| | | | |  | | By Brakkton Booker | With help from Ella Creamer, Rishika Dugyala, Jesse Naranjo and Teresa Wiltz
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Former U.N. Ambassador and South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley speaks to reporters Tuesday near a polling site in Hampton, New Hampshire. | POLITICO illustration/Photo by AP | What up, Recast fam! The Biden administration is hammering Republicans — and most notably former President Donald Trump — on abortion access. The top four California Senate candidates spar in a primary debate co-hosted by POLITICO, and tributes continue to pour in remembering Dexter King. First, though, we focus on Nikki Haley’s do-or-die push in New Hampshire. The Granite State holds the first-in-the-nation primary and by the end of tonight we will all know if we have a legitimate contest for the GOP nomination — or if the general election effectively begins Wednesday morning. Polls indicate this is former United Nations Ambassador Nikki Haley’s last stand. Following last week’s Iowa caucus blowout, other Republican White House hopefuls, Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, businessman Vivek Ramaswamy and former Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson have all dropped out. Hutchinson, who struggled to get above 1 percent in most national polls, threw his support behind Haley. While DeSantis, Ramaswamy and the recently engaged Sen. Tim Scott (yes, I guess he liked it so he put a ring on it) have all coalesced behind Donald Trump, the undisputed front-runner. Scott, who dropped his presidential bid in November, endorsed Trump prior to making his engagement announcement to Mindy Noce public via the platform we still call Twitter, because no one actually says X. While Haley’s made no indication that she plans on folding her campaign after New Hampshire voters have their say, it is difficult to see her path forward. She had narrowed Trump’s advantage to single digits in New Hampshire, according to a CNN/ University of New Hampshire poll earlier this month. But now, those futures have reversed, with the RealClearPolitics average showing Trump has a commanding 19-point advantage. Looking ahead to next month’s South Carolina primary, a state where Haley served as governor from 2011 to 2017, Trump’s polling average lead jumps to 30 points.
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Haley has sought to project confidence that a Trump head-to-head matchup is exactly what she wanted. And as such, she’s sharpened her criticism of her former boss, even questioning if he is mentally fit to hold the White House. It’s a critique some point to as salient, particularly after Trump recently confused Haley with former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi when talking about the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot.
Trump, who is running a far more disciplined campaign than he did in 2016 and in 2020, is ramping up attacks on Haley that are both politically savvy and harken back to his start in politics fanning birtherism claims during the Barack Obama era.
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South Carolina Gov. Henry McMaster points to Trump at a campaign rally in Manchester, New Hampshire, on Saturday. | Matt Rourke/AP | | His savvy moves include flaunting South Carolina elected officials and bringing them to New Hampshire to stump with him. At a rally in Laconia last night, Scott riled up the crowd with: “If you want four more years of Donald Trump let me hear you scream,” which the crowd enthusiastically did. And current Gov. Henry McMaster cited “those great philosophers, the Spice Girls” before quoting the lyrics to their 1996 megahit “Wannabe.” “Tell us what you want, what you really really want,” McMaster said over the weekend in Manchester. “What we really want,” he continued, gesturing at Trump standing just behind him, “there he is.” But then there’s an ugly, racialized side to Trump’s campaigning that many of his supporters seem willing to gloss over. Lately, with his nomination within sight, Trump has taken to playing up Haley’s race in order to go for the kill shot. Haley was born Nimarata Nikki Randhawa and raised in Bamberg, South Carolina, by Indian immigrants; she has gone by Nikki, her middle name, her entire life. This is something that Trump presumably knows — after all, he hired her to be his ambassador to the U.N. That didn’t stop him from purposefully butchering her name on his social media platform. He referred to her as “Nimbra” on his Truth Social platform while also painting her as weak on border security, Russia and crime in the U.S.
