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Former U.S. President Donald Trump and Nikki Haley, his one-time ambassador to the United Nations, are squaring off Tuesday in the first 2024 Republican presidential nominating primary election, in the northeastern state of New Hampshire.
Trump holds a significant edge in polling heading into the contest and, with a decisive win, could all but wrap up the party's presidential nomination for the third straight election cycle. He would face Democratic President Joe Biden again in the national election on November 5. After a single term in the White House, Trump lost his reelection bid to Biden in 2020.
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But Haley, who finished a distant third to Trump in last week's Republican caucuses in the midwestern farm state of Iowa, has new momentum in the New Hampshire contest. She is in the head-to-head match against Trump she had hoped for after Florida Governor Ron DeSantis and others dropped out of the contest for the party's nomination for lack of voter support.
Haley, 52, dashed from one campaign rally to another on Monday, contending that Trump at 77 has lost some of his mental sharpness and that he and the 81-year-old Biden are too old to lead the country in the four-year presidential term that starts in January 2025.
Trump handily won in Iowa with more than half the vote, easily doubling the vote count of DeSantis and Haley.
New Hampshire voters headed to polling places throughout the state, with polls not closing until the evening in most parts of the state. As is tradition, the tiny town of Dixville Notch voted just after midnight, with all six voters casting ballots for Haley.
That result was not indicative of pre-voting opinion polls in New Hampshire, which showed Trump well ahead of Haley. A Suffolk University/Boston Globe/WBTS poll released Monday had Trump with 57% support compared with 38% for Haley. Surveys by other news outlets showed similar support for Trump.
Haley said Monday during a final day of campaigning, "This is a two-person race."
She cast her candidacy as bringing "new solutions" in contrast to a potential second Trump term that would mean "more of the same."
"We can either do the whole thing that we've always done and live in that chaos world that we've had, or we can go forward with no drama, no vendettas and some results for the American people," Haley told reporters.
Trump, who has garnered endorsements from former competitors, including DeSantis and tech entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy, told his supporters the Republican Party is "becoming more and more unified" as he looked toward the potential of knocking Haley out of the race and facing Biden.
"I think one person will be gone probably tomorrow and the other one will be gone in November," Trump said. "But now is the time for the Republican Party to come together. We have to unify."
Even if Trump decisively wins the New Hampshire contest and becomes the party's de facto presidential nominee, he faces an unprecedented 91 criminal charges across four indictments, with one or more of the cases possibly going to trial in the coming months. Some of his voters, perhaps 15%, have told pollsters they will abandon him if he is convicted of any of the charges and not vote for him in November.
Among the charges against Trump are allegations that he illegally tried to upend his 2020 loss to Biden to stay in power. To this day, he erroneously claims that he was cheated out of reelection by vote-counting fraud although no evidence of irregularities substantial enough to overturn the outcome has been uncovered.
New Hampshire Democrats are also holding a primary election Tuesday, but Biden does not appear on their ballots.
The Democratic Party hoped to move away from having New Hampshire hold the first primary election of the presidential race, preferring to put the southeastern state of South Carolina first this cycle.
But New Hampshire Democrats say state laws require them to hold the first primary, so they are going forward with the vote. Those wishing to back Biden will have to write in his name.
South Carolina helped revive Biden's 2020 campaign after a series of poor early performances, with national party officials then acceding to Biden's demand to officially hold the first Democratic primary there this time.
The Democratic primary in South Carolina is on February 3, and the Republican primary is three weeks later.
After the state-by-state voting contests are complete, Republicans will formally choose their presidential nominee at their national convention in July, while Democrats hold their national convention in August.
Some information for this report came from The Associated Press, Agence France-Presse and Reuters.