(WASHINGTON) — House Speaker Mike Johnson has invited President Joe Biden to deliver his annual State of the Union address on March 7.
In a letter to Biden on Friday, Johnson extended the formal invitation for the president to address a joint session of Congress.
“In this moment of great challenge for our country, it is my solemn duty to extend this invitation for you to address a Joint Session of Congress on Thursday, March 7, 2024, so that you may fulfill your obligation under the U.S. Constitution to report on the state of our union,” the invitation said.
This will be Johnson’s first State of the Union since becoming speaker in October.
This is a developing story. Check back for updates.
(WASHINGTON) — Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin has been hospitalized at a military hospital since Monday night due to complications resulting from a recent elective medical procedure, the Pentagon announced Friday night.
“On the evening of January 1, Secretary of Defense Lloyd J. Austin III was admitted to Walter Reed National Military Medical Center for complications following a recent elective medical procedure,” Pentagon Press Secretary Maj. Gen. Pat Ryder said in a statement.
“He is recovering well and is expecting to resume his full duties today,” he added later, clarifying that Austin remains hospitalized.
Another Defense Department spokesman declined to specify what procedure was performed on Austin other than describing it as “a minor, elective procedure.”
No information was provided as to what the complications were that Austin experienced following the procedure that required his hospitalization.
“At all times, the Deputy Secretary of Defense was prepared to act for and exercise the powers of the Secretary, if required,” he added.
When asked why it took so long for the Pentagon to disclose the hospitalization of a key figure in the Biden administration Ryder described “an evolving situation.”
“We had to consider a number of factors, including medical and personal privacy issues,” said Ryder. “We are now in a position to update you.”
Austin did not have to delegate his authorities since the deputy defense secretary, who has made routine decisions on his behalf, was automatically tasked with that responsibility, said another Defense Department spokesman.
Ryder said that prior to his hospitalization, Austin had authorized the drone strike that occurred in Baghdad that killed the leader of an Iranian-backed militia that the U.S. blames for some of the attacks against U.S. forces in Iraq and Syria.
(DENVER) — Former President Donald Trump is among the list of candidates certified by Colorado’s secretary of state on Friday to be on the state’s Republican primary ballot.
That, despite the U.S. Supreme Court saying Friday it will consider an appeal by Trump’s legal team of a Colorado Supreme Court ruling that declared him disqualified under Section 3 of the 14th Amendment.
Friday Jan. 5 was the deadline for Secretary Jena Griswold to certify candidates to each political party’s presidential primary ballots, which gives county clerks the go-ahead to print their ballots.
Those clerks can begin mailing the ballots to military and overseas voters on Jan. 20, ahead of the state’s March 5 primary election.
Trump’s certification comes amid a Colorado Supreme Court’s ruling on Dec. 19 that held him ineligible to compete in the GOP primary because, the court found, he “engaged in insurrection” on Jan. 6, 2021.
The former president is able to remain on the certification list, however, because Colorado’s high court placed a stay on its decision, pending an appeal filed by Jan. 4, which the Trump team did.
The Colorado GOP appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court on Dec. 27 and Trump’s attorneys appealed on Jan. 3, which effectively placed him back on the GOP candidate list.
Unless the U.S. Supreme Court upholds the Colorado Supreme Court’s ruling, Trump would remain on the list.
The nation’s high court on Friday said it would consider the appeal of Trump’s disqualification from the Colorado GOP primary ballot, setting oral arguments for Thursday, Feb. 8.
Ballots cannot be changed once they are printed, Griswold said, but Colorado does have procedures in place for candidates on the ballot who then drop out or become disqualified.
The secretary has “broad rulemaking authority,” according to Colorado code, so as to “avoid voter confusion.”
Griswold said she would not count the votes cast for Trump if he is ruled off the ballot after ballots are sent out and votes are cast for him.
“Once the ballots are printed, it’s done that the ballots are what they are,” Griswold said.