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Trump meets with Haley in the Oval Office in October 2018. | Evan Vucci/AP | When asked about it by Fox News host Brett Baier, Trump said it was something that “just felt good” to him, but implies he does it to other rivals too. He referred to it as a “a little bit of a takeoff of her name, where she may come from.” While this type of rhetoric is nothing new for Trump, it underscores yet again that Haley’s efforts to help the GOP move beyond the former president have been futile. As my POLITICO colleague Natalie Allison points out, Haley has already made it further than any other Republican woman seeking the highest office in the land. The question remains, though: If tonight is Haley’s last hurrah in this cycle, has Trump done irreparable damage to her future prospects? We’ll certainly keep a lookout on this to see how this all materializes down the line. All the best,
The Recast Team
| | | DEMS RAMP UP REPRODUCTIVE FREEDOM PUSH
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Biden speaks at a meeting with his reproductive rights task force to mark the anniversary of the Roe v. Wade decision on Monday at the White House. | Evan Vucci/AP | President Joe Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris and their spouses are all set to appear in Northern Virginia on Tuesday headlining a rally aimed at marking the 51st anniversary of Roe v. Wade this week. It’ll be Biden and Harris’ first joint reelection campaign appearance together. It’s also a dual purpose event. On the one hand it’s designed to be a messaging and policy blitz for what the administration sees as a galvanizing issue for this year’s presidential election. It’s also serving as counterprograming for the aforementioned New Hampshire primary, where Biden’s name is not appearing on the ballot. On Monday the vice president was in the Milwaukee suburbs, a politically significant area in a key battleground state that Trump narrowly won in 2016 but Biden flipped by less than a percentage point in 2020. And Biden was there touting investments his administration made to elevate Black-owned businesses just last month. While Biden’s visit was designed to highlight his administration’s accomplishments for Wisconsinites, the vice president went on the attack — blasting Republicans for ushering in a post-Roe v. Wade era. “This is in fact a health care crisis,” Harris told the crowd. “The former president hand-picked three Supreme Court justices because he intended for them to overturn Roe. He intended for them to take your freedom. And it is a decision he brags about,” she added. The vice president also highlighted the ongoing legal battle over abortion in the state which centers around a 174-year-old law still on the state books. It had largely been ignored, until Roe was overturned by the Supreme Court in 2022. Since then that Wisconsin law has been the subject of legal challenges. Democrats argue the law does not apply to abortion, while Republicans insist the law would ban the procedure except in situations where the mother’s life was at risk. “After Roe was dismantled, extremists evoked a law 1849 to stop abortion in this state,” Harris said, reiterating that the law was written “before women could vote, before many women could hold elected office, before many women could even own property.” A Dane County judge last year ruled that the 19th century law did not apply to abortion, but instead bans feticide, which, according to the state, occurs when a pregnant person is attacked and the fetus is destroyed. The ruling paved the way for some clinics to resume performing abortion in the state after they ceased doing so for more than a year following Roe’s reversal. Wisconsin Republicans, who control both chambers of the state Legislature, held a public hearing on Monday for a bill that, if passed, would ban abortion after 14 weeks of pregnancy, reducing the state’s current abortion ban by six weeks. Gov. Tony Evers, a Democrat, has threatened to veto the legislation should it reach his desk.
| | | DEXTER KING REMEMBRANCE
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Dexter King, son of the the late Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., speaks at a news conference in Atlanta, Georgia, Dec. 28, 1994. | Leita Cowart/AP | Dexter Scott King, the youngest son of the late civil rights icons Coretta Scott and Martin Luther King Jr., has died after a battle with prostate cancer. He was 62. The King Center in Atlanta, where he served as chairman, made the announcement Monday. King’s wife, Leah Weber King, said he died “peacefully in his sleep,” according to a statement. Dexter was named after Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama, where his father once served as pastor. He was 7 when his father was assassinated in Memphis in 1968. Following the announcement of his death, tributes began pouring in on social media. “My condolences to all of Dexter’s family & friends. May he RIP, may his legacy live,” civil rights activist and cable television host Al Sharpton said on X. “My heart goes out to Rev. Bernice King and Martin Luther King III,” wrote Rep. Maxine Waters on X, referring to the surviving King children. “We mourn with you the death of Dexter King and we are so proud of the way that all of you have worked to keep your father's legacy alive.” The aforementioned Bernice King also shared disbelief at the loss. “I cannot express the heartbreak I feel from losing another sibling, my brother, Dexter,” she wrote. “I’m praying for strength to get through this very difficult time.” “My deepest sympathy to the King Family,” said former Georgia state Rep. Vernon Jones, a former Democrat who has since switched to the GOP. “He was a friend!”
| | | ICYMI @ POLITICO
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Biden’s advisers are betting that campaign investments in South Carolina will underscore to Black voters across the country that the campaign is prioritizing them. | Drew Angerer/Getty Images | Biden Focuses on Black Voters in S.C. — While some New Hampshire Democrats are mounting a write-in campaign for Biden in New Hampshire, his reelection campaign is focused on South Carolina, which votes in about a month. POLITICO’s Holly Otterbein and Elena Schneider explore how the campaign is zeroing in on Black voters there. California Senate Race Get Feisty — POLITICO co-hosted a debate featuring the top four candidates looking to become California’s next senator. Get caught up with the spiciest moments from last night here. Speaking of the California Senate race, POLITICO’s Ally Mutnick reports that the marquee contest between Democratic Reps. Adam Schiff, Katie Porter and Barbara Lee and Republican Steve Garvey is making it difficult to fundraise for down-ballot races in the state.
| | | THE RECAST RECOMMENDS Kaveh Akbar’s novel “Martyr!” follows a recovering addict and poet unspooling the secret history of his family. Artist Cauleen Smith’s immersive video installation explores the poems of Wanda Coleman, aka the “LA Blueswoman.” It’s on until mid-March at 52 Walker in New York City. “Nope” star Daniel Kaluuya makes his directorial debut with “The Kitchen,” a film that imagines a dystopian London in which social housing has been all but eliminated.
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| Chrissy Teigen and Dave Chang gossip with famous faces over dinner at Los Angeles’ most renowned restaurants in a new show that begins tomorrow on Freeform at 10. HUI gets everybody dancing in a diner and outer space in a high-energy musical-style video for “Hmm BOP”.
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| TikTok of the Week: Guilty pleasure
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