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A record number of New Hampshire voters – more than 320,000 when all votes are counted, according to CNN’s estimate – turned out to choose between former President Donald Trump and former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley in the state’s Republican primary.
The increase in New Hampshire Republican primary turnout is a shift from last week’s Iowa caucuses. In Iowa, Republican caucus turnout was down compared with 2016, the most recent contested Republican primary with no incumbent.
The New Hampshire primary result is a second decisive win for Trump as he begins the process of building a delegate lead. No other non-incumbent Republican candidate has won the early contests in both Iowa and New Hampshire, although Trump, as a former president with almost universal name recognition, has some of the advantages of incumbency.
Turnout is generally higher for Republican primaries in years like this one when there is a hotly contested primary on the GOP side and less competition on the Democratic side. In 2016, when there were contested primaries for both Republicans and Democrats, and when Trump notched his first victory as a candidate in the New Hampshire primary, a then-record number of Republican primary voters – nearly 288,000 – took part.
Trump performed better than he did in the 2016 primary in nearly every New Hampshire town, and most of those were by double-digit margins.
That’s partly driven by the dynamics of the race: This year, Trump faced a sole remaining major challenger, while several other contenders were still actively campaigning at the time of the New Hampshire primary in 2016.
In New Hampshire’s three largest cities (Concord, Nashua and Manchester), Trump performed nearly 20 percentage…
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