Colorado would embark on enacting that procedure once they have guidance from the U.S. Supreme Court — either a decision not to review the case or a ruling on the side of the Colorado Supreme Court.
(WASHINGTON) — The U.S. Supreme Court on Friday said it would consider the appeal of former President Donald Trump’s disqualification from the Colorado GOP primary ballot.
Moving with relative speed in matter that could prove consequential in the 2024 presidential election, the justices set oral arguments for Thursday, Feb. 8.
Trump’s team on Wednesday asked the high court to overturn the Colorado Supreme Court’s explosive decision deeming him ineligible to run for the White House in 2024 because, it said, he “engaged in insurrection” on Jan. 6, 2021.
“The issues presented in this petition are of exceptional importance and urgently require this court’s prompt resolution,” his attorneys wrote.
Colorado was the first state to bar Trump from the ballot under Section 3 of the 14th Amendment, followed by Maine.
Trump has also filed an appeal seeking to overturn Maine Secretary of State Shenna Bellows’ decision.
More 14th Amendment-related lawsuits are ongoing across the country, though Trump has so far won challenges to his eligibility in Michigan, California and a dozen other states.
“The Colorado Supreme Court decision would unconstitutionally disenfranchise millions of voters in Colorado and likely be used as a template to disenfranchise tens of millions of voters nationwide,” Trump’s team wrote in its petition to the Supreme Court. “Indeed, the Maine secretary of state, in an administrative proceeding, has already used the Colorado proceedings as justification for unlawfully striking President Trump from that state’s ballot.”
This is a developing story. Please check back for updates.
(TALLAHASSEE, Fla.) — Florida abortion rights advocates on Friday said they surpassed the required number of signatures needed to put a referendum that would enshrine abortion rights in Florida’s Constitution on the state’s 2024 ballot in November.
If the referendum, which needed 891,523 total verified signatures to be placed on the ballot, prevails in November, it will undo Florida’s abortion ban and deliver a devastating blow to Florida Republicans, including Gov. Ron DeSantis, who has restricted access to abortion in the state.
“I’m confident that something that’s very, very extreme is not gonna be able to pass in Florida,” he said in Cumming, Iowa, on Friday after it was announced that the measure received the requisite number of signatures.
Currently, Florida has a 15-week abortion ban that a six-week abortion ban, caught up in litigation, could replace if the state’s supreme court rules it constitutional.
Abortion advocates and Democrats are celebrating the development.
“It’s official — nearly 1 million Florida voters have stepped in to protect reproductive rights and access to life-saving health care,” said Florida Democratic Party Chair Nikki Fried.
Anna Hochkammer, director of the group Florida Women’s Freedom Coalition, told ABC News in a statement on Friday that there was “a grassroots avalanche of support for abortion access across the state.”
“Floridians across the political spectrum want women and girls to have access to modern, safe, dignified healthcare, and when abortion is on the ballot in 2024 in Florida, it will win,” Hochkammer added.
Hochkammer said that her group believes the government should “stay out of personal, complicated health issues.”
But the amendment — which would need 60% of the vote to pass — still faces serious headwinds to get on the general election ballot.
Florida Attorney General Ashley Moody is challenging the initiative in the Florida Supreme Court – asserting the initiative is misleading.
Florida Voters Against Extremism, another group affiliated with Florida Family Policy Council, has filed an amicus brief with the high court in Florida, urging them to reject the ballot amendment. And national anti-abortion organization Susan B Anthony List has also filed a brief with the court.
And groups opposed to abortion access are organizing against the amendment.
John Stemberger, the president of Florida Family Policy Council, opposes the amendment and told ABC News that the next big hurdle for the pro-amendment side is going to be the Florida Supreme Court, which will hear arguments about the amendment on Feb. 7.
In the meantime, Stemberger says his organization is hiring a staffer and has a consultant already working with the group to fight the amendment.
