Donald Trump’s former White House press secretary turned Fox News host said the New Hampshire primary on Tuesday was “a fairly good night for” President Joe Biden.
Biden easily defeated long-shot candidates Rep. Dean Phillips (D-Minn.) and author Marianne Williamson in a write-in campaign in the Democratic party primary.
McEnany said it was a good night for the incumbent president citing exit polling data.
“This was actually a fairly good night for Joe Biden. When you look at our voter analysis, only 10% said ‘I would not vote for Joe Biden if he’s the nominee,'” McEnany said in a clip shared by Mediaite. “He won a plurality of voters who said he was too old. He won a majority of voters who are upset about the Gaza war. So the divides in the Democrat Party, and this is a small sample size, but perhaps aren’t as stark as one would think.”
McEnany compared that to exit polling data from the GOP primary showing 7 in 10 Nikki Haley voters saying they would not vote for Trump and cited a Des Moines Register poll showing that 43% of Haley supporters would not back Trump in a general election.
McEnany advised her former boss to adopt a “general election tone” to not further alienate independent and moderate voters who are supporting Haley in the primary.
“If I’m Trump, I sit back and I exclusively focus on the general election. I take the posture of a presumptive nominee,” she said. “I focus on number one, uniting the party and number two, winning the independents, which Nikki Haley won 55 to 39%. That’s what I would do.”
The advice was not well received by Trump who took to Truth Social to call McEnany a “RINO” the derisive acronym for ‘Republican in name only’ and said he doesn’t need her advice.
