Two fresh surveys put Nikki Haley in second position in fresh Hampshire, just two weeks before the state’s crucial primary, according to reports released on Tuesday. However, the poll will determine whether the ex-governor of South Carolina is even somewhat competitive with Trump.
Trump has 39 percent support among likely GOP primary voters and Haley has 32 percent, according to a University of New Hampshire/CNN poll. The margin of error for the poll is plus or minus 2.3 percentage points, so the gap between the two is in the single digits. The online survey was place from January 4th to the 8th and included 1,864 participants from New Hampshire selected from a probability-based panel.
At 46%, Trump leads Haley in the Suffolk University/Boston Globe/USA TODAY poll. With a margin of error of plus or minus 3.1 percentage points, the poll of 1,000 voters was conducted from January 3-7 using live calls to landlines and cellphones.
Both surveys confirm what several polls done in December found: Haley, who is supported by popular GOP Governor Chris Sununu, has jumped into second place in New Hampshire. It wasn’t until late last year, when she was in the midst of securing Sununu’s endorsement, that the South Carolinian’s ratings began to rise in Granite State surveys, although they had been in the teens since the first GOP presidential primary debate late last summer.
Meanwhile, Chris Christie, the former governor of New Jersey, is in third place, with only 12% support in both surveys.
The town hall participants and key Haley surrogates, like Sununu, have urged Christie to withdraw from the race and support Haley, but Christie has ignored their demands. Christie, who is focusing his campaign on the Granite State, will not benefit from the UNH survey’s findings that 65% of his supporters would switch to Haley if he dropped out of the race. Independents are a key voting demographic for both candidates in the GOP primary, but they continue to be divided between the two. Among those respondents, 43% back Haley and 23% Christie.
Both polls put Florida Governor Ron DeSantis—whose support in New Hampshire has been steadily declining over the last year—and entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy in the single digits.
Despite not running in the state’s primary due to an internal party dispute over the sequence of nomination contests this year, Democratic Party leader Joe Biden maintains huge leads in both polls.
Among likely Democratic primary voters, 69% said they would write in Biden’s name on the ballot, compared to 7% who said they would back Marianne Williamson and 7% who said they would back Rep. Dean Phillips (D-Minn.).
In a comparable split, the Suffolk study found that 64% of probable Democratic primary voters switched to Biden, compared to 2% for Williamson and 6% for Phillips.
Even in a made-up general election scenario, the Suffolk survey had Biden up 42% to 34% over Trump. Independent candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. received 8% of the vote.