“We’re ready to run a full-blown campaign,” he said.
Florida’s effort follows a similar campaign by advocacy groups in Ohio to enshrine abortion rights in the state’s constitution. That measure was adopted by a simple majority in November 2023.
(VALLEY FORGE, Penn.) — In his first major campaign event of 2024, President Joe Biden on Friday, the eve of the third anniversary of the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol, delivered a speech near Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, to argue democracy and fundamental freedoms are under threat if former President Donald Trump returns to the White House.
The president was closely involved in writing the speech, aides told ABC News Chief White House Correspondent Mary Bruce, after he met this week with historians and scholars at the White House, and in what seemed to be especially personal remarks, he said Trump and far-right extremists are a threat and a danger to the freedoms on which the country was founded, echoing familiar themes he argued during the 2020 campaign, which he called “a battle for the soul of the nation.”
“The topic of my speech today is deadly serious. And I think it needs to be made at the outset of this campaign,” he began.
“Today we are here to answer the most important of questions: Is democracy still America’s ‘sacred cause’?” he continued, repeating a phrase used by George Washington. “This is not rhetorical, academic, or hypothetical. Whether democracy’s still America’s ‘sacred cause’ is the most urgent question of our time. And it’s what the 2024 election is all about,” he said.
“The choice is clear. Donald Trump’s campaign is about him. Not America, not you. Donald Trump’s campaign is obsessed with the past, not the future,” Biden said. “He’s willing to sacrifice our democracy, to put himself at power.”
Later in his remarks, he said, “Today, I make this sacred pledge to you, the defense, protection, and preservation of American democracy will remain, as it has been, the central cause of my presidency. America, as we begin this election year, we must be clear, democracy is on the ballot. Your freedom is on the ballot.”
Attendees included young people motivated by the Jan. 6 attack to get involved in politics, “voter protection volunteers” from the 2020 election, and elected officials directly impacted by the events of Jan. 6, 2021.
The Biden-Harris campaign has billed the location in the election battleground state as being a “stone’s throw” away where then-Gen. Washington, leading the Continental Army, “transformed a disorganized alliance of colonial militias into a cohesive coalition united in their fight for our democracy” nearly 250 years ago.
Biden made the afternoon remarks at Montgomery County Community College in Blue Bell, Pennsylvania, which is actually about 15 miles from the Revolutionary War site that’s considered the birthplace of the American army.
“This Saturday will mark the three-year anniversary of when, with encouragement from Donald Trump, a violent mob breached our nation’s Capitol,” Biden campaign manager Julie-Chavez Rodriguez told reporters in a call previewing the speech. “It was the first time in our nation’s history that a president tried to prevent the peaceful transfer of power.”
“Let’s all take a moment to sit with the gravity and significance of the moment we’re all living through,” Biden communications director Michael Tyler added later. “The leading candidate of a major party in the United States is running for president so that he can systematically dismantle and destroy our democracy.”
With Iowa’s Republican primary 10 days away, and Biden facing polling woes for months, he took a more aggressive posture against Trump, but some Democratic strategists question whether the “threat to democracy” message will resonate with Americans now that it’s been three years since Jan. 6 and Trump was in the White House.
“The venue makes some sense and the timing makes some sense. It makes sense on January 6th, but don’t kid yourself. On January 8th and 9th, Americans will still be going to the grocery store,” Democratic strategist James Carville told ABC News in a phone interview. “People live in the economy and experience it many times a day. They don’t live on January 6th.”
Democratic strategist Tim Hogan, who worked on presidential campaigns for Minnesota Democratic Sen. Amy Klobuchar and Hillary Clinton, said the Biden campaign should take every opportunity to draw a sharp contrast with Trump.
“Trump is operating behind this smoke screen of a GOP primary right now. So, it’s important to clarify and focus now on the threat that he poses, so if and when he emerges as the Republican nominee, the Biden campaign can walk and chew gum at the same time,” Hogan told ABC News.
