The New Hampshire Primary Will Continue To Bring The Actual State of The GOP Race Into Focus

By Brian Cates

If you’ve been following the 2024 GOP Primary race for the presidential nomination, you’ve probably seen some wild speculations tossed around over the past few months.

I saw claims before the Iowa primary was held last week saying there was no way that President Donald J. Trump’s lead over the other candidates was as large as the polls were saying it was.

There were also claims that Trump was drawing very few people to his rallies, that clever camera tricks and whatnot was being utilized to hide the fact that this Alpha Male blowhard act has worn thin, and his voting base has been shrinking for some time now.

Then the Iowa caucus happened, and wouldn’t you know it, it turns out the polls saying Trump had a lead of around 30 points over his nearest challenger turned out to be accurate after all, when Trump finished ahead of Florida governor Ron DeSantis by exactly 30 points.

Now…past performance is no infallible predictor of future results…but if we assume the polls are as accurate in New Hampshire as they were in Iowa just a week ago…that would mean Nikki Haley is about to lose to Trump by double-digits in New Hampshire.

She would very likely lose by double digits **even if** all of the 8% of DeSantis voters jumped over to the Haley camp for the caucus tonight. The RCP average aggregate of the polls for Iowa had Trump winning by 29.8 pts. That was off by just 0.02 from what the actual result was.

The RCP aggregate for the latest round of polling in New Hampshire has Trump winning by 19.3 pts. Assuming its accurate, even if all 8% of the vote that DeSantis would have garnered goes to Haley instead of Trump – a doubtful proposition, if you ask me – Haley still loses to Trump by a margin of 11.3 pts.

Moving on to the claim that Trump isn’t nearly as popular now as he was back during his 2016 and 2020 campaigns for the presidency, it looks like its going to be increasingly harder to seriously advance this claim in the light of his rally in New Hampshire the other night.

We’re about to go into a general election season where Trump will be holding increasingly massive rallies while – for as long as he’s running – Biden will go back into his basement when he’s not holding what amounts to campaign press conferences with about 100 people, mostly reporters, in attendance.

Look, both the Fake News and Conservative, Inc. have been throwing everything in their arsenal at Trump since he rode down that golden escalator in 2015. Every clever trick, every media strategy, every campaign tactic has been expended against him. None of it worked.

Fake News and Con Inc. couldn’t prevent Trump beating The Witch in 2016.

Then, after a first term chock-full of fake scandals manufactured by his enemies, such as the Trump/Russia Collusion Hoax, and an impeachment based on a fake Ukraine ‘perfect phone call’ hoax, Trump went out and bettered his vote numbers in 2020 by almost twelve million votes. And that’s just the **official vote total**. I happen to personally believe that in addition to stealing the election for Joe Biden by vastly inflating Biden’s vote count, they also stripped Trump of a significant number of votes. He got more than twelve million over 2016.

But what about NOW?

How successful will the Fake News Media and Con Inc. be THIS YEAR in pulling all the same old media tricks they’ve been using since 2015 in driving the voting public away from The Orange Bad Man?

I don’t think they’re going to be successful at all in finding – AT LAST!!! – the magic combination of lawfare and media trickery that shall at this late date ‘expose’ Donald John Trump and drive any significant chunk of the voting base away from him.

Donald Trump is one of the world’s greatest salesmen. Especially when what he’s selling is…himself.

Back in 2016 various shenanigans were enacted to deny Trump the delegates at the Republican National Convention in Cleveland that he had fairly and rightfully won. Up until the very last minute Never Trump forces were trying to strong arm then-RNC chair Reince Priebus into giving the nomination to someone – ANYONE – else but Donald Trump.

That won’t happen this time around. Long before this year’s RNC arrives in Milwaukee, Wisconsin in July, Trump is going to have all the delegates locked up. Nobody is even going to have the remotest shot behind the curtains of pulling strings to take the nomination from Trump.

The polls are currently open in New Hampshire, and the voting has begun. I’m looking forward to covering the results of the GOP primary tonight for The Vigilant News Network.