THE EXPECTATIONS GAME — As various competitive drivers would tell you, second place is the first loser. Or, in the words of fictional NASCAR driver Ricky Bobby, “if you ain’t first, you’re last.” Two very different campaigns are attempting to prove that false in New Hampshire tonight. Former South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley and Rep. Dean Phillips (D-Minn.) both look on track to finish in second. A victory by either would be a noteworthy achievement. A Haley win could change the trajectory of the GOP nomination fight, even if she remained a distinct underdog. A Phillips win wouldn’t really alter his chances — there are no Democratic delegates at stake and his ultimate chances of winning the nomination are close to zero — but it would amplify his message about Biden’s weakness and reflect poorly on the president. But short of an outright victory, what does a strong night look like for each of these campaigns in New Hampshire? What kind of performance could reasonably be called something close to a win? To some extent, the answer is shaped by the expectations game. In December, New Hampshire Gov. Chris Sununu raised the bar. “[Nikki Haley] is going to win in a landslide and that’s not an exaggeration,” he told ABC “This Week.” A little over a month later, he’s doing his best to wrench that bar back down. “We always wanted to have a strong second. That’s the only expectation we ever laid out there,” he said to ABC’s “Nightline” on Wednesday. The revisionist history reveals how Haley’s campaign wants to project victory. As recently as mid-December, even as Sununu was predicting a landslide, Haley’s polling average in New Hampshire sat below 20 percent in a much more crowded field; today her average is slightly below 40 percent. The problem for Haley is that as the field has consolidated, former President Donald Trump has seen a similar bump. And as it looked like she may have been inching closer earlier in January, polling now suggests Trump is on track to win by somewhere around 20 points this evening. While the Republican ballot will feature 24 candidates — including all the Republicans who’ve dropped out recently — the bulk of the votes will go to Trump and Haley. While there’s no objective threshold for claiming a moral victory, Haley likely needs at least 40 percent to convincingly claim it was a good night in a state where independents can vote in the primary. The demographics of the Haley vote will prove revealing. In a public memo today, campaign manager Betsy Ankney hinted at the Haley campaign’s strategy for a longshot victory: win primaries that allow independents or Democrats to vote in them. She highlights that South Carolina and Michigan, two early voting states, have open primaries, and that 11 of 16 Super Tuesday states have open or semi-open primaries. The crosstabs of New Hampshire polling — and the Iowa results — suggest Haley needs independents to win. The latest Suffolk University/NBC-10/Boston Globe poll , though, had Haley and Trump in a statistical dead heat — 45 percent for Haley, 44 percent for Trump — among undeclared voters (that poll included Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis). That’s down from earlier in January, when Haley captured 53 percent to Trump’s 32 percent of undeclared voters from the same polling shop. If Haley can’t outright win independents in New Hampshire, where she’s spent a whole lot of money and energy — and where Trump was crushed among independents in the 2020 general election, according to exit polls — tonight would qualify as a disaster, no matter what her campaign says in public. Haley’s messaging ahead of the primary was designed to temper expectations — she told NBC News her goal is to be “stronger” than she was in Iowa, an almost assured outcome given that she finished third there and is now in a two person race. But if she can win independents by a sizable margin, her campaign will have an opportunity to claim there’s a narrow path to victory because of future open primaries. And if Haley can keep it close with Republican voters in New Hampshire as well, that would spell a tighter result than expected and a shockingly great night that opens the aperture on her future prospects. On the Democratic side — where Phillips has accused the DNC of rigging the primary for President Joe Biden by keeping him off of ballots — the Minnesota congressman has also sought to lower expectations as the primary approached. A campaign adviser originally set 42 percent of the vote as an indicator of success. Since then, Phillips himself has ratcheted down the number — the 20 percent range “would be magnificent ,” he said. That’s a bit of an overstatement, especially since Joe Biden isn’t even on the ballot, (There is, however, an organized write-in campaign for the president.). To get a bounce out of New Hampshire, Phillips will likely need a showing that’s closer to the 30s or 40s, which begins to suggest a deeper level of unrest among Democrats and comes closer to matching Eugene McCarthy’s 42 percent performance in the 1968 New Hampshire primary against President Lyndon B. Johnson, the historic measuring stick that’s likely to be applied, fairly or not. According to the New Hampshire secretary of state’s office , Democratic turnout is projected to be a paltry 88,000 voters, compared to a projected 322,000 on the other side. That small turnout is common for an uncompetitive primary, which doesn’t necessarily bode well for Phillips. But it also means he needs to convince fewer voters that the top of the Democratic ticket needs a change. Since the state’s Democratic primary this year is essentially a straw poll with no actual delegates at stake, true victory for Phillips may not necessarily be a number. Rather, it would be a series of post-primary news cycles that underscore the premise of his campaign — that Biden is not well-positioned to defeat Trump. What does defeat look like? The appearance of irrelevance or being written off as a vanity candidate after the first-in-the-nation primary. Welcome to POLITICO Nightly. Reach out with news, tips and ideas at nightly@politico.com . Or contact tonight’s author at cmchugh@politico.com on X (formerly known as Twitter) at @calder_mchugh .
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