“Are there many things you have to talk about in a presidential campaign? Absolutely. Voters care about their future, and Donald Trump poses a threat to them in a lot of different ways…All of that is going to be part of the messaging,” he said.
Hogan pointed to a Washington Post-University of Maryland poll released this week showing 55% of Americans believe Jan. 6, 2021, was “an attack on democracy that should never be forgotten” and a 56% majority say Trump is probably guilty of a criminal conspiracy to overturn the election.
But views of Jan. 6 have grown increasingly divided along partisan lines as misinformation about the attack has run rampant.
The same poll found 25% of Americans believe the falsehood that the FBI was responsible for the Jan. 6 attack, and that while 77% of Democrats say that those in the pro-Trump mob who entered the Capitol were “mostly violent,” the number is 18% among Republicans, down from 26% in 2021. Seven in 10 Republicans say too much is being made of the Capitol attack, and 36% of Americans believe Biden’s victory was illegitimate, up from two years ago.
Americans appear to agree that democracy is at risk in 2024, but for different reasons.
A poll from December by The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research, found 87% of Democrats and 54% of independents believe a second Trump term would negatively affect U.S. democracy. At the same time, 82% of Republicans said democracy would be weakened in another Biden term, with 56% of independents agreeing.
Friday’s speech was rescheduled from Saturday due to predictions of bad weather in Valley Forge, where Washington and his troops struggled to survive a brutal winter.
The Biden campaign also used the symbolic setting to highlight how, unlike Trump, the nation’s first president left office voluntarily despite calls to stay on. Deputy campaign manager Quentin Fulks told reporters that George Washington “united American willpower and went on to lead this nation as commander and as president – before relinquishing power – the ultimate precedent and the experiment of American democracy.”
Biden has frequently called out Trump as his “predecessor” in closed-door campaign fundraisers, but Friday’s speech could see him make stronger, public attacks, in which he condemns Trump’s anti-immigrant comments — what Biden calls “Nazi rhetoric.” He’s described Trump’s vision to lead “with revenge and retribution,” often qualifying how he cites Trump’s language statements with “his words.”
Trump, the consistent frontrunner for the Republican nomination, is facing 91 criminal charges against him in four felony cases, with one case concerning his efforts to overturn his 2020 election loss to Biden. He continues to deny any wrongdoing.
304 days to go
The campaign speech near Valley Forge was announced in conjunction with Biden making a trip Monday to Charleston, South Carolina, to speak on political violence and extremism at the historic Mother Emanuel AME Church, where nine Black Americans were murdered by a white supremacist in a 2015 mass shooting.
The campaign says the choice of locations was designed to reinforce to Americans what Biden sees as what’s at stake in November’s election — the ideals of freedom and democracy on which the nation was founded 250 years ago.
“Whether it is white supremacists descending on the historic American city of Charlottesville, the assault on our nation’s capital on January 6, or a white supremacist murdering churchgoers at Mother Emanuel nearly nine years ago,” Fulks told reporters, “America’s worried about the rise in political violence and determined to stand against it.”
Leading up to Friday’s speech, the Biden campaign released its first television campaign ad of 2024, part of a half-million-dollar blitz in key swing states and digital platforms — in which he’s heard calling the preservation of democracy the central issue of his presidency.
In narrating the ad, Biden does not call out Trump by name but warns against “an extremist movement that does not share the basic beliefs in our democracy,” over images of the Capitol attack and “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville in 2017, an event he has said propelled him to run for office in 2020.
To help frame his speech, the White House said Biden had lunch this week with historians and scholars to discuss what it called “ongoing threats to democracy and democratic institutions both here in America and around the world.”
Former Vice President Kamala Harris is also traveling to South Carolina, the first state where Democrats will head to the polls on Feb. 3, at least two times in January. She’s set to launch a “reproductive freedoms tour” in Milwaukee on Jan. 22, on the anniversary of the now-overruled Roe v. Wade decision that legalized abortion nationwide.
