But nearly a third, 31 percent said if he's convicted, he is not fit to be president. I mean, that is a that is a that is an Iowa caucus that Donald Trump won by 30 points and still nearly a third of the people who turned out in that caucus said if he's convicted, I'm out. Look at New Hampshire tonight.

44% of New Hampshire voters saying, if he is convicted, I am out. And he, I mean, he may be winning by double digits in New Hampshire and it may be, and it may be something that makes him feel warm and toasty inside because this had a lot of, you know, independence and even Democratic leaning independence in the electorate. But if 44% of the people who turned out in an electorate, maybe they did give him a double digit lead.

are out if he gets convicted. It means the rapture option needs to be alive. And why a Nikki Haley or even a Ron DeSantis didn't want to come straight for Trump and attack him? Because if they do, that's attacking his voters. So if she just mildly attacks him, she's not kicking his voters out of bed. But if he gets nabbed by the government, she can say, like, remember, it's me. It wasn't that mean. I remember.

How do you do that in a two-person race? You know, I mean, the pressure is going to be extreme. He's making it easy for her when he mistakes her for Nancy Pelosi. You're talking about it from Nikki Haley's vantage point. I think you're not really... The MAGA base...

Which already doesn't like Nikki Haley and everything she represents from her heritage to her corporate ties to her sort of rhino esque impression that she's left, I think, on some of the field is going to hate her even more if she is the thing standing between Donald Trump and the nomination. And that level of rage is it's going to go through the roof. But the level of rage, the problem is it's a ping pong, right? It's attached to a cord that keeps hitting Donald Trump in the face to the point.

is that every time he hits her, he hits her in a way that just happens to remind whatever independents are left out there that are, that can't decide. He is constantly reminding people of why he is unacceptable to so many people. Can I just say one last thing? Yeah. Just the,

end of this race was the most perfect distillation of the Donald Trump versus the rest of the field, which is that he closed on two messages. This like disgusting birtherism and racist nickname about her. And she wants to cut Social Security. And I was just like, you could not

produced a more succinct articulation of why Donald Trump has wrenched this party away from the people who used to run it. That's what they want. Those two things. Cutting Social Security. Like, let's go to Paul and we go to Paul Ryan. Yeah, exactly. Let's go to this. All right. With this win in New Hampshire tonight, Donald Trump takes a major step toward becoming the Republican nominee for president, of course, when he won last week in Iowa.

His victory speech was a sort of politically sanitized version of the way he has otherwise been campaigning. The Iowa speech was lots of thank yous and praise for other Republicans, a notable lack of, Chris, what you were just describing in terms of the racist birtherist attacks on Nikki Haley, and a notable lack in the Iowa victory speech of, like, you know, promises to build camps to hold millions of people or to root out his internal enemies like vermin. He didn't do that. And...

Seeing him dial it back like that in Iowa, that's an important part of understanding the way this candidate and the Republican Party are going to try to win the election. So this is a decision that we revisit constantly and that we will revisit constantly. But tonight we're expecting Trump to speak momentarily. We are going to go to those remarks to see how he uses this moment at least constantly.

At first, we'll see how it goes. Again, this is a decision that is one that we consider to be an open-ended, live decision. Let's go to Trump headquarters right now in Nashua, New Hampshire. Thank you, everybody. Thank you. Whoa! USA! USA! USA! USA! USA! USA!

Well, I want to thank everybody. This is a fantastic state. This is a great, great state. You know, we won New Hampshire three times now. Three. We win it every time. We win the primary. We win the generals. We've won it. And it's a very, very special place to me. It's very important. If you remember in 2016, we came here and we needed that winner. We won by 21 points and it was great.

And today, I have to tell you, it was very interesting because I said, wow, what a great victory. But then somebody ran up to the stage all dressed up nicely when it was at seven. But now I just walked up and it's at 14. But she ran up when it was seven.

And, you know, we have to do what's good for our party. And she was up and I said, well, there we go. So this is part of the issue here. So Donald Trump saying that he won New Hampshire not only in previous primaries, but that he won New Hampshire in the general election is not true. Donald Trump did to his credit.

in 2016 win the New Hampshire Republican primary. He did in 2020 win the New Hampshire Republican primary. But both in 2016, when he was competing against Hillary Clinton in the general election, he narrowly lost New Hampshire in the general election. And then in 2020, when he was competing against Joe Biden in the general election, he lost New Hampshire by a good, fair chunk of vote. So,

The former president has opened his remarks tonight once again by proclaiming falsehoods about previous elections. This is what makes it hard to take him, his pronouncements live. We'll try again, though. Here we go. You have the very the now very unpopular governor of this state. This guy, he's got to be on something. I've never seen anybody with energy. He's like hopscotch.

And, you know, I'm watching this guy and two weeks ago he said, we're going to win, we're going to win in Atlanta. We're going to win. About three days ago he started saying, well, we want to do well. That's a big difference. But I walked out just now, we're 14 points up and I don't know what it's going to be. But when she was up here, it was like six or seven.

And, you know, with like 7% of the vote counted. Now, let me just tell you, we had an unbelievable week last week in Iowa. We set a record. It was the best in the history of the caucus in the history.

And I remember I sort of had the same feeling. I'm up and I'm watching and I said, "She's taking a victory lap." And we beat her so badly she was... But Ron beat her also. You know, Ron came in second and he left. She came in third and she's still hanging around. The other thing, she only got 25% of the Republican votes. I don't know if you saw that.

