Upscale voters are embracing Nikki Haley in New Hampshire. Can they carry her to a primary win?

BRETTON WOODS, N.H. – Rudy Glocker strolled into the Omni Mount Washington Resort on a mission to see former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, as snow blanketed the luxury hotel’s red tin roof.

Glocker, a 54-year-old entrepreneur, had seen Haley once before at an event over the summer near his company, Burgeon Outdoor’s, a Lincoln, New Hampshire store that specializes in outdoor apparel. Her foreign policy expertise and leadership style impressed Glocker, a former Goldman Sachs executive.

Ahead of the Granite State’s first-in-the-nation primary, he wanted to be sure he was backing the right candidate.

“She has a vision,” said Glocker, a Harvard Business School graduate, who said the former South Carolina governor's approach evoked the problem-solving ability of a business owner. “She expresses a desire to understand the issue, understand what drives it and to take action that will hopefully help solve the problem.”

Glocker is a part of a key demographic that Haley is counting on to overtake former President Donald Trump in Tuesday's primary: highly educated and fiscally conservative professionals.

The departure on Sunday of Ron DeSantis left Haley and Trump locked in a two-person race in which the former president is the heavy favorite.

Though Trump has held a commanding lead in the GOP field throughout the primary campaign, Haley began seeing momentum for her candidacy in New Hampshire last fall as she crisscrossed the state answering voters' questions at town halls.

Upscale voters are an important part of her coalition there. New Hampshire is a relatively wealthy state that boasts proximity to the Boston area along with scenic mountains and coastal areas. Its median household income of roughly $90,000 is more than $10,000 higher than the national average, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.

A USA TODAY/Suffolk University/Boston Globe poll in early January found that New Hampshire residents earning more than $100,000 a year were more likely than other voters to support Haley. She performs her best among highly educated voters who earned either college or advanced degrees.

While combative rhetoric is a staple of Trump's speeches and also featured heavily in DeSantis's campaign appearances, Haley has a more measured style. The former South Carolina governor and former UN ambassador puts a strong emphasis on explaining her policy proposals, from the economy to the border to foreign policy. That appears to be part of her appeal to college educated voters.

“Much of primary politics is identity politics. When all the candidates have an R or a D next to their name, voters' choices often rely on intangible factors,” Dante Scala, a political science professor at the University of New Hampshire, said.

For Gail Myers, 69, that was exactly the case after meeting Haley at the Bretton Woods event Tuesday.

"I felt like I was her long-lost sister," said Myers, who formerly owned her own drapery business.

Myers and her husband, the former president and CEO of A.I.M. Mutual Insurance Companies, drove an hour and half from their home in Wakefield in the lakes region for the event. A friend who served in the South Carolina State Senate told them Haley was "the real deal." Haley's brief 20- minute address in the hotel's ballroom had Myers hooked.

"Everything that she had to say was right on target. That was all my feelings," Myers said. "I'm definitely voting for her."

Haley has courted supporters like Myers by hosting campaign stops at 4-star hotels in coastal and mountain vacation havens frequented by the wealthy, such as the Omni Mount Washington Resort in Bretton Woods, Portsmouth’s Wentworth by the Sea and the Inn on Main near Lake Winnipesaukee in Wolfeboro.

In wintertime, travelers from New York and Massachusetts flock to resorts like Bretton Woods to ski down the White Mountains renowned peaks and cozy up by the fire in the lodges. During the summer, they line the streets of quaint downtowns near the seacoast, bumping shoulders with locals as they wait for dinner reservations at chic restaurants.

New Hampshire also has rural voters of more modest means and blue-collar voters. Working class voters are a base of support for Trump both in New Hampshire and across the country. The USA TODAY/Suffolk University/Boston Globe poll found the former president performing well among those with a high school degree or some college.

If Haley is to do well against Trump, she'll need to overperform in the white-collar communities where she has spent much of her time, such as Portsmouth and Hollis.

"More than anywhere else in New Hampshire on Tuesday, I'm paying attention to those bedroom communities – suburban communities in the southern tier of the state that make up the outer ring of metropolitan Boston," Scala said.

The Sununu Factor

Haley has an important supporter in New Hampshire Gov. Chris Sununu.

Sununu is one of the most popular governors in the country and is himself among the state’s elite. His family owns and operates a ski resort in northern New Hampshire that he helped run before he was elected in 2017. As governor, Sununu has championed a platform of fiscal responsibility and traditional conservative policies, such as business tax cuts.

His electoral success rate in the state is nearly unmatched – he won four races before announcing last year that he would not seek another term. Sununu chalks his victories up to retail politics and says that’s how Haley can pull ahead in the state, too.

“National strategies don't work in New Hampshire. You've got to be really genuine. You've got to connect with folks,” he said in an interview. “That's the fundamental rule.”

Greg Moore, state director of Americans for Prosperity, an arm of the conservative Koch-backed group that endorsed Haley last November, noted that Sununu has a higher favorability than Trump with wealthy suburban voters.

For instance, in the 2020 general presidential election, Trump lost the once-Republican stronghold of Bedford, a suburb of Manchester, to President Joe Biden. In the same election, Sununu carried the town by more than 70%.

“If Nikki Haley is smart, she's listening to him, as he sort of gives her advice as to how to position herself with those types of communities,” Moore said. “Fundamentally, I think that's an area where she can really clean up.”

Linda Wells, 65, is among the voters in the state who were turned off by Trump but is drawn to Haley's message. A former business analyst for Fidelity Investments, Wells said she is looking for a candidate who is "cool, calm, collected, logical and future-focused.”

“I don't want Trump again. I'm tired of the drama,” the Wolfeboro resident said after attending a November town hall for Haley. Just down the road, multimillion dollar mansions, including one owned by Sen. Mitt Romney, surrounded one of the state's premiere summer destinations – Lake Winnipesaukee.

Wells, an independent voter, has donated to Haley’s campaign and is considering whether to volunteer for her on Election Day.

“I want somebody fresh and new that will spend her time and energy tackling the issues,” Wells said.

Haley’s big business backing

Haley's business background and popularity with donors drew attacks from other Republicans, including DeSantis and former GOP presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy. Both sought to paint the former UN ambassador as beholden to Wall Street.

Haley sat on the board of Boeing after leaving the Trump administration. In 2020, she stepped down over the company’s pursuit of a federal bailout during the pandemic. She’s held several other board positions and has made millions from speaking engagements, private consulting and stock market holdings since leaving office, according to her financial disclosure forms.

But in New Hampshire, voters such as Glocker say they don’t see her business ties as a liability.

Instead, they look at her professional pedigree, international background and time as a governor as a trifecta for a presidential candidate. In fact, one of the experiences Glocker said he valued most in