Trump, meanwhile, is holding several “commit to caucus” rallies in Iowa this weekend.
ABC News’ Chief White House Correspondent Mary Bruce contributed to this report.
(NEW YORK) — Three years after the attack at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, federal law enforcement leaders still have one major unsolved mystery — finding the person who placed two pipe bombs outside the Democratic and Republican national headquarters the day before the riots.
The FBI, along with the Bureau of Alcohol Firearms and Tobacco, D.C. Police and the U.S. Capitol Police said this week that finding whomever is responsible is a “top priority.”
Between 7:30 p.m. and 8:30 p.m. on Jan. 5, 2021, a hooded figure with Nike shoes and a severe gait was seen on camera footage placing what were ultimately two live pipe bombs outside of the DNC and RNC, according to investigators.
The FBI is still offering a $500,000 reward for any information leading to the arrest and conviction of the suspect.
One of the challenges in the investigation is that there wasn’t a lot of video footage captured in the area, according to the former official who led the investigation.
“People surmise and suspect that, ‘oh, there’s all this video all over the country, all over D.C.’ It’s not true,” Steven D’Antuono, the former head of the FBI Washington Field Office, testified before the House Judiciary Committee on June 7, 2023.
D’Antuono testified that the DNC didn’t have a good video system at the time. That system has since been upgraded.
“We did every check, every lab test, every data. We ran this through systems back and forth, up and down, sideways, all over the place,” he testified about the search for the suspect.
The bombs did not detonate, however, the FBI noted that the suspect placed them in “residential and commercial areas in Capitol Hill just blocks from the U.S. Capitol with viable pipe bombs that could have seriously injured or killed innocent bystanders.”
“Over the past three years, a dedicated team of FBI agents, analysts, data scientists and law enforcement partners has worked thousands of hours conducting interviews, reviewing physical and digital evidence, and assessing tips from the public about who may have placed pipe bombs on Capitol Hill,” said David Sundberg, assistant director in charge of the FBI Washington Field Office.
“We urge anyone who may have previously hesitated to come forward or who may not have realized they had important information to contact us and share anything relevant,” he said.
(WASHINGTON) — Harry Dunn, who struggled to defend the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, and has been one of the most outspoken members of law enforcement to condemn the attack, announced Friday that he is running for Congress.
Dunn, who resigned as a Capitol Police officer last month, said he is running as a Democrat to represent Maryland’s 3rd Congressional District, which includes several Maryland counties outside Baltimore. He is running to replace Democrat Rep. John Sarbanes, who is not seeking reelection.
Dunn, who delivered memorable testimony before the House Jan. 6 committee, recalled the horrors of the day in an exclusive interview with ABC News Chief Justice Correspondent Pierre Thomas.
“‘I got called a [N-word] a couple dozen times today protecting this building,'” Dunn recalled telling an officer colleague. “Is this America? They beat police officers with Blue Lives Matter flags. They fought us, they had Confederate flags in the U.S. Capitol.”
Dunn, who joined the Capitol Police in 2008, called the pro-Trump rioters on Jan. 6 “terrorists.”
“They tried to disrupt this country’s democracy — that was their goal … And you know what? Y’all failed because later that night, they went on and they certified the election,” Dunn told Thomas.
Dunn said he suffers from PTSD from the events of Jan. 6, and that the insurrection is never far from his mind.
Dunn told Thomas that former President Donald Trump needs to be held responsible for the events of Jan. 6.
“I believe he should be held accountable for his actions or inactions of that day,” he said.
Dunn wrote a book released last year about his experiences on Jan. 6 as well as his “fight for accountability.”
(VALLEY FORGE, Pa.) — In his first major campaign event of 2024, President Joe Biden on Friday, the eve of the third anniversary of the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, will deliver a speech near Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, to argue democracy and fundamental freedoms are under threat if former President Donald Trump returns to the White House.