Tremendous numbers of independents came out because in this state, because you have a governor that doesn't frankly know what the hell he's doing, in this state, in the Republican primary, they accept Democrats to vote. In fact, I think they had 4,000 Democrats before October 6th. They already voted.

Now, they're all devoting because they want to make me look as bad as possible. Because if you remember, we won in 2016. And if you really remember it, if you want to play it straight, we also won in 2020 by more. And we did much better in 2020 than we did in 2016. But as they said, we lost by a whisker, just by a whisker.

No, no, no. But we can't let that happen. You know, you have to have people that speak up. I said...

I can go up and I can say to everybody, oh, thank you for the victory. It's wonderful. Or I can go up and say, who the hell was the imposter that went up on the stage before and, like, claimed a victory? She did very poorly, actually. She had to win. The governor said, she's going to win, she's going to win, she's going to win. Then she failed badly. Now, I have here, if he promises to do it in a minute or less...

But the only person more angry than, let's say me, but I don't get too angry, I get even. The only person, because he was there, and he did fantastically well, by the way, and then he endorsed me. And we don't have to talk about Tim Scott, who, by the way, just got engaged, we have to tell you. And that's more important than all of this stuff. But a man that got to know her very well is Vivek. I said Vivek. I said Vivek.

Go up and say a few words about it. He has to do it in one minute or less. And then we're going to just say we had one hell of a night tonight. And one other thing before Vivek comes. Do you see that, Paul? We're going to put it up. We have beaten Biden. You could almost say who can't. Who the hell can't? The man can't put two sentences together. He can't find the stairs off a stage. Who can't? But.

Vivek, one minute or less. Go do it, Vivek. What we saw tonight is... Donald Trump giving an unusual victory speech in New Hampshire in which...

He initially, at the outset of his remarks, said that he had won New Hampshire, not only previous primaries, but had won in previous general elections. He lost both in 2016 and in 2020 in the New Hampshire general election contests. He then reiterated that and then handed over his victory speech to Vivek Ramaswamy, who

After saying we don't need to talk about Tim Scott, and by the way, he got engaged, and that's more important than any of this, and then we did one...

So... He seemed to suggest also that the governor of New Hampshire is on some sort of drug. He said, I don't know what he's on. Baseless. The governor. Which I think is utterly baseless, just to be clear. Yes. But I just want to be clear, like you said this. So he said it casually, we won the primaries and we won the general. He came back to linger on it. Yeah. Acknowledging at one point, like, they said we lost by a whisper. But really, we won, and we won in 2016, and we won by a bigger amount in 2020. And again, like...

Like, there are misstatements, there are, you know, have truths, politicians tell, but like, the fundamental core lie that is the

of the whole democratic crisis the country faces right now revolves around this just simple matter of history. You see it reflected in two thirds of Iowa primary voters saying that Joe Biden was not legitimately elected. One half of those voters in New Hampshire. Like, so this is just in a different category, I would submit. Well, let's just, I mean, let's just be really clear about this, right? So Trump saying tonight, after having won the New Hampshire primary, which he has done twice before, that

Having then gone on to say, that's not enough. You can't just claim credit. You have to claim credit. You have to falsify the election results in the two times that you lost the state.

is a form of like reality bullying in a way. And he's done this around Iowa as well. So for example, he doesn't have bragging rights about winning the Iowa caucuses. He lost the Iowa caucuses in 2016 to Ted Cruz. But after winning the Iowa caucuses this time, he said, oh, it's really great to have won it for three times in a row.

And he knows that it's not true. And he knows that everybody listening to him knows that it's not true. It's like his insistence on the date of the Spanish flu epidemic or his insistence on what the hurricane track was going to be that he had to draw in with a Sharpie. It's an exercise in bending reality to his will and insisting that others follow. It's an exercise in making reality

People who love him denounce reality and endorse his view instead as a form of fealty, as a form of loyalty. And it's a way of breaking the truth in our country and showing that his most loyal people will do that in a performative and a facing way. It's called religious faith. The psychiatrist who wrote the book about him literally, uh,

all agreed that this is a very serious lifelong problem. He's now in his like 70th year of never being satisfied with reality, even on the days when he wins, because life can never, ever give him what he wants. His insecurity being so profoundly deep and and permanent. The victory speech, by the way, in political campaigns in the primary season,

is always supposed to be about...

Winning more voters. Yes, uniting the party. In the next election, whether that's the general election or the next state, you are supposed to reach out to voters who expressed a different feeling tonight. Say, reach out to the voters who voted for Haley. You don't have to specify that that's what you're doing. But every politician prior to Donald Trump has found a way to do that. He never has. And just I think it's because you set it up with the last time, which is that, you know, throughout these elections,

however many years we are now into this, nine years, I suppose, right? 2015 is when he sort of starts. You know, there have always been these moments where there's like, he's able to sort of perform some version of like conventional campaigning. He stays on script and people say, oh, if only that, you know, it's like a joke. It's a trope, right? Like, if only that Donald Trump. And so like last time in Iowa, it was a more conventional, it was gracious, it was thank you.

So I'm glad that we saw that because that's this sort of petulant incoherence, which is really kind of the... No, it's really the rhetorical register that he is at at all times. I mean, and particularly in the last three days on the trail. I mean, I don't know if people have been seeing the clips, but it is...

