Tamara Keith and Amy Walter on Haley’s chances against Trump in New Hampshire

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• Amna Nawaz:

  It's the last night ahead of the New Hampshire primary, and the Republican presidential field is now a two-person race after Florida Governor Ron DeSantis dropped out over the weekend. Meanwhile, Democrats have to navigate a ballot that will be missing a key name, President Joe Biden.

  To help bring us up to speed on all of this, I'm joined by our Politics Monday duo. That is Amy Walter of The Cook Political Report With Amy Walter, and Tamara Keith of NPR, who is in New Hampshire.

  So, Tam, kick us off here.

  Days after lamenting about Republicans who were lining up to kiss the ring of Donald Trump, as he put it, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis does exactly that. He drops out of the race and endorses Donald Trump. What does that say to you about his campaign and this race right now?

• Tamara Keith, National Public Radio:

  The DeSantis campaign started with so much promise, but from the moment it actually launched, it was troubled.

  He launched on X, the social media site formerly known as Twitter. It was a total disaster. It was just a technical disaster. And then, from there, his campaign burned through cash. He ended up relying on an outside super PAC that you're not technically supposed to coordinate with. It turns out, turfing your campaign to a super PAC may not actually work that well.

  And he just burned through campaign managers and super PAC heads. And in the end, it was just a failed campaign. But the big failure was finding a message that actually worked with this Republican electorate, because he was saying he was Trump without the baggage. And it turns out a lot of Republican voters, enough Republican voters, just don't care about the baggage.

• Amna Nawaz:

  Amy, it's not like he was out there alone, right? He had a lot of support. He had a lot of money. This is the guy, by the way, The New York Post crowned as the future or DeFuture, playing on his name. This was after he won big in the midterms.

  He had a lot of key endorsements too. What happened?

• Amy Walter, The Cook Political Report:

  I mean, I think Tam summed it up pretty well, which is that he just never found a message that was going to resonate with an electorate that still really likes Donald Trump.

  I mean, at the end of the day, there were many problems with this campaign. So, Tam is absolutely right. Some of this is tied to him. But a lot of it is about the Republican Party and who Republican voters are. If you get Republican establishment, sort of the elite class, the donor class, they want anybody but Donald Trump as the nominee.

  That's not what voters want. And that disconnect has been apparent since 2016. And so for all the money and all the effort that a lot of those folks who are dubbing him, DeSantis, giving him money, wanted to believe that this is the formula, this is how you unseat Donald Trump with a candidate that's a lot more like Donald Trump, the problem, as one Republican strategist said to me early on, is, that strategy, that idea of being Trump without the baggage, really what he was Trump-lite.

  And for voters who know that they can get the full-calorie Trump, they didn't want the diet version.

• Amna Nawaz:

  The full-calorie.

  (Laughter)

• Amy Walter:

  Yes.

• Amna Nawaz:

  Well, Tam, let's talk about what this means for the race now.

  You're in New Hampshire. It's essentially a two-person Republican race now with Nikki Haley and Donald Trump. We have a new poll from Monmouth, which now shows that, while Haley has picked up some support from independents, she hasn't closed the gap. Some 52 percent of potential Republican primary voters there would choose Mr. Trump. Some 34 percent would pick Nikki Haley.

  I should note this was conducted before DeSantis dropped out. So where do his backers go in New Hampshire?

• Tamara Keith:

  I think we have talked about this before, but Ron DeSantis is much more of a Trump-like candidate than a Nikki Haley-like candidate.

  People who support Ron DeSantis didn't necessarily want to stop Trump at all costs. And so many of those voters are just going to go to Trump. DeSantis obviously endorsed him and is rallying behind him. Many of Trump's vanquished rivals are rallying behind him going back to 2016 and now 2024. His rivals are up on stage with him, rallying with him at rallies here in the state.