The Biden campaign has billed the location in the election battleground state as being a “stone’s throw” away where then-Gen. George Washington, leading the Continental Army, “transformed a disorganized alliance of colonial militias into a cohesive coalition united in their fight for our democracy” nearly 250 years ago.
He’ll make the afternoon remarks at Montgomery County Community College in Blue Bell, Pennsylvania, which is actually about 15 miles from the Revolutionary War site that’s considered the birthplace of the American army.
“This Saturday will mark the three-year anniversary of when, with encouragement from Donald Trump, a violent mob breached our nation’s Capitol,” Biden campaign manager Julie-Chavez Rodriguez told reporters in a call previewing the speech. “It was the first time in our nation’s history that a president tried to prevent the peaceful transfer of power.”
“Let’s all take a moment to sit with the gravity and significance of the moment we’re all living through,” Biden communications director Michael Tyler added later. “The leading candidate of a major party in the United States is running for president so that he can systematically dismantle and destroy our democracy.”
With Iowa’s Republican primary 10 days away, and Biden facing polling woes for months, he’s expected to start taking a more aggressive posture against Trump, but some Democratic strategists question whether the “threat to democracy” message will resonate with Americans now that it’s been three years since Jan. 6 and Trump was in the White House.
“The venue makes some sense and the timing makes some sense. It makes sense on January 6th, but don’t kid yourself. On January 8th and 9th, Americans will still be going to the grocery store,” Democratic strategist James Carville told ABC News in a phone interview. “People live in the economy and experience it many times a day. They don’t live on January 6th.”
Democratic strategist Tim Hogan, who worked on presidential campaigns for Minnesota Democratic Sen. Amy Klobuchar and Hillary Clinton, said the Biden campaign should take every opportunity to draw a sharp contrast with Trump.
“Trump is operating behind this smoke screen of a GOP primary right now. So, it’s important to clarify and focus now on the threat that he poses, so if and when he emerges as the Republican nominee, the Biden campaign can walk and chew gum at the same time,” Hogan told ABC News.
“Are there many things you have to talk about in a presidential campaign? Absolutely. Voters care about their future, and Donald Trump poses a threat to them in a lot of different ways…All of that is going to be part of the messaging,” he said.
Views of Jan. 6 have grown increasingly divided along partisan lines as misinformation about the attack has run rampant.
A Washington Post-University of Maryland poll released this week found 25% of Americans believe the falsehood that the FBI was responsible for the Jan. 6 attack, and that while 77% of Democrats say that those in the pro-Trump mob who entered the Capitol were “mostly violent,” the number is 18% among Republicans, down from 26% in 2021.
Friday speech was rescheduled from Saturday due to predictions of bad weather in Valley Forge, where Washington and his troops struggled to survive a brutal winter.
The Biden campaign also appears to be using the symbolic setting to highlight how, unlike Trump, the nation’s first president left office voluntarily despite calls to stay on. Deputy campaign manager Quetien Fulks told reporters that George Washington “united American willpower and went on to lead this nation as commander and as president – before relinquishing power – the ultimate precedent and the experiment of American democracy.”
Biden has frequently called out Trump as his “predecessor” in closed-door campaign fundraisers, but Friday’s speech could see him make stronger, public attacks, in which he condemns Trump’s anti-immigrant comments — what Biden calls “Nazi rhetoric.” He’s described Trump’s vision to lead “with revenge and retribution,” often qualifying how he he cites Trump’s language statements with “his words.”
Trump, the consistent frontrunner for the Republican nomination, is facing 91 criminal charges against him in four felony cases, with one case concerning his efforts to overturn his 2020 election loss to Biden. He continues to deny any wrongdoing.
304 days to go
The campaign speech near Valley Forge was announced in conjunction with Biden making a trip Monday to Charleston, South Carolina, to speak at the the historic Mother Emanuel AME Church, where nine Black Americans were murdered in 2015 by a white supremacist in a mass shooting.
