Trump Touts More South Carolina Backing as Frontrunner Looks Ahead Beyond New Hampshire

MANCHESTER, N.H—Former President Donald J. Trump brought up to New Hampshire a large group of South Carolina politicians led by Gov. Henry McMaster, who spoke on behalf of the former president against, among others, their state’s former governor, Nikki Haley.

“I love your motto,” said South Carolina House Speaker Murrell Smith, referring to New Hampshire’s “Live Free or Die” motto.

“We’re going to be there,” President Trump said of South Carolina in a rally at the Southern New Hampshire University Arena in Manchester on Jan. 20—just three days before New Hampshire’s Jan. 23 Republican and Democratic primaries.

The moment laid bare Ms. Haley’s struggle to command support from other Republicans in her home state, where polling shows President Trump with a commanding lead among prospective primary voters.

RealClearPolitics’ latest polling average has President Trump above 50 percent and Ms. Haley below 22 percent in the state she once led.

The president previously appeared on stage with Sen. Tim Scott (R-S.C.) on Jan. 19 in Concord, his previous rival in the presidential contest. The senator had previously said he wasn’t going to endorse anyone in the race.

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A few minutes before introducing the South Carolina lawmaker, President Trump had teased the possibility of bringing him on stage.

“I‘d love to get him up here tonight. But I don’t know if he’ll be able to. You know, he’s always working in Washington, D.C.,” he said to a crowd of his followers and, a little further back, the journalists.

When Mr. Scott appeared, his pitch for the former president began with talk of the southern border, an issue that Trump supporters have consistently emphasized to The Epoch Times in both Iowa and New Hampshire.

“We need a president who will close our southern border today,” he said.

New Hampshire residents also worry about the security of their northern border with Canada.

Many of the former president’s top items in his “Agenda 47” collection of proposed policies involve cracking down on mass illegal immigration and its consequences—one of those consequences being the provision of citizenship to non-citizens’ children.

“Our borders are open,” said South Carolina’s lieutenant governor, Pamela Evette, at the Manchester event.

While President Trump has amassed a passel of supportive South Carolinian politicos, the state’s former governor has drawn on representatives of the Granite State’s more moderate Republican Party to help make her case on the campaign trail there.

The state’s governor, Chris Sununu, is one who has supported Ms. Haley on the trail.

Ret. Brigadier Gen. Don Bolduc, who received President Trump’s endorsement before his failed 2022 Senate bid in New York, has a less moderate reputation. Yet he too has campaigned for Ms. Haley.

President Trump still holds a commanding lead in the polls. RealClearPolitics’ latest shows him hovering near 50 percent support in New Hampshire, close to the chunk he ultimately won in Iowa’s caucus.