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An upside-down sign rests on the frozen ground outside Republican presidential candidate, former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley’s campaign event at the Franklin VFW on January 22, 2024, in Franklin, New Hampshire.
Haley vows to fight on after Trump wins New Hampshire
Nikki Haley lost the New Hampshire primary on Tuesday, but you wouldn’t have known it based on the response from the crowd at her … non-victory speech. Her supporters erupted in applause when the former South Carolina governor proclaimed she’d earned “almost half” the votes. What happened to Ricky Bobby’s America, where “if you ain’t first, you’re last”?
But in the new normal, losing by 10+ percentage points to former President Donald Trump is, in its own strange way, a feat to celebrate. With 91% of the vote counted this morning, Haley is finishing around 43.2% and Trump 54.5%.
Turnout smashed previous state records -- with 300,000 voters casting ballots in the GOP primary -- a reminder that Trump drives people to the polls, whether in adoration or revolt.
Haley says she will fight on in her home state of South Carolina, where once again she looks certain to get absolutely crushed, by a 2:1 margin if some polls are to be believed. The question now is how long her major donors will keep backing her quixotic campaign. We’ll see if she makes it to Super Tuesday in March.
President Joe Biden, on the other hand, got “almost all” the votes in New Hampshire’s bizarre sideshow of a Democratic primary — and he wasn’t even on the ballot. Democrats rescinded official approval for New Hampshire’s primary after the Granite State refused to budge on its “first-in-the-nation” primary tradition, so the results were never going to count anyway. But if Democratic challengers like Dean Phillips can’t even beat Biden when his supporters are forced to write him in, the question again arises about how long to keep trying.
So don’t fall for the hype among these (literal) losers: Trump is running against Biden in November. And if that doesn’t prove to be the case, it won’t be because of Nikki Haley and Dean Phillips.
Democratic presidential candidate US Representative Dean Phillips greets supporters at a campaign event ahead of the New Hampshire presidential primary election in Rochester, New Hampshire, on Jan. 21, 2024.
AI has entered the race to primary Joe Biden
For a brief moment this week, there were two Dean Phillips – the man and the bot. The human is a congressman from Minnesota who’s running for the Democratic nomination for president, hoping to rise above his measly 7% poll numbers to displace sitting President Joe Biden as the party’s nominee.
But there was also an AI chatbot version of the 55-year-old congressman.
A political action committee that’s raised millions to finance Phillips’ longshot bid for president from donors like billionaire hedge fund manager Bill Ackman, released an AI chatbot called Dean.Bot last week. It only lasted a few days.
The bot, which disclosed it was artificial intelligence, mimicked Phillips, letting voters converse with it like it was the real congressman.
The 2024 presidential election has seen AI-generated videos and advertisements, but nothing in the way of a candidate stand-in — until now. And for good reason: OpenAI, the company with the most popular chatbot, ChatGPT, doesn’t allow developers to adapt its software for political campaigning.
OpenAI took action against Dean.Bot, which is built on ChatGPT’s platform. The company shut down the bot and suspended access for its developer on Friday, saying the bot violated its terms of use. Funnily enough, the PAC behind the bot is run by an early OpenAI employee.
There are no current federal regulations prohibiting the use of AI in political campaigning, though legislation has been introduced intended to curb the politically deceptive use of AI, and the Federal Election Commission has sought public comment on the same issue.
Phillips the man, meanwhile, has had to resort to campaigning in the flesh in New Hampshire ahead of today’s primary since his AI doppelganger is nowhere to be found.