Keller @ Large: State of the Republican presidential primary race in New Hampshire
BOSTON - With three weeks to go until New Hampshire primary voters make their call, the RealClearPolitics average of polls shows three GOP candidates in double figures: Chris Christie at 10.5% (with Ron DeSantis bubbling under at 9.5%), Nikki Haley at 24.8%, and the defending heavyweight champ Donald Trump cruising along at 46.3%.
Game over?
Nikki Haley showed serious momentum in recent polling but has been spending the holidays cleaning up her failure to mention slavery in an explanation of what caused the Civil War.
"She did it because she's unwilling to offend anyone by telling the truth," said Christie, who hopes to get a boost out of the story.
But with time running out, the question is - does any of this matter?
"He is the Ronald Reagan of our time as far as the Republican Party is concerned," said University of New Hampshire political scientist Dante Scala of Trump. He sees Trump's soaring poll numbers since the parade of indictments began as having triggered a rally-around effect among many New Hampshire Republicans that makes him all but unbeatable.
"Rank and file Republicans bought the former president's story that this is all a setup, that's the central fact," Scala said. "And anything else, any other candidate we talk about, is just a B story compared to that."
Not everyone agrees. Neil Levesque's New Hampshire Institute of Politics recorded bigtime momentum for Haley in their recent poll. "If something happens here where she comes close or beats [Trump], that's going to be a story that's heard around the world," cautions Levesque.
But Trump's strong showing has seemed to take the wind out of his challengers' claims of superior electability, a key argument Haley, Christie and DeSantis have been making. Says Scala: "Right now that whole argument that Trump can't win an election doesn't hold a lot of water."
