New Hampshire primary: Trump wins Republican contest as Haley vows to stay in race

Haley has pledged to remain in race regardless of voting results after Trump cruised to victory

Donald Trump on Tuesday won the New Hampshire's Republican presidential contest, according to several polling organisation projections, cementing a seemingly unassailable path to the Republican nomination for the 2024 presidential election.

The former US president is closer to a November rematch with Democratic President Joe Biden, while Mr Trump's only remaining rival, former UN Ambassador Nikki Haley, vowed to soldier on despite her loss.

With 41 per cent of the expected vote tallied, according to Edison, Mr Trump held a comfortable 54.7 per cent to 43.7 per cent lead, Reuters reported.

Mr Trump opened his speech at his post-election party in Nashua by calling Ms Haley an "imposter" and saying, "She's doing, like, a speech like she won. She didn't win. She lost. ... She had a very bad night."

New Hampshire is the first in a series of party primaries in which Republican Party members choose their candidate for this year's presidential race.

Only two candidates – Mr Trump and Ms Haley – remain in the race after last week's Iowa caucus.

The focus now is how large the margin will be between the two candidates.

"I want to congratulate Donald Trump on his victory tonight," Ms Haley told a crowd of supporters. "He earned it. This race is far from over."

Ms Haley has pledged that she would remain in the race regardless of Tuesday night's results.

“It's the political elite that are uniting around President Trump,” she said at a separate event earlier in the day.

“The political class has gotten us into this mess. We need a normal, real person to get us out of it.”

Her campaign circulated a memo saying that some wanted to offer Mr Trump "a coronation", The New York Times first reported.

“They want to throw up their hands, after only 110,000 people have voted in a caucus in Iowa and say, 'Well, I guess it’s Trump'," Ms Haley's campaign manager Betsy Ankney wrote in the memo.

"That isn’t how this works.”

The convention in Milwaukee in July is when the party will officially appoint its nominee for the general election.

The vast majority of Republican voters in New Hampshire, about eight in 10, believed Mr Trump would win the nomination, after he dominated in Iowa.

In a blow to a candidate who has pitched herself as a Trump alternative, more than half of Ms Haley’s supporters said Mr Trump was likely to represent the party on the ballot.

Despite Mr Trump's big wins, Ms Haley has been making steady gains among moderates and independents, and her campaign is hoping to attract support from people who may not want a repeat Trump-Biden rematch.

But Mr Trump still has solid support among the Republican base.

He will become the first Republican to sweep competitive votes in both Iowa – where he won by a record-setting margin eight days ago – and New Hampshire since 1976, when the two states cemented their status as the first two nominating contests.

The former president, however, is the focus of several court cases that may block his efforts to return to the White House.

Mr Trump has been indicted on criminal charges including election interference. He is also the subject of a number of civil cases, including a case in New York over fraud.

He has already been found liable for sexual assault and defamation in a separate case.

Early exit polls showed that 50 per cent of Republican primary voters said Mr Trump would be fit for the presidency even if convicted of a crime, while 47 per cent said he would not be fit to serve if convicted, according to the preliminary results of an exit poll conducted by Edison Research.

Mr Biden was not on the ballot in New Hampshire due to a change making South Carolina the first primary state for the Democratic Party in election years.

US Representative Dean Phillips and author Marianne Williamson ran on the Democratic ticket in New Hampshire.

Biden supporters in the state asked people to write his name in. AP and other news organisations projected his win in the Democratic primary.