New Hampshire Gov. Chris Sununu (R) doubled down on his belief Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley can win South Carolina’s primary next month and argued the White House hopeful is “surging.”
“Nikki can win South Carolina,” Sununu said Monday in an interview on NewsNation’s “Elizabeth Vargas Reports.” “I mean, the fact that she went from what…single digits in Iowa — 20 percent there. Forty-five percent or so here in New Hampshire, just skyrocketed everyone out of the race.”
“She’s the one that’s surging wind at our backs and the South Carolina primary isn’t for a couple more weeks and she’s won there before, she knows how to do it,” Sununu continued. “She can talk about successes there that Trump can’t talk about.”
NewsNation anchor Elizabeth Prann interjected Sununu to point out recent polling that shows the former South Carolina governor matches up “really well” against President Biden but does not match up well against former President Trump, who continues to hold a wide lead over his last main GOP challenger.
According to a polling index by The Hill/Decision Desk HQ, Haley, a former United Nations ambassador, trails Trump in the South Carolina primary race by about 31.3 points. Trump’s lead is higher in national polling, securing about 70.7 percent of the likely GOP primary vote compared to Haley, who has about 13.9 percent of the vote, per The Hill/Decision Desk HQ polling index.
Sununu appeared to dismiss these numbers on Monday and said, “The election really comes down to the last couple of weeks, even the last few days, sometimes in some of these races.”
“South Carolina has a very low turnout…voter turnout. So they have an opportunity to turn out a lot of those conservative base voters…those Republican voters who haven’t voted before, who appreciate what Nikki has brought to the table,” Sununu said.
“So there’s a lot of opportunity to go, there’s a lot of campaigning to go and again, she’s only kept surging and surging and surging. So you know, ‘polls, schmolls,’ I mean, really like nobody cares about the polls, they just care about the final result,” he continued.
Despite early losses in Iowa and New Hampshire, Haley has maintained she intends to stay in the race as Trump’s main challenger until at least Super Tuesday. Haley, however, also sidestepped questions on Sunday about if a win in her home state of South Carolina is “do or die.”
NewsNation is owned by Nexstar Media Group, which also owns The Hill.
Copyright 2023 Nexstar Media Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
Source link
