NEW YORK (AP) — Barely 400,000 votes have been cast in two rural Republican primaries over the span of eight days. But both Donald Trump and Joe Biden are behaving like their parties’ nominees already.
Trump’s double-digit victory Tuesday in independent-minded New Hampshire, where he was considered more vulnerable than perhaps anywhere else, was a rhetorical tipping point for both Democrats and Republicans.
“It is now clear that Donald Trump will be the Republican nominee. And my message to the country is the stakes could not be higher,” President Joe Biden said hours after Trump’s victory Tuesday night.
Trump’s team largely agreed, even as he raged about former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley’s unwillingness to leave the race altogether.
“I say the general election begins tonight,” said Trump-adversary-turned-advocate Vivek Ramaswamy, who was standing at the former president’s side during his New Hampshire victory speech. “And this man will win it in a landslide.”
What comes next for a potential matchup many voters don’t want
The bluster is just a sliver of what’s to come over the next 10 months. Both parties are building out sprawling political operations backed by billions of dollars in advertising to shape the all-but-certain general election rematch between the current president and his predecessor.
It is a matchup that many voters and some elected officials did not want. Both Biden and Trump have loud detractors within their parties and glaring political liabilities. Yet no other Republican presidential candidate in history has won the first two contests on the primary calendar, as Trump polished off Tuesday night, and failed to clinch his party’s nomination. And Biden, who won New Hampshire’s Democratic primary without even appearing on the ballot, is facing only token opposition in his bid for the Democratic nomination.
Hours before Biden’s New Hampshire win was official, the president shifted two key aides from the White House to his Delaware-based campaign. On Wednesday, Biden is serving as the keynote speaker at a United Auto Workers political convention as he works to win over blue-collar workers in critical Midwestern swing states.
Trump heads to Phoenix on Friday to address Republicans in a swing state that Biden won by 10,000 votes in 2020.
Nikki Haley vows to continue
As much as Trump’s team would like to shift its full focus toward Biden, one Republican rival is still standing.
“Could somebody please explain to Nikki that she lost — and lost really badly,” Trump wrote on his social media network. “She also lost Iowa, BIG, last week. They were, as certain non-fake media say, ‘CRUSHING DEFEATS.’”
Haley’s team vowed on Wednesday to continue fighting Trump for the GOP nomination, even with the prospect looming of an embarrassing home-state primary defeat in South Carolina on Feb. 24.
“New Hampshire is first in the nation. It is not last in the nation,” Haley declared before leaving Tuesday night. “This race is far from over. There are dozens of states left to go.”
Indeed, primary contests are scheduled in every U.S. state and territory over the next five months ahead of each party’s summertime national conventions. The earliest either Trump or Biden could clinch enough delegates to become his party’s presumptive nominee is March.
