Election 2024 live updates: GOP presidential debate in N.H. canceled | AP News

Published: January 16, 2024 12:16 PM

Trump’s victory in the Iowa caucuses sends a resounding message that the GOP’s 2024 presidential nomination is his to lose, but his legal battles continue to loom over his campaign. (Jan. 16)

ATKINSON, N.H. — Fresh off his overwhelming win in Iowa’s leadoff caucuses, Trump is taking the stage in New Hampshire with two of his former rivals-turned-supporters.

Ramaswamy drew loud applause as he joined Trump on stage in Atkinson, a day after dropping out and endorsing the former president. Ramaswamy declared America to be in “a 1776 moment right now” and attacked Haley in a fiery speech.

Trump called Ramaswamy “a fantastic guy, a very smart guy” and someone who is young and “has some young ideas too.”

North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum was also scheduled to appear Tuesday night with Trump.

BRETTON WOODS, N.H. — At the grand Mount Washington Hotel, the crowd applauded when Haley argued that both Trump and Biden are focused on “investigations, past issues and things that aren’t taking us forward.”

“We can either have more of the same, or we can say it’s time for change,” she said.

“We finished Iowa. They were good to us. We came out strong,” she said. “Now we want to finish New Hampshire and come out even stronger.”

CLAREMONT, N.H. — DeSantis canceled his first event in New Hampshire on Tuesday evening because of heavy snow.

The governor was scheduled to attend a town hall in Claremont, near New Hampshire’s border with Vermont. It has been snowing here all day, and frequent plowing has been unable to keep the often-hilly roads clear.

The event drew a small group of hardy locals, but they were told about 25 minutes after it was scheduled to start that DeSantis wouldn’t be making it.

DeSantis flew from Iowa to South Carolina after Monday night’s caucuses and landed in New Hampshire on Tuesday afternoon. He had been scheduled to visit Claremont and then head to a taping of a CNN town hall.

But travel was so slow to Claremont that he ran out of time to attend both events. Two cars associated with the governor’s team spun off the road on their way to the event. There were no injuries.

BRETTON WOODS, N.H. — The usually majestic view of the Northeast’s highest peak rising behind the grand Mount Washington Hotel was obscured by snow as voters began arriving to see Haley early Tuesday evening.

Chris Donahue, a Democrat from Holderness, said he wished he had switched his party registration to undeclared before the October deadline so he could vote for Haley. Instead, he said he’ll focus on encouraging others to vote for her.

“I feel like she’s compassionate,” he said. “And I like the idea of a woman leader.”

Donahue, a 56-year-old builder, adamantly opposes Trump and said he finds DeSantis “scary.”

Donahue said immigration is a top issue for him, though he doesn’t know what the answer is. “I’d like to see our borders open, but what’s going on is a little bit out of control,” he said.

He said he would vote for Haley in a general election over President Joe Biden but would vote for Biden over Trump.

GOFFSTOWN, N.H. — The next presidential debate has been canceled.

ABC News says the debate it planned to co-host with WMUR-TV on Thursday will not happen.

“Our intent was to host a debate coming out of the Iowa caucuses, but we always knew that would be contingent on the candidates and the outcome of the race,” an ABC spokesperson said in a statement Tuesday. “As a result, while our robust election coverage will continue, ABC News and WMUR-TV will not be moving forward with Thursday’s Republican presidential primary debate in New Hampshire.”

The announcement came after Haley said she wouldn’t participate unless Trump agreed to take part. Trump has skipped every debate so far.

That left DeSantis as the only candidate committed to the event.

ATKINSON, N.H. — Donna Nichols drove from the town of Seabrook with her coworker at a medical manufacturing firm to see Trump in New Hampshire.

Nichols, a Republican, said unhesitatingly that she planned to vote for Trump and declared his win in the Iowa caucuses to be impressive.

Her coworker, Eric Holmstrom from Goffstown, said he changed his registration from independent to Republican in 2016 to vote for Trump — the first time he cast a ballot.

“I felt like Trump was going to be the one to change the system. And I didn’t really care for any of the Republicans before him,” he said.

He said as president, Trump had fulfilled his hopes by changing the system — and then some. He praised relationships Trump cultivated with Saudi Arabia and the entreaties he made to North Korea.

Holmstrom called Haley a “walking PR mistake,” and “a contradiction after contradiction” and said all Trump’s GOP rivals should have dropped out by now.

“Nobody should really be running against him at this point,” he said.

Enthusiasm for Trump was on display in Atkinson, New Hampshire, where voters were standing in line outside a country club Tuesday afternoon in the sleet and blowing snow, hours before the former president was due for his first rally of the final stretch.

The Trump motorcade left the New York courthouse where a jury of nine people has been selected for the penalty phase of a columnist’s defamation trial against him.

