Back in December, New Hampshire Gov. Chris Sununu endorsed former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley for president. Just as Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds' endorsement wasn't enough for Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis to win Iowa, so was Sununu's endorsement not enough for Haley in his state. Former and potentially future President Donald Trump, who is very likely to be the Republican nominee once more, won both of those races. He's on track to win Nevada, since only he is competing in the caucus, while Haley is competing in the primary, and it's the former that awards delegates. The Republican primary in South Carolina takes place on February 24, and Haley and Sununu have expressed confidence that she has a shot in her home state.
Sununu certainly had that confidence about him when he spoke to NewsNation’s "Elizabeth Vargas Reports" on Monday. He offered that Haley is "surging," especially as he highlighted "the fact that she went from what … single digits in Iowa--20 percent there."
Haley indeed got 19.1 percent of the vote in Iowa, where she came in third. DeSantis did drop out before New Hampshire, though, and so Haley now has that two-person race she spoke about.
"She’s the one that’s surging, wind at our backs, and the South Carolina primary isn’t for a couple more weeks and she’s won there before. She knows how to do it," Sununu continued as he gushed over Haley. "She can talk about successes there that Trump can’t talk about."
As the discussion focused on polls showing Trump beating Haley in South Carolina, Sununu went for quite the angle when it comes to dismissing the polls. As The Hill, which is owned by the same company as NewsNation, highlighted about this part of the segment:
According to a polling index by The Hill/Decision Desk HQ, Haley, a former United Nations ambassador, trails Trump in the South Carolina primary race by about 31.3 points. Trump’s lead is higher in national polling, securing about 70.7 percent of the likely GOP primary vote compared to Haley, who has about 13.9 percent of the vote, per The Hill/Decision Desk HQ polling index.
Sununu appeared to dismiss these numbers Monday and said, “The election really comes down to the last couple of weeks, even the last few days, sometimes in some of these races.”
“South Carolina has a very low … voter turnout. So they have an opportunity to turn out a lot of those conservative base voters … those Republican voters who haven’t voted before, who appreciate what Nikki has brought to the table,” Sununu said.
“So there’s a lot of opportunity to go, there’s a lot of campaigning to go, and again, she’s only kept surging and surging and surging. So you know, ‘polls, schmolls,’ I mean, really, like, nobody cares about the polls. They just care about the final result,” he continued.
Again, that's quite the read that Sununu has. You never want to be down in the polls, though that's not to suggest that's what he's saying. It does seem, though, that the governor has an odd way of dismissing how Haley is so far behind Trump in the polls.
Past primary races will remind us that nobody is safe when going up against Trump, even in their own state. While then Gov. John Kasich won Ohio for the Republican presidential primary in 2016, Trump still won Florida, despite how Sen. Marco Rubio was still in the race then, though he dropped out after that loss. DeSantis, back when he was still in the race, was polling considerably behind Trump in Florida, and that's despite how he won reelection by nearly 20 points in 2022. Even if Haley loses her state, and it's likely that she will, it doesn't appear she'll be so willing to quit the race. She's committed to staying in for Super Tuesday, when 16 states and territories go to the polls, on March 5.