The campaign says the choice of locations is designed to reinforce to Americans what Biden sees as what’s at stake in November’s election – the ideals of freedom and democracy on which the nation was founded 250 years ago.
“Whether it is white supremacists descending on the historic American city of Charlottesville, the assault on our nation’s capital on January 6, or a white supremacist murdering churchgoers at Mother Emanuel nearly nine years ago,” Fulks told reporters, “America’s worried about the rise in political violence and determined to stand against it.”
Leading up to Friday’s speech, the Biden campaign released its first television campaign ad of 2024, part of a half-million-dollar blitz in key swing states and digital platforms — in which he’s heard calling the preservation of democracy the central issue of his presidency.
In narrating the ad, Biden does not call out Trump by name but warns against “an extremist movement that does not share the basic beliefs in our democracy,” over images of the Capitol attack and “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville in 2017, an event he has said propelled him to run for office in 2020.
To help frame his speech, the White House said Biden had lunch this week with historians and scholars to discuss what it called “ongoing threats to democracy and democratic institutions both here in America and around the world.”
Former Vice President Kamala Harris is also traveling to South Carolina, the first state where Democrats will head to the polls on Feb. 3, at least two times in January. She’s set to launch a “reproductive freedoms tour” in Milwaukee on Jan. 22, on the anniversary of the now-overruled Roe v. Wade decision that legalized abortion nationwide.
(MILFORD, N.H.) — Nikki Haley is facing backlash for comments she made to a New Hampshire crowd that its primary voters have the opportunity to “correct” the results of the Iowa caucuses set for later this month.
Joined by Gov. Chris Sununu, the Republican candidate and former U.N. ambassador saw large crowds at all three of her events across the state’s southern region. At her event at Milford’s Hampshire Hills Athletic Club on Wednesday, she closed her remarks with a note catered to New Hampshire voters downplaying the significance of Iowa’s caucuses — which takes place Jan. 15, just a few days before New Hampshire’s Jan. 23 primary.
“We have an opportunity to get this right. And I know we’ll get it right and I trust you. I trust every single one of you. You know how to do this. You know, Iowa starts it. You know that you correct it. … And then my sweet state of South Carolina brings it home. That’s what we do,” said Haley, who served as governor of South Carolina.
The campaign of competitor Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis knocked Haley for the comment. In a post on X, the DeSantis campaign wrote, “Nikki Haley belittles Iowa Caucusgoers — claiming their decisions will need to be corrected by New Hampshire voters.”
Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds fired back after Haley’s comments.
“I trust Iowans to make their own decisions. No ‘corrections’ needed!” Reynolds, who has endorsed DeSantis, posted to X.
Evangelical leader Bob Vanderplaats, who has also backed DeSantis, posted to X that Haley’s remark “are very telling regarding her status in Iowa” and that it is an “admission of getting beat” there.
The Iowa Democratic Party posted to X that it “seems like Nikki Haley believes Iowa just picks corn while New Hampshire picks presidents.”
“What a disgusting slap in the face to all Iowans and just one of the many reasons she should never be anywhere near the Oval Office,” the post continued.
Haley trails in the Iowa polls behind former President Donald Trump and DeSantis, according to 538’s latest polling averages.
While Haley is not far from DeSantis — 15.7% to 18.4%, respectively — both are far behind Trump, who is polling at an average of 50%.
Haley has been splitting her time on the campaign trail across several early states including New Hampshire and South Carolina, rather than taking on Iowa head-on.
In New Hampshire, Haley is polling about 20 points behind the former president, 25.7% to Trump’s 44.1%, according to 538’s latest polling averages in the state. DeSantis is polling at 7.6% — falling behind former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie who is at 11%.
DeSantis and Haley will appear at back-to-back town hall events in Iowa Thursday night.
