Republican New Hampshire Gov. Chris Sununu appears to be changing his tune about Nikki Haley's chances in his state's first-in-the-nation presidential primary Tuesday.
In December, Sununu told ABC News the Granite State was "an absolute win" in a "landslide" for the former South Carolina governor and U.N. ambassador. But on Thursday, after polls showed former President Donald Trump increasing his lead over Haley in the primary, he told ABC the campaign "always wanted a strong second place showing."
"That's the only expectation we ever laid out there," he told the network. "Now to the fact that she's challenging him to actually win the state, something no one in the media ever thought was possible, that gets everybody really excited. I mean, that's a pretty big hill to climb, to be sure, but it can be done."
The FiveThirtyEight polling average shows Trump at 49.1% and Haley at 33.8%, a margin of 15.3 percentage points. Haley had been as close as 11.4 percentage points on Sunday but following Trump's dominating victory in the Iowa caucuses Monday, he has increased his lead over her.
Sununu was pressed by ABC News about his change from predicting a landslide victory to a strong second place.
"If everyone that can possibly vote comes out, that would be tremendous, and I have no doubt that we could get a victory here," Sununu said following a Haley town hall in Hollis, New Hampshire. "But the expectation was we want a strong second place, we've got that. We've already exceeded those expectations."
Haley finished a distant third in Iowa with 19.1% of the vote, behind Trump (51%) and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (21.2%).
"My plan is that we wanted to be strong in Iowa, we did that," Haley told ABC News. "We want to be stronger in New Hampshire; we're going to do that. We want to go to my sweet state of South Carolina, we want to be even stronger there. It's about just continuing to move up."
In South Carolina, Haley is in second and trails Trump by nearly 32 percentage points in the FiveThirtyEight average. South Carolina's Republican primary is Feb. 24.
Michael Katz ✉
Michael Katz is a Newsmax reporter with more than 30 years of experience reporting and editing on news, culture, and politics.
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