What’s the future for the New Hampshire primary?

This week:??A pro-Donald Trump committee’s swipe at Nikki Haley’s stance on immigrants … Ron DeSantis’ claim about Florida’s small state employee count … Trump’s call for presidential qualified immunity … A deceptive pre-primary robocall … Checking the calendar for the State of the Union … A New Hampshire epilogue

Considering the New Hampshire primary’s future?

MANCHESTER, N.H. — We were on the ground watching this year’s primary, and on the surface, it proceeded as usual.

Candidates spoke to packed rooms, with the cleverest campaigns booking spaces just smaller than the expected turnout to stoke excitement. Presidential candidates dropped by the Red Arrow Diner here, including former President Donald Trump and former United Nations Ambassador Nikki Haley, who are now the lone contenders for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination.

The run-up to the Jan. 23 voting offered signs that New Hampshire is slipping from its long-standing perch as the nation’s presidential primary kingpin.

Trump, the Republican front-runner, visited the state only sporadically, leading big rallies and eschewing traditional New Hampshire politicking. Immediately after the Iowa caucus, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis bypassed the Granite State and flew to South Carolina. He held only a few events in New Hampshire before exiting the presidential race Jan. 21.

A planned Jan. 18 debate hosted by ABC and WMUR, New Hampshire’s sole local TV station and a PolitiFact partner , was scrapped when Haley, who finished third in the Iowa caucus, said she’d debate only Trump or President Joe Biden. A planned Jan. 21 CNN debate was also canceled.

“Fewer candidates, fewer events, fewer opportunities for regular citizens to engage with candidates about their real lives … I do think the primary as we knew it, that served the nation well for decades, has changed,” said Fergus Cullen, a former state Republican Party chairman and now a Dover city councilor. “More than ever (this year), New Hampshire was just a set and voters were extras.”

At Biden’s behest, the Democratic Party took away New Hampshire’s first-in-the-nation status, handing it to South Carolina. This meant New Hampshire, required by law to have the nation’s first Democratic primary, did so Jan. 23, but didn’t distribute Democratic delegates. Biden never campaigned in the state because of the shake-up; backers promoted him in a write-in campaign.

Rep. Dean Phillips , D-Minn., Biden’s long-shot Jan. 23 primary challenger, held events that drew media attention because, as Semafor wrote, “many national reporters were milling around Manchester with nothing else to do.”

The longer-term question for Democrats is whether the party will return New Hampshire to prominence. Iowa, the first caucus state, and New Hampshire have declined in relevance for many Democratic officials because of demographics: Both states have a far greater share of white residents than the nation as a whole, and even more so compared with the Democratic Party’s electorate.

Read Louis Jacobson and Amy Sherman’s full report.

Also read: Our fact-check about how DeSantis, in his Jan. 21 campaign exit video, misattributed a quote to former British Prime Minister Winston Churchill.

Examining Haley’s stance on illegal immigrants

EXETER, N.H. — A 30-second ad airing across New Hampshire calls former United Nations Ambassador Nikki Haley "too weak, too liberal to fix the border."?

The ad, from pro-Donald Trump political action committee MAGA Inc., depicts a U.S. under attack, with suspenseful music and darkened video of people running.

"Drug traffickers, rapists, poisoning our country … Nikki Haley refused to call illegals criminals," the narrator says, followed by a clip of Haley speaking in 2015.?

"We don't need to talk about them as criminals, they're not," Haley says in the clip.?

When voter Robert McCowen told us during a Haley rally in Exeter, New Hampshire, on Jan. 21 that he watched the ad and wanted to know the full context behind Haley’s comments, we explored the rest.

One month after Trump launched his 2016 presidential campaign with an anti-immigrant tone,, Haley joined several Republican governors for a?panel by the Aspen Institute, a public policy think tank.

Trump drew widespread headlines for saying Mexican immigrants were “bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.” The Aspen Institute moderator acknowledged that Haley comes from a family of Indian immigrants and asked, “How does that inform your thinking on the immigration debate, and what do you feel about the tone of the immigration debate as it’s recently turned?”

Haley said, "We don't need to be disrespectful. We don't need to talk about (immigrants) as criminals; they're not. They're families that want a better life and they're desperate to get here. We … need make sure that we have a set of laws that we follow.”

When we asked MAGA Inc. for evidence to back the Haley “repeatedly pushed amnesty for illegals” claim, the group pointed us to Haley’s comments during the Dec. 6 Republican primary debate in Tuscaloosa, Alabama.

Answering a question from moderator Elizabeth Vargas, Haley said all of the people who have entered the U.S. illegally under President Joe Biden’s administration must be deported. She said everyone else, an estimated 11 million people, must be evaluated by circumstance: “How long have they been here? … Have they paid taxes? Have they been working?” she said.

