While New Hampshire is unlikely to face the same kind of harsh weather conditions as the Iowa caucusgoers last week, the results could be delayed by a significant amount of hand-counting or by calls for a recount by a former president who has made a habit of questioning results he doesn’t like.

New Hampshire Secretary of State David Scanlan has told election officials to release the results of the Republican primary ahead of the Democratic results if hand-counting on the left side of the aisle slows down the processing of ballots.

Read more from Gustaf Kilander:

At a Sunday event in New Hampshire, Florida representative Matt Gaetz appears to call Ron DeSantis ‘diet Trump’ just hours after the governor ended his presidential campaign.

“In a way, DeSantis endorsing us now, it really creates a contrast of ideas. Because with DeSantis and Trump, you saw a lot of the same ideas,” Mr Gaetz said. “I guess we figured out we wanted Trump instead of diet Trump.”

And then there were two.

Ron DeSantis’s presidential bid ended unceremoniously on Sunday with a Twitter video marking the end of a campaign that had begun on the same platform. It was a ho-hum but not necessarily surprising end for a candidate who had placed a distant second in a state where he has thrown everything he had against the frontrunner and who faced a difficult primary contest calendar going ahead.

Now, the race is down to Nikki Haley and Donald Trump, the latter of whom remains the far-and-away favourite to win it all after a decisive victory in the Iowa caucuses; the former president won 51 per cent of the vote. The 2024 GOP primary has, so far, played out exactly as the polls predicted it would.

So what does Sunday’s development mean for Mr DeSantis’s two rivals for the nomination?

John Bowden has more...

“Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts.”

Mr DeSantis used the quote while announcing his campaign suspension on X, formerly Twitter, on Sunday.

However, years earlier the society honouring the memory of the two-time UK prime minister had debunked the idea that the ever-quotable politican had ever said this.

“We base this on careful research in the canon of fifty million words by and about Churchill, including all of his books, articles, speeches and papers,” the organisation said in response to a 2013 article in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution which also used the same quote.

Michelle Del Rey has more...

Just hours before the Florida governor announced he was dropping out of the 2024 presidential race, NBC News published a scathing story detailing the pitfalls of the since-ended campaign. The report revealed Scott Wagner, CEO of the super PAC Never Back Down, spent a significant amount of time constructing a 1,000-piece jigsaw puzzle at the organization’s headquarters in West Des Moines, Iowa.

“Staffers are putting their dedication and devotion to electing Gov. DeSantis and they come in and the CEO, the chairman of the organization, is sitting there working on a puzzle for hours,” a Never Back Down staffer told NBC News.

Read more...

The Donald Trump campaign has issued a statement on the Florida governor’s decision to drop out of the race on Sunday, per Nick Corasaniti with The New York Times.

“With only a few days left until President Donald J. Trump’s victory in New Hampshire, we are honored by the endorsement from Governor Ron DeSantis and so many other former presidential candidates,” the statement read.

The statement went on to tell voters, “it’s time to choose wisely” between Mr Trump and candidate Nikki Haley.

“Nikki Haley is the candidate of the globalists and Democrats who will do everything to stop the America First movement,” the statement continued. From higher taxes, to decimating Social Security and Medicare, and to open borders, she represents the views of Democrats more than the views of Republicans.”

Sarafina Chitika, national press secretary for the Democratic National Committee, released a statement in response to the Florida governor suspending his campaign.

“Ron DeSantis pinned his entire campaign’s hopes on the same extreme MAGA agenda that both Donald Trump and Nikki Haley are still running on, and now he is the latest member of the GOP to fall in line behind the original MAGA brand,” Ms Chitika said in a statement provided to The Independent.

“Just like Trump, DeSantis ran a campaign pledging to ban abortion nationwide, rip away access to health care, and gut Social Security and Medicare, while embracing election deniers and whitewashing January 6,” Ms Chitika continued. “Whichever candidate wins the race for the MAGA base will be left running on the same dangerous and unpopular anti-freedom agenda that voters will reject in November.”

Wondering how the Ron DeSantis campaign ended up here today?

The Independent’s Washington, DC Bureau Chief and Senior Washington Correspondent Eric Garcia has the analysis you’re looking for:

“Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts,” were words never said by UK Prime Minister Winston Churchill, according to the International Churchill Society.

Former presidential candidate Ron DeSantis used the quote in a post to X, formerly Twitter, announcing the end of his campaign.

Reacting to a story in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution published in 2013 which used the same quote, the organisation tasked with preserving the legacy of the prime minister, said Mr Churchill never used the quote or one similar.

“We base this on careful research in the canon of fifty million words by and about Churchill, including all of his books, articles, speeches and papers,” the organisation said.