MANCHESTER, N.H. — Donald Trump supporters crisscrossed New Hampshire on Tuesday with two goals: to mobilize the former president’s voters and to cast him as the inevitable GOP nominee if he scores a dominant win over Nikki Haley.
“I think we’re going to see the end of the primary hopefully later tonight,” Georgia U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene said during a stop at a Manchester diner.
“It would be a good choice for Nikki Haley if she drops out after this election,” said Greene, who represents much of northwest Georgia. “It’s not going to go well for her in her own state.”
The next major contest is Haley’s home state of South Carolina, where Trump has commanding leads in the polls for the Feb. 24 primary. She trails him in other key states, including Georgia, which holds a March 12 primary.
Haley, a former South Carolina governor who served as U.N. ambassador during Trump’s first term in the White House, has forcefully pushed back on the narrative that a humbling defeat in the first-in-the-nation primary would doom her campaign. Her campaign manager, Betsy Ankney, released a memo saying, “we aren’t going anywhere.”
Ankney wrote that Haley has earned her head-to-head shot against Trump and isn’t concerned that “members of Congress, the press, and many of the weak-kneed fellas who ran for president are giving up and giving in.”
Still, the territory is forbidding for Haley if she doesn’t score an upset victory or a close second place in Tuesday’s primary.
Greene is among the Republicans who are painting the race as a forgone conclusion — and warned of repercussions against Haley if she stays in the race against Trump.
“We support his policies. Any Republican that isn’t willing to adapt these policies, we are completely eradicating from the party,” Greene told MSNBC. “It’s up to Nikki Haley what she does.”
Haley’s New Hampshire supporters are digging in, too.
”I believe Donald Trump is a danger to democracy and a danger to America as we know it,” said Alicia Xanthopous, a lifelong Republican from Hampton Beach. “I have said if there’s someone, anyone who can possibly beat him, I will support that person. I believe that person is Nikki Haley.”
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