A constant degree of essentially petulant incoherence. That has been the sort of general vibe, much different than the rare moment of something approaching composure. Slow that down, though. Petulant incoherence. When you say incoherence, what do you mean?

Well, you know, he... Every... I saw him speak earlier about gas prices. And in his... He talked about gas prices, and he said they're higher than they've ever been. You know, they were $2 when I left. Okay, so they're not higher than they've ever been. They're below $3. It's just reality. They were $2 during COVID when no one was on the road. Okay, so...

But, you know, they're throwing everything they have at us, so it's coming down now. But, man, if he gets in, then never know what's going to happen with the gas. So...

Again, this is just the sort of it's like it's the salesman patois. It's the it's the sort of pitter patter. But there has this has been the sort of general rhetorical mode. And people have noted it. Nikki Haley in her speech tonight talking about the fact that he was sort of ranting about January 6th and said that Nikki Haley was the one who had destroyed some evidence or had not destroyed evidence, had not allowed them to bring the National Guard in when he meant it was actually Nancy Pelosi. Right.

And that general aggrieved but hard to follow vibe has been the candidate Trump of this campaign. But it's also been the Donald Trump of his life. I mean, if you look at his biography, the one religion that his family was ever associated with was Norman Vincent Peale, the power of positive thinking. And it is part of him. If you read Mary Trump's biography and others about the way he grew up, it is this notion that

to lose is to be a loser. Yes. And to lose is actually the greatest sin. It's the one thing you can't do that his parents, his father, his parents would never allow you to get away with, you know, and you really see it as he's gotten older that it is now enhanced by this kind of

tick the things that trigger him, he can't stop ranting about them. And sometimes he substitutes the thing that triggers him most for the thing he's talking about. So when Barack Obama is triggering him, he'll say Barack Obama when he means Joe Biden. Right. If he's triggered by Nikki Haley, he says Nikki Haley when he means Nancy Pelosi. So he's super triggered. But he also is

acclimatized and was raised by this sort of Norman Vincent Peale. And if you look back at like videos of this guy back in when he was a speaker, it was all about bending reality to your will. Because she has been invoked, we must summon her. Joining us now, I'm very, very pleased to say it's Nancy Pelosi, the former House Speaker, the current Speaker Emerita. Madam Speaker, we have so much to ask you. We're so glad you could be here with us tonight. My pleasure. Thank you. You

You have been invoked in this current discussion that we are having, I'm sorry to say, because the former president in campaigning in New Hampshire did repeatedly try to attack you over the response to the January 6th insurrection at the U.S. Capitol building.

His opponent, Nikki Haley, has made a lot of hay out of the fact that in trying to attack you, he kept using her name instead. We've heard what Nikki Haley thought about that, that confusion, that mistake by Donald Trump. But I don't know what you thought about it. And I'm curious.

Well, let me just say I'm not going to spend too much time on Donald Trump's cognitive disorders. But what I am going to say and I want to in friendship say to Chris, he tried to say that Nikki Haley did not allow the National Guard to come, but it was Nancy Pelosi. It was nobody. It was Joe. It was Donald Trump.

He knows and you know that Mitch McConnell, Chuck Schumer and I begged for hours for the National Guard to come. He knows that we don't have the party to bring the National Guard. The president does. Sad to say for the District of Columbia, because every other state, the governor has that power. So.

I'm more concerned about what he was trying to accuse her of than, again, his many misrepresentations. But don't spend so much time on him. We don't agonize about him. We organize. And Joe Biden is our nominee. And he's going to be again. He and Kamala Harris are again going to be president and vice president of the United States.

It's now the time. The intensity has arrived. The election year is here. As you see, some folks have come over from the White House. Jill O'Malley Dillon and Mike Donilon, two stars of the political arena in our country, joining Julie.

Julia's wonderful, Julia Chavez Rodriguez. She's done a great job as the campaign manager. She has the biggest record of money raised for a presidential campaign. More importantly, she's mobilizing at the grassroots level. We organize and they will come now together with the message to go forward. So the message, so when he lies, I mean, he's a constant liar, but when he lies, he's

Sometimes you have to listen to him. For example, he lied and said, oh, Obamacare sucks. I mean, to use his kind of language, Obamacare sucks. Listen to when he says that. Of course, it doesn't. Affordable care occurs. So in the campaign, people have to understand that their well-being is on the ballot.

Whether it's a woman's right to choose, which yesterday we observed the 51st anniversary of when that became respected in our country until his judges pulled that down and he brags about that. He says he's going to terminate the Affordable Care Act. And what does that mean to you?

If you have a preexisting condition, if you have a child in college after college who still needs health care, if you're a woman, being a woman is no longer a preexisting condition. The list goes on and on about the benefits of the Affordable Care Act. So people have to understand. Listen when he speaks because he does not have your interest at heart, even though you may not.

you know, I respect as you see your interest, but I make sure that you know how you're affected by some of what he says, whether it's guns, whether it's climate, whether it's a woman's right to choose, whether it's health care. You know, in 2018,

People said to me, weren't you lucky that health care became the central issue of the campaign and that's how you won 40 seats and win the House? I said, no, we weren't lucky. We made our own luck. So let's get on with it. Let's forget about him and his dysfunction and understand that we have to get out our vote. We have to mobilize on the ground. We have to message in the interest of

As Lincoln said, public sentiment is everything. With it, you can accomplish almost anything. Without it, practically nothing. And we have to have the financial resources. And Joe Biden has proven that he can attract that message, mobilization, money. Joe Biden, great vision, great knowledge, great strategic thinker, great legislator and a person with a big heart and empathy for the American people.