Haley was vague about what would happen to the people with jobs.

We rate the ad’s claims False.

Also read: Our fact-check ofHaley’s New Hampshire claims on fentanyl, education and Trump’s stance on the federal retirement age.

Fact-checks of the week

• Off the trail. On the presidential campaign trail and back in Florida, Gov. Ron DeSantis had touted his stewardship of his home state. "Florida state government (has the) lowest number of state employees per capita in the country," DeSantis said Jan. 16 at New England College in Henniker, New Hampshire, days before he left the race. Florida’s small state workforce long predates DeSantis . A recent Florida Department of Management Services report found the state had the fewest state government employees per capita of the 50 states, by two separate measures of employee counts. But when state government workers are combined with local government workers, as an independent group calculated, Florida ranks low, but isn’t the lowest. We rate DeSantis’ claim Mostly True.
• Making the call. If New Hampshire voters thought something was deceiving their ears, those voters were right, at least when they heard a robocall with a voice that sounded like President Joe Biden’s saying, “What a bunch of malarkey!” The recording, obtained by NBC News , was malarkey, in other words, fabricated. It said, “Voting this Tuesday only enables the Republicans in their quest to elect Donald Trump again. Your vote makes a difference in November, not this Tuesday.” The recording included the cellphone number for Kathleen Sullivan, a former New Hampshire Democratic Party chair; she filed a complaint with the state attorney general Jan. 22. In New Hampshire, it’s a felony to knowingly use fraudulent or misleading information to deter or prevent someone from voting. Read more.
• Who’s immune? Though his campaign rejected PolitiFact’s requests to attend five of his rallies, Donald Trump loomed large for us during the primary season. When the former president petitioned the courts to be held legally immune for his actions as president and compared presidents and police officers, we examined his argument. On Jan.19 on Truth Social, Trump argued that “a president of the United States must have full immunity, without which it would be impossible for him/her to properly function.” Police officers are protected against lawsuits related to their official actions, called “qualified immunity.” Legal experts told PolitiFact Trump’s suggestion that he’s seeking what police officers already have is flawed.

New Hampshire epilogue

As we tracked presidential candidates during the week and a half we spent in New Hampshire covering the primary, we also went into the crowds to talk to voters and, sometimes, characters.

At a Manchester school, we met Vermin Supreme, a man who totes a megaphone and wears a long gray beard and a boot on his head. He runs in presidential elections; on Tuesday, Supreme, who said his name is not a pseudonym and is on his driver’s license and passport, ran in the Democratic bracket and secured, based on New York Times data, 732 votes to finish seventh. He trailed the winner and write-in President Joe Biden (65,655 votes) third place “unprocessed write-ins” (11,859 votes) and fourth-place “other write-ins” (7,540 votes).

Supreme, who said he’s from “the internet,” crossed PolitiFact’s radar in 2020, when we investigated whether then-incumbent President Donald Trump had named him the Iowa caucus winner. Trump hadn’t done this , but Supreme said he remembered us from the fact-check.

We asked Supreme why he has footwear as headwear.

“It stands for all that’s good in America,” he said, “the ability to wear a boot on your head if you so damn please.”

On a more serious note, voters we spoke to this week reiterated how much accuracy matters to them.

“Accuracy is important in everything we do,” Newmarket, New Hampshire, resident Erin Williams told us at Haley’s rally Jan. 21 in Exeter. “I think the campaigns themselves are twisting everybody’s words and I don’t like that.”

Another Haley rallygoer, Eric Savage of Kingston, New Hampshire, said, “Accuracy is really important, I really appreciate sites, people who are doing that fact-checking and trying to hold people accountable.”

Quick links to more fact-checks & reports

• Vice President Kamala Harris is wrong that Republican lawmakers played a role in reinstating an abortion ban in Wisconsin.
• Razor wire and a blocked Border Patrol. We look at what’s going on in Eagle Pass, Texas.
• A Kentucky lawmaker isn’t pushing to legalize incest. He made a mistake and withdrew a bill.
• Claims that tennis journalist Mike Dickson died from COVID-19 vaccines are not substantiated.
• U.S. Sen. Thom Tillis, R-N.C., falsely said police made “no arrests” of protesters who blocked Durham Freeway.

Do you smell smoke??

Here's your Pants on Fire fact-check of the week:?Don’t adjust your calendars. President Joe Biden didn’t change the 2024 State of the Union address from summer to March.

See what else we've rated Pants on Fire this week.?

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Thanks for reading. Editor-in-Chief Katie Sanders will be back next week.

Matthew Crowley

PolitiFact copy chief?