The way things look today, the 2024 Republican primary is going to end with a whimper, not a bang. The FiveThirtyEight average of New Hampshire GOP primary polls finds former President Donald Trump ahead of former U.N. ambassador Nikki Haley by 14 points.
Could the polls be wrong? After all, in 2008, polling in the New Hampshire Democratic primary showed Barack Obama ahead of Hillary Clinton by eight points, on average. In the end, Clinton won the state by three points.
For an upset to occur, a significant number of independent voters who aren’t normally active in GOP primaries would need to show up and vote for Haley — and she’d need to improve her standing with core Republican voters. Remember, Democrats cannot change their registration to undeclared on Election Day. The deadline to change party affiliation was Oct. 6, 2023.
But even a big influx of independents likely isn’t enough to pull Haley into the lead. A Washington Post-Monmouth University poll released over the weekend assumed a primary electorate that was 47% undeclared and 53% Republican, a much bigger
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