Speaker Pelosi, it's Alex Wagner. Thanks for joining us tonight. How are you? In addition to abortion and the ACA, it seems like one of the issues that's very much front of mind with Republican voters tonight and those who may not be fans of Donald Trump is whether or not he is going to be convicted. I'll

point you to some of the exit polling we have tonight. 47% of Republican New Hampshire primary voters say they would not consider Donald Trump fit to be president if he were convicted of a crime. Last week, 31% of Iowa caucus goers said effectively the same. As of this evening, he's almost certainly going to be the nominee.

I do have to ask you, should the American people know whether they are potentially voting for a convicted felon? You you established the January 6th committee in June, I believe, of 2021. It held its first public hearing in July of 2021. Do you take any issue given that history and the fact that you're an American voter with a timeline that the Department of Justice has pursued on this, both in terms of the investigation and the prosecution of Donald Trump?

Well, let me say that no one in our country is above the law. And that certainly applies to someone who wants to be president of the United States. And many of the transgressions that the president has engaged in are about his integrity. But it's also about our security. But people, his base doesn't seem to care about some of that.

in those states and in any event. But the fact is they have to know what it means in their lives, that they're no longer going to have affordable care, that there will be a national ban on access to an abortion. So the elections about freedom

Yes, writ large. But it's also about your personal freedom in your lives. And all the things that Joe Biden did in the camp in his presidency with the help of Democrats in the House and Senate, I might add, and modestly, were great things to create jobs. Twenty six. What?

But how many million more jobs? Sixteen million jobs created. The market hit thirty eight thousand. Now it's down to thirty seven nine or something today, but record high. What that means to people's 401ks. The issue about, again, child tax or Biden child tax credit, what that means to women to be in the workplace. Actually, dads, too, but in the workplace. So we have to.

carefully and with great, shall we say, prioritizing, make sure people understand. While they may want to vote for a convicted felon, do they want to vote for somebody who's going to take away your health care, especially if you have a pre-existing condition or a child with one? Do you want to make sure that your daughter, wife, sister, someone in your family has no freedom to make a judgment about her reproductive health?

Do you want to vote for somebody who ignores that in the country, 80-some percent of American people think there should be background checks

for purchasing of firearms to reduce the violence in our country. And young people care so much about the climate issue, which this person doesn't... I don't even have to understand it, much less understands or is solely in the pocket of the fossil fuel industry, which is probably blocking his understanding of the fate of our planet. So the fate of our democracy, the fate of our planet...

the personal decisions for people at their kitchen table. How are they going to make ends meet? We reduce the cost of prescription drug.

Look, insulin in the IRA bill, insulin before the bill was $500 to $600 a month for seniors on Medicare. And now it's $35 a month. They want to change that back because they're in the pocket of fossil fuel industry, they're in the pocket of a farmer, they're in the pocket of the gun industry. So people have to—we have to have clarity and, again, transparency.

Prioritizing what and that's what we did in 2020, when 22, when people said, you're going to lose 30, 40 seats. We said, we're not. I don't know why the people that sit in Washington or New York and say these things when they're not in the hinterlands, but into the fight on the ground, mobilizing and fighting. We knew that gun violence protection, a woman's right to choose climate and democracy was

And health care were very important. And the contrast, we had to make the contrast. This is what your member of Congress has voted for. This is what our candidate is for. And that's why we kept the minimum to five seats difference rather than 30 or 40, as was predicted. So, again, we just we have to get out there and get the job done. And we have a mobilization. But I just say this one more thing. When we save the Affordable Care Act, remember?

Remember when? Yes. He was going to, you know, repeal and replace. But whatever the replace was, nobody ever knew. We had 10,000 events throughout the country where people came forward and told their stories. Nothing more eloquent than that. Certainly more eloquent than the misrepresentation of the president, former president. Oh, well, former president.

of the White House when he says Obamacare sucks. Let's have a fight about that. I feel like Democrats have their marching orders if they have tuned into this program this evening. Speaker Merida, Nancy Pelosi, a treat to have you on in this sort of critical moment for the presidential race. Thanks for your time tonight. Rachel. Nancy Pelosi. Just win, baby. Just win, baby. Just win, baby.

Just win, baby. Saying that she does not want to talk about his cognitive disorders and she does not want to talk about him and his dysfunctions. Yes. And instead laying out what it is she does want to talk about. Veiled. Well, sort of. We just heard Nancy Pelosi there saying the election is about democracy and freedom writ large. Also about freedom and individual lives. President Biden and Vice President Harris have been making that exact same case. And they did so today at a campaign stop.

in Virginia. We've got some sound from that queued up for you, plus more about what happened tonight in New Hampshire and what's about to happen in this campaign and the road ahead. Stay with us. We'll be right back.

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Today's news requires more facts, more context, and more analysis. The world's never been harder to understand. That's why it's never been more important to try. MSNBC. Understand more. In 2016, Donald Trump won the New Hampshire primary by a lot.