  So, for Nikki Haley, Ron DeSantis dropping out doesn't actually help, though it does give her that two-person race that she has said that she wanted, and it will provide a lot of clarity after tomorrow night about the state of the Republican Party and the appetite for a Trump alternative.

  That said, this is New Hampshire and independent voters can vote in the Republican primary. And I have spoken to a lot of left-leaning independent voters who, under any other description, would be Democrats, but they are independents. They're registered independents, and they will be supporting Nikki Haley.

  Those sorts of voters can't vote in a Republican primary in the states to come.

• Amna Nawaz:

  Amy, can those independents make up the difference for Haley?

• Amy Walter:

  Yes, there just aren't enough of them.

  And, right now, if you do look at the polls, she's doing well among those independent voters, but not as well among the Republican vote. And so where it could help is, it could make the margins a little bit smaller, especially, as Tam pointed out if a bunch of people are coming to vote that pollsters didn't pick up on.

  Remember, in 2008, polls suggested that Barack Obama was easily going to win in New Hampshire. That didn't happen. Hillary Clinton actually won. I don't think that's what we're going to see on Tuesday, but that Trump is still ahead. But, for Haley, this really is a do-or-die state. I mean, the state, the electorate is tailor-made for her candidacy.

  To not win here would basically be the — I think it would be the beginning of the end of the candidacy.

• Amna Nawaz:

  And, Tam, we should mention the incumbent Democratic president's name is being pushed as part of a write-in campaign there. He's not on the ballot, because New Hampshire state law says they still go first. Even so, the DNC changed the rules, so South Carolina would go first. So, Bidens's not on the ballot there.

  But I do want to talk about the message we're hearing from the Biden administration, which is on Roe v. Wade. Today is the 51st anniversary of that decision. We know it's a central part of their reelection campaign message.

  Here actually is part of a new ad they just put out on that issue.

• Dr. Austin Dennard, Suing Texas Over Abortion Ban:

  I think Donald Trump bears an incredible amount of responsibility for these restrictive laws. We need leaders that will protect our rights and not take them away.

• Amna Nawaz:

  Tam, we should note there are 12 states where abortion is or could be on the ballot this fall. Is this still going to be as potent a force as the Biden reelection campaign wants it to be at the end of this year?

• Tamara Keith:

  Well, I can't predict just how potent it will be, but I can tell you how the Biden reelection campaign feels about it.

  And you can see it. Vice President Harris is launching a multistate tour where she is going to be talking about reproductive rights. She's starting in Wisconsin, a state where a state Supreme Court raised was really decided because voters cared about this issue and because there was a restrictive abortion ban on the books.

  And, tomorrow, the president, the vice president, the first lady, the second gentleman, they will all be rallying in Virginia, another state where abortion wasn't technically on the ballot, but where it was a major issue.

  So, this is clearly going to be a centerpiece of the Biden campaign, but they're going to frame it as a freedom issue and say that it's not just about one health care procedure, it's about freedom, and they're looping it in with other things like gun safety and the big issues of democracy that we have seen Biden talking about already.

• Amy Walter:

  Yes, and I think it was also really interesting. In that ad, she makes this connection between Donald Trump, the choices he made, especially putting many of the current justices onto the Supreme Court, and these restrictive laws in states like Texas, where she's from.

  In 2022, Democrats were very effective in making the individual Republican candidate look out of step, basically just showing what those candidates had said about abortion access. They had very restrictive views on the issue. But it really wasn't about Donald Trump in 2022. It was about those individual candidates.

  And so what the Biden campaign needs to do is to make that connective tissue between Donald Trump and this issue of freedom and abortion access.

• Tamara Keith:

  And Donald Trump certainly helped them with that in a recent town hall on FOX News. He once again claimed credit for it. I was at Biden headquarters the day after that, and they were quite pleased to have that video in their arsenal.

• Amna Nawaz:

  All right, Amy Walter and Tamara Keith joining us tonight from New Hampshire, good to see you both. Thank you so much.

• Amy Walter:

  You're welcome.