Donald Trump campaigned in Concord, N.H., last week as the clock ticked down to the state’s leadoff presidential primary. Photo by AP/Matt Rourke

Voices & Opinion

POV: Are There Hints of 1968 N.H. Politics in 2024?

Nikki Haley hopes to do to Donald Trump what Eugene McCarthy nearly did to LBJ

Where have you gone, Eugene McCarthy?

Back in 1968—a tumultuous year marked by war, massive student protests, race riots, burning cities, and assassinations—the then little-known cerebral junior senator from Minnesota nearly pulled off one of the greatest political upsets in American history by coming within an eyelash of beating incumbent President Lyndon B. Johnson in the March New Hampshire presidential primary. “You know when I first thought I had a chance?” McCarthy asked. “When I realized that you could go into any bar in the country and insult Lyndon Johnson and nobody would punch you in the nose.” 

Humiliated by the shocking results and the entry of an opportunistic and well-funded Robert F. Kennedy into the race, LBJ decided to throw in the towel by the end of the month, claiming he was making the drastic move for the good of the country: “I have concluded that I should not permit the presidency to become involved in the partisan divisions that are developing in this election year.” 

Fast forward to 2024, an equally turbulent time, and the question has become whether a similarly unexpected outcome is possible among Republican contenders vying for top honors in this upcoming first-in-the-nation presidential primary on Tuesday. At first blush, the prospect seems highly unlikely after the twice-impeached, four-times-indicted former president Donald Trump lapped the GOP field in the Iowa Caucuses.

Indeed, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, once thought of as Trump’s biggest obstacle to renomination, finished a distant second, despite sinking considerable financial resources into the fight. In fact, DeSantis was almost edged out for the silver medal by Nikki Haley, the late-charging former South Carolina governor and United Nations ambassador under Trump. (DeSantis ended his bid last weekend, leaving Haley the last candidate standing against Trump.) “This is the first,” Trump announced to his ecstatic Iowan supporters afterwards, “because the big night is going to be in November when we take back our country.” 

But a close examination of caucus results suggests that Trump’s grandiose optimism might be misplaced when applied to New Hampshire. For Iowa has become a deep red MAGA sanctum in recent years with far fewer moderate and crossover Democratic and independent voters than are reasonably expected to be found in the Granite State. 

Haley has a shot at derailing the Trump bandwagon in New Hampshire, provided she can convince enough of the aforementioned moderates and crossover Democrats and independents to flock to her banner. Granted it might be a tough sell given her recent embarrassingly ignorant slip about the causes of the Civil War. When asked by an attendee at a town hall meeting in Berlin, N.H., she said, “I mean, I think, the cause of the Civil War was basically how government was going to be run, what you could do and couldn’t do, the freedoms of what people could and couldn’t do.” She made no mention of slavery, which is ironic given she’s from the state that fired the first shot in the conflict in the name of protecting slave-owning interests in the South. But then compounding the misstep was her tone-deaf statement that America has never been a racist country. She attempted to walk back both her controversial remarks but their damage was done.

All the same, Haley has managed to significantly close the gap with Trump in the most recent state polls, suggesting Granite Staters care less about her views on history and more on what she’s been saying about the GOP front-runner. After months of avoiding directly commenting on the myriad legal troubles Trump is embroiled in, including the charge that he gave encouragement and support to the January 6 insurrectionists, she has of late begun to launch a more sharply defined line of attack. “I agree with a lot of his policies, but the truth is, rightly or wrongly, chaos follows him,” Haley charged. “We have too much division in this country, and too many threats around the world to be sitting in chaos once again.” 

The critique appears to have had somewhat of an effect. Trump, who essentially ignored her up to this point, has fired back, suggesting to the Republican rank and file that Haley is a tax-raising, undocumented-immigrant-loving globalist, or in other words, a Hillary Clinton in Republican clothing.

In a social media posting, Trump wrote, “Now she’s stuck with WEAK POLICIES, and a VERY STRONG MAGA BASE, and there’s nothing she can do about it.” 

Granite Staters may beg to differ, just as they did about Eugene McCarthy over half a century ago.