He had just lost in Iowa, but in 2016, when he came to New Hampshire, he beat his nearest rival, John Kasich, by about 20 points. Ahead of that New Hampshire victory in 2016, Trump had racked up endorsements from precisely zero Republicans in Congress, none in the House, none in the Senate, not even any sitting governors either.

So you contrast that New Hampshire experience in 2016 for Trump with what has just happened tonight.

As of tonight, heading into today's New Hampshire primary, a majority, more than half of all Republicans in the House and Senate had already endorsed Trump. Again, by this point in the race in 2016, that number was zero. He's now got a majority of elected Republicans in Washington. Former presidential contender Tim Scott was the latest high-profile senator to endorse Trump before tonight on Friday. After Ron DeSantis dropped out this weekend, he too endorsed Trump. That makes him the 11th sitting Republican.

Thank you.

John Cornyn, same guy, was saying that Donald Trump cannot win in 2024. What this is, is full consolidation of the Republican Party behind Donald Trump. It raises the question of what room there is for Nikki Haley to make decisions

progress among Republicans. Given the results tonight, given her performance among Republican voters in New Hampshire and given the overall margin in New Hampshire, what is her deer trail out of this particular wilderness? Let's head over to Steve Karnacki at the big board.

Take a look here. I'll call it up here to latest results. And I think this does. Well, let's get New Hampshire up here. And I think let's get to that question here. As soon as I get up on the screen. OK, the question here of what Haley is going to come out of New Hampshire with tonight, which gets to the final margin, which gets to where she's getting her votes from, where Donald Trump is getting his votes from.

And I think we've been sort of saying she wants to keep this in single digits. And what sort of happened tonight, to put this in some perspective, is obviously we showed you the exit poll early in the night, which from Haley's standpoint had some encouraging news for her, just in terms of the composition of the electorate. It looked like a very—and it was, it is—

a very high number of independents who are in this electorate, and even Democrats. The current exit poll with all of the waves put in right now has Democrats at 6% of this electorate. Again, it's usually two, three, so it's double, triple what you'd usually expect for that. So that was good news for Haley. And the initial reports we saw were from cities like

Dover and Concord and Keene, where she was doing quite well, doing basically what she needed to do to make this a race statewide. What has happened since, though, we talked about this particularly in small towns and in rural New Hampshire. She just she's just getting swamped.

She needed to be, you know, like she was in Iowa. We talked about this in Iowa. A lot of rural counties, a lot of counties with low median income, with low college attainment. She wasn't even getting out of single digits in Iowa. And she's not, you know, she's out of single digits here because it's a two-person race, but she's getting swamped in a lot of those places. So that has held her back.

from really making this competitive statewide. And then she's had some other things kind of go wrong for her. Take a look at this one. I think this is the biggest on the board right now. Nashua is the second largest city in the state. And this is one Haley didn't just need to win. She needed to win this thing by a pretty comfortable margin. And on paper,

to be winning statewide. That was essential. It looks like we've got a little bit left in Nashua. It looks like she's not even going to win Nashua tonight. Trump's actually going to gain votes here. And again, look, the city of Manchester, which, you know, again, we thought going in Haley to make it a game statewide needed to be basically tied here, you know, maybe up a point, maybe down a point. She and I was going to lose this thing basically by 16 points in Manchester. And when you start to look at what's left, there are some areas where Haley's going to make up

ground that are not colored in this map. City of Lebanon, we've talked about. Hanover, where Dartmouth is. You can go up here where Durham, the State University, University of New Hampshire, no numbers there. Exeter. Those are four places here where Haley's going to get a lot of votes. Also, we could expect a lot out of Hollis. We could expect a lot out of Amherst next door. These are vote centers for Haley that's still to come. Here's the problem, though, for her on top of all of that. Some of the places here, we just start taking a look. Atkinson.

Salem is the sixth largest town in New Hampshire. It's got more than 30,000 people. It was one of Donald Trump's best towns in 2016. Remember, I said the border, the suburbs, the bedroom communities aren't necessarily the moderate independent enclaves. Salem is a perfect example. We don't have numbers from here yet. But based on everything we're seeing, this should be a blowout Trump win where he really gains momentum.

I mean, it's going to be true as well. We expect the same thing to happen in Pelham. We expect that to happen potentially in Wyndham when that comes in. Derry, Derry, you know, we've had reporters there. I know Derry is another big, big community where I think based on what we're seeing, you can expect Trump to get a lot of numbers out of that. So what it all kind of adds up.

to here is, again, we've got half the vote in right now, 48%. Trump is leading this by 11.2%. I think there's a very, very real possibility that it's very plausible that Donald Trump is going to end up winning the state by double digits. When Nikki Haley took the stage earlier, there were some indications of a far less vote in. We're looking at that exit poll and it looked like, hey, this might be a five, six point race and she'd go make some noise based on that. But if this ends up

you know, 10, 11, 12 points for Donald Trump. And he's winning essentially three quarters of the Republican vote. She's only getting 25 percent, as we showed you, the Republican vote. What is she walking out of this state with tonight to go make her competitive in any other state? Because this mix that we've seen tonight, we've talked so much about, you know, there will be some states that can come close to this. The only one I can think of, it's not actually a state.