When the judge asked during jury selection if anyone felt Trump had been treated unfairly by the court system, the former president raised his hand slyly. The gesture drew laughter from the crowd and a comment from the judge, who told Trump: “We know how you feel.”

Trump has an event planned this evening in Atkinson, New Hampshire.

Iowans had something on their minds, but it wasn’t jobs, taxes or business regulations.

About 4 in 10 caucusgoers said immigration was their top issue, compared to 1 in 3 picking the economy, according to AP VoteCast, a survey of voters. Other priorities like foreign policy, energy and abortion ranked even lower.

Indeed, about two-thirds of caucusgoers said they felt their finances were holding steady or improving. But the voters still want major changes — 3 in 10 want a total upheaval of how the federal government runs while an additional 6 in 10 want substantial changes.

As Trump faces multiple criminal charges, 6 in 10 caucusgoers don’t have confidence in the U.S. legal system.

This is an excerpt from a longer story.
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WASHINGTON — Attendance at the Iowa Republican presidential caucuses Monday landed squarely in the middle of the pack compared to previous events from the party’s modern caucus era.

More than 110,000 Republican voters braved life-threatening cold weather to cast the first ballots of the 2024 campaign season, according to preliminary estimates from the Iowa Republican Party.

Attendance this year was the lowest since the 2000 caucuses, when just shy of 88,000 caucugoers turned out to vote. But it did surpass the turnout for every Iowa caucus held from the first modern event in 1976 through 2000.

The highest level was in 2016, when nearly 187,000 Iowans decided a competitive GOP contest. That year, U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas won the event with 28%, compared to 24% for Trump.

MANCHESTER, N.H. — Haley is downplaying DeSantis’ trip down to South Carolina a day after his second-place finish in Iowa’s caucuses.

“It really doesn’t matter to me why he went there. I’m sure he had a great time. South Carolina is a great state,” Haley said on CNN on Tuesday from New Hampshire.

She noted that the Florida governor now faced an uphill climb in both South Carolina and New Hampshire after focusing so heavily on Iowa.

“He’s been invisible in both states. He is not my concern. I’m going after Trump,” she said.

Trump shook his head in disgust Tuesday as the judge in his New York defamation trial told prospective jurors that another jury had already decided the former president sexually abused columnist E. Jean Carroll in the 1990s.

Prospective jurors were told the trial was likely to last three to five days. Opening statements come next.

Donald Trump scored a record-setting win Monday in the first-in-the-nation Iowa caucuses, with his rivals languishing far behind. As AP’s Meg Kinnard explains, the contest now moves swiftly to New Hampshire, which holds its primary next week.

DIXVILLE NOTCH, N.H. — A tiny community near the Canadian border will kick off New Hampshire’s first-in-the-nation Republican primary voting on Jan. 23 as the clock strikes midnight.

Dixville Notch has been in the spotlight since 1960, when the owner of the Balsams resort, Neil Tillotson, arranged for residents to vote at midnight, with the polls closing and results announced within minutes. The resort closed in 2011, but voting has continued in various locations. This year, voting will take place in Tillotson’s former home, in a living room decorated with photos and memorabilia from previous primary voters.

The latest report from the secretary of state’s office shows five registered voters in Dixville Notch: three Republicans and two undeclared voters.

In 2020, former New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg, who was not even on the ballot, won the midnight vote with three write-in votes, one from a Republican and two from Democrats.

GREENVILLE, S.C.— On his way to next-voting New Hampshire, DeSantis made a stop in South Carolina to emphasize he plans to take on and beat Haley in her home state.

He asked the crowd of several hundred at a converted airplane hangar in Greenville if any of them could name an accomplishment during Haley’s six years as governor. No hands went up. DeSantis said in Florida, there would have been plenty of hands.

He later told reporters that the door is still open for someone to beat Trump for the nomination and that his second-place finish shows he’s that choice.

“Half the people wanted someone else,” DeSantis said, referring to the 51% of the vote Trump captured in Iowa.

Digging in further on Haley, he said she was the reason he did a Fox News debate with Democratic California Gov. Gavin Newsom last year.

“I needed practice debating someone almost as liberal as Nikki Haley,” DeSantis said.

NEW YORK — Trump has a campaign rally scheduled later Tuesday in New Hampshire, but he spent the first part of the day in a New York courtroom for the penalty phase of a civil defamation trial stemming from a columnist’s claims he sexually attacked her decades earlier.

After several dozen prospective jurors were sworn in, Trump shook his head as the judge described the case in general terms and explained that for purposes of the trial, it had already been determined that Trump did sexually assault columnist E. Jean Carroll.

In May, a different jury awarded Carroll $5 million after concluding that Trump sexually abused her in a department store dressing room 1996, then defamed her in 2022 by claiming she made it up after she revealed it publicly in a 2019 memoir.

He was not required to be present Tuesday and didn’t attend the first trial.