But the only place I can think of based on this demographic mix that I could see Haley absolutely winning in is the District of Columbia. They've got 19 delegates. Donald Trump got 13 percent there in 2016. Kasich and Rubio combined for well over 60 percent of the vote. I don't think he's going to win the District of Columbia if she's still an active candidate there.

It's very hard to find other places where she could where she could actually post a win based if this wasn't enough for her and it ends up being double digits. And like I said, the other big problem becomes then this is not like the Democratic primaries. This is not like the Democratic primaries where everybody, as long as you get 15 percent, is getting a delegate out of every single congressional district on the map.

The rules in most of the states and most of the big states on Super Tuesday are you win a congressional district, you get every single 50 percent. You get every single delegate in it. You get 50 percent statewide. You get every at large delegate. And functionally in a two person race, all Trump has to do basically is beat Haley in any given congressional district in any given state. He could beat her by two points. He would take over.

all of the delegates. And again, just based on the fact that Haley's still only at 25% with Republicans, and you're really not going to see this mix anywhere else. You know where else you might see this mix? You might see it next door in Vermont. That could be another target for her. Vermont with a negligible number of delegates, though. I'm talking about Texas, talking about California, Alabama, Arkansas, Oklahoma, Michigan. These are states where Trump's just got to go in there and win a congressional district by even a single vote.

He'll get all the delegates out of it. So it's designed on the Republican side, unlike the Democratic side, not to be a six month slog that could even be active going into convention. It's designed to be wrapped up quickly and just taking this mix. Trump with this kind of mix would be poised for a massive, massive Super Tuesday. And even before Super Tuesday, he'd be poised for a very, very big win in South Carolina if Haley's only getting 25 percent of Republicans. Yeah.

I mean, those numbers go a long way in explaining why. I think Mark Leibovich described him as Nikki Haley's fleece-clad parrot. Chris Sununu, the governor of New Hampshire two weeks ago, says, yeah, I'm going to vote for Donald Trump if he's the eventual nominee, even if he's convicted of a felony, right? There's this understanding in the Republican Party that all roads lead to Trump. And I think, you know, for people who haven't been paying attention to down ballot, you

There's been a pretty significant development, which is that House Republicans who won in districts that Biden won in 2020 have begun endorsing Trump. So vulnerable Republicans. Vulnerable Republicans, not from deep red districts. We're talking Nick LaLotta on Long Island. I think John Duarte in California. Biden won that district by 11 points.

Trump, right? The sort of pressure points are not the same for them as they are for the rest of the Republican conference. And you're seeing this capitulation that, I mean, you look at the map that Steve just showed us, it's a bulldozer plowing through the next several primary races. And, you know, you're seeing that reality dawn for Republicans. Although Nikki Haley as mayor of Washington, I would like to see that contest. And why not? Everyone needs a second act. Look, I guess I see it like this.

Good night for Trump.

Not a great night for Trump, precisely for the reasons we've discussed. When you're standing on that much ground and you're only doing this number, then you have some weaknesses, even if, yes, you're clearly being declared the front runner by your party. And so you think back to eight years ago, right? Eight years ago was a feels like a long time to me in the news business. And I remember where I was because I was in New Hampshire inside the hall watching Trump come on stage and win. And he won by about fifty five thousand votes and 20 plus points.

And that was a great night for him. And he did it, as you pointed out in the lead, Rachel, without any of the institutional support and having zero endorsement, zero endorsements, basically taking over the party and coming off a disappointing start in Iowa based on what he had hoped for. And so right now, again, we have to be careful with projection, but with half the vote in.

He's up 16,000 votes. When you say it like that, it doesn't sound like all that big a gap. Now, all the projections are true, and the coalition doesn't necessarily materialize in every other state. But if you are the former president, and you are the most famous, and Fox News is backselling you, and you're doing those town halls, and you never had to square off

in a debate or adversarial interview, and you have all the endorsements, and everybody's gearing up for you, and over at Davos, all the elite buddies said it's going to be your year and you're going to win because you're not an outsider, if you ever were, but you certainly ain't anymore by even the narrow standards of Republican outsider. And what do you have at this hour? 16,000 more votes. So he may be very well on the path, and there are people who study this, but I don't call it a great night for him. It looks to me like a good night and standing on a whole lot.

facing off against one person and she's only had two campaign days in a two-person race, that's where he is. He's 16,000 up. So one of the relevant frames to use in looking at what Trump achieved tonight and didn't achieve is what Joe Biden achieved. Someone else came in second tonight. Dean Phillips running against Joe Biden.

is coming in second with 20% of the vote among the Democratic, the unofficial Democratic primary that they had there. The model that he had going into New Hampshire was Gene McCarthy in 1968, who won 42% of the vote against the sitting President Lyndon Johnson, who also

had a write-in campaign. Johnson didn't bother to have his name on the ballot, just like Biden. Both of them ran unofficial write-in campaigns. So Dean Phillips got completely crushed, didn't come close to the threshold. You know, if Gene McCarthy had gotten 20 percent in 1968, that would have been the end. No one would have talked about it again. Bobby Kennedy probably would have rethought his plan to get into the race after seeing how strong LBJ was.

So Joe Biden demonstrates this enormous strength in New Hampshire tonight. And then you have Trump showing much greater weakness against a credible challenger. And it depends on how you want to look at Trump. He wants to be called president in court and everywhere. So let's call him president just for this moment. When a president is on the ballot in the New Hampshire primary,

You're supposed to win everything. You're not supposed to face a serious challenge. And when you do, you lose. There is no president who faced a serious challenge in the New Hampshire primary who then won in November. And so this is a very bad night for Donald Trump looking at the pattern of presidents in New Hampshire primary situations who face very serious challenges. So what we're saying here is that he's very...

likely to win the nomination. And the way that he's winning shows him to be a very weak general election candidate. He's likely to win the nomination the way George H.W. Bush was still likely to win the nomination after Pat Buchanan went to New Hampshire and almost knocked him out. You know, so and then George H.W. Bush didn't win the nomination. He won the nomination and then got shot. And the presidency was over. Yeah. To put it in a sentence, there's a difference between being feared within your party and

and appealing or popular within the nation. Yeah, absolutely. If New Hampshire is the avatar for what independent voters want and would choose, you know, given the option, given the fact that anyone could play in that independent side, Nikki Haley beat Donald Trump among independents by something like 40, you know, 40 percentage points.

That is not a good sign for a sitting former or former president of the United States who, again, wants to be seen as president. Yes, he will beat her in South Carolina. But let's not forget that one of the things that Joe Biden did was to remake the calendar such that he was not on the ballot in New Hampshire, still mopped up Dean Phillips in New Hampshire when he wasn't even on the ballot as a write in candidate.

Yes, Donald Trump will likely win South Carolina, Nikki Haley's home state. Joe Biden might win it by more because that state is built for Joe Biden, just like on the Republican side, it's built for Donald Trump. So tonight, the winner, if you want to look at all of the

all of the metrics for a general election, the winner tonight is Joe Biden, who won in New Hampshire decisively as a write-in, who is going to win decisively in South Carolina. And the story that Donald Trump thinks he's going to get out of South Carolina, Joe Biden will get one of equal...

to him. And in the end, he's got a better story to tell in November because he's not facing 91 criminal counts. Let me ask, and Steve Kornacki, I'd love to ask your advice on this, and this isn't about data from tonight, but it's about sort of recent history and campaigns. One of the...

electability arguments that's being made on the Republican side is that it's important for the Republicans to unify now, for them to end their primary now, that deciding on a candidate now gives them a better shot

at the general election gives them a better, a longer runway in terms of what they want to line up against Joe Biden. When I think about that, Steve, I think about, you know, John Kerry wrapping it up quickly in 2004 and then losing to George W. Bush. I think about Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama battling right down to the very last second in 2008. That's making for a very short run.

election campaign in 2008, but won at the Democrats ultimately won. Is there any way that you think about it in terms of the lived history that we've got of the primaries versus the generals as to whether or not there is a case to be made that it might help the Republicans to have a nominee sooner rather than later? Well,

I think the way I look at it is, and I love historical precedents and I love talking about them and bringing them in. But I think the reality is there is no modern precedent for what we're seeing. We could talk about whether Trump should be considered an incumbent president or not. He sure didn't look like an incumbent president at the start of this campaign in terms of how he was polling. His sport grew over the course of last spring and last summer. In modern history, how many former presidents

have turned around four years after losing the office and tried to reclaim it. In modern history, the answer is zero. What's the closest parallel we have? Gerald Ford explored running for president in 1979 after losing it in 1976. He was an unelected president. He was polling second place in the summer and fall of 1979 to Ronald Reagan. Ford saw the polls and didn't run. That's your closest parallel. That's not much of a parallel. So I think we're in a very different place. And I think one of the things we've seen pretty consistently here is –

I think a lot of people have already been looking at this race as inevitable, a Trump versus Joe Biden race. And that is why opinion on both of them is so strong and, in my view, is so set in place. There are going to be people, there are up for grabs voters, there are swing voters, there are voters who it's a question about are they, are they, they're potential voters, are they actually going to be motivated to turn out? I think that's going to be one of the biggest questions.

as we head into the fall of 2024. But I think the bottom line is people know both of these candidates extremely well, have extremely strong opinions of them. They do not have a good opinion at all of Donald Trump. But you have to keep in mind, they do not have a good opinion at all of

Joe Biden. His average approval rating now is 39 percent. The last time our network polled a Trump versus Biden matchup, Trump was winning nationally by two points. We have polled since the start of 2019 a Trump versus Joe Biden matchup. NBC has 16 times.

The first 14 times, that's all of 2019, all of 2020, in the first nine months of 2023, the first 14 times Joe Biden led Donald Trump. In the 2020 cycle, the league was never short of six points. It was as high as 12 points. That was the range. Then this fall, for the first time, we had a tie, Trump versus Biden. In our final poll of the year, we had Trump ahead of Biden, something we'd never seen before. The reality is, when you look at the

polling out there, whether it's our polling or any of the other quality polls that are out there looking at a Trump Biden rematch, you're seeing something that you didn't see in 2019, in 2020, and for that matter that you didn't see in 2016. And that is at least in the polls that

a strength for Trump relative to Biden that he never showed in 19 and 20. We did. I defy you to find more than a single poll in 2019 and 2020, a single quality poll that put Trump ahead nationally. They just didn't exist. Every poll is just a question of how much was he behind?

Now we're looking at polls that actually have Trump tied, actually have Trump ahead in the popular vote. And we've talked about do Republicans have a bit of an advantage in the Electoral College where if they're even competitive for the popular vote, that's going to translate into a big boost in the Electoral College.

And we've seen statewide polls, some of these swing state polls, some of these states that Biden won in 20, that Trump had won in 2016, that were critical to his election as president in the first place. We've seen Trump racking up some very big numbers, some very impressive numbers there, again, relative to how he's polled before. So to me, it just it raises the question. We're looking at a different atmosphere, I think, than we saw in 2020, than we saw in 2016. And

that we've ever seen in a modern presidential race before. And it's one that I think is sort of dominated by questions. When you see a poll right now that has Donald Trump ahead of Joe Biden or competitive with Joe Biden nationally, the questions that are raised are where's the new strength coming from? One of the places that picking up on it in the polls is younger voters. Is that real?

Are younger voters actually backing away a bit from Biden? Are they actually going to go out there and vote for Trump or are they actually going to stay on the sidelines in some meaningful number that they didn't in 2020 and they didn't in 2016? That's a big factor. That's part of what we're seeing in these polls right now. Is that actually going to trip? We weren't seeing it in 20. We're seeing it now. Is that going to translate when you get to Election Day 2024? For that matter, we talked all in 2016 and all in 2020 how the

Polls in both years completely missed a crucial section of Trump supporters, particularly in the upper Midwest, in the Midwest states. Those are white voters, rural, not a college degree, low, low trust in the media, unable to reach them in polls, even though the whole methodology was changed between 2016 and 2020. Is that a factor again? Is that still in play? Is there something about Trump being on the back burner?

Because he wasn't on the ballot in name in 2022. He was in 20 and he was in 16. He brought them out in 16. He brought them out in 20. In 18 and 22, Republicans had bad years in the midterms, but Trump himself wasn't on the ballot. Does Trump's presence on the ballot bring them out again in 2024? These are the questions I think that we have. But a lot of them just stem from the fact that

So much is known about these two candidates. Opinion is so deep, so entrenched. We're left with questions about turnout. We're left with questions about what exactly the electorate is going to look like. But, you know, look, if it ends up being the longest general election in history and if Haley's out of the race by March 3rd, it will be the longest general election in history. I think it's one that's it's shaping up to be extraordinary.

extremely, extremely close right now because while there is, as I said, while there is a lot of negative opinion about Trump, there is about Biden too. And that's a difference between 20 and 24. Biden's the incumbent president, an incumbent president with an approval rating under 40%. If that persists to election, that's another if. Will that persist to election day? Will the economic news get better? Will Biden's numbers, they're completely possible. But if it doesn't, and you're an incumbent president walking into election day with an approval rating, anything like Joe Biden has right now,

If we're going to have the longest general election campaign in history, how

how good are these two old guys at campaigning against each other? Yes, we've seen it before, but we saw it before when they were a little bit younger. And we saw it when, before there was a lot of this water under the bridge. And we saw it at a time there was a global pandemic, which prohibited a lot of the normal forms of campaigning. And so what's going to happen once these two are in a general election matchup has a lot to do with the art of politicking. And that is as much of a black box as any of this. To build on that,

It's been a modern. So Kennedy and Nixon in 1960, the first televised presidential debates. They didn't have them in 64, 68 and 72 since 1976. It's been a staple of our fall every four years. The presidential debates and then sometimes the vice presidential debate, too. We're going to have those. Yeah, we're getting strong indications for the first time that we may not have debates between these two candidates. Now, I'll throw one more in there. You know, it's been a while since we've had 30.

Third party candidates registering very significant support. And I don't know what's going to happen with RFK Jr. I don't know what's going to happen with no labels. But that's another very big question, because there was a poll from The Washington Post at the end of last year. It matched Trump and Biden. It found the close result. And then it re-polled the same voters and it put several voters.

You know, I put RFK Jr. I think it put Joe Manchin to test the name. I think it put the libertarian candidate, maybe one other. It put them all in front of voters and the third party choices combined. We're getting something like 15 percent of the vote. When you see the negatives that Biden and Trump have, when you see the share of the voting population, it says, I don't want either one of them. It takes me back.

As I mentioned, 1992, you know, George H.W. Bush, the incumbent president, his approval rating was in the 30s and the economy was not in a good place. Bill Clinton emerged from the Democratic primaries with poisonously, seemingly poisonously high personal unfavorable numbers. It created the atmosphere in which was born the Ross Perot phenomenon. And Ross Perot qualified for all the ballots necessary.

And go back. You can find the cover in Newsweek from June 1992. It says President Perot on it. He was leading as a third party candidate the national polls in June of 1992. He dropped out over the summer, got back in the fall, finished with 20 percent of the vote. No electoral votes, but 20 percent of the vote. No one's matched that number or come close to it since. Could that be something that happens this year? And would that disproportionately affect one candidate? Those are the questions I think we start to turn to now. Oh, God. Steve.

We were feeling a little agitation anyway. But there's that many black boxes and those are the depths of the questions we've got to consider right away. We're going to have to take a break. More of our special coverage tonight from the New Hampshire primary and beyond. We're going to hear from our friends Claire McCaskill, Jen Palmieri. When we come back, we've got lots still to get to. Stay with us. With Donald Trump, Republicans have lost almost every competitive election. We lost the Senate.

We lost the House. We lost the White House. We lost in 2018. We lost in 2020. And we lost in 2022. The worst kept secret in politics is how badly the Democrats want to run against Donald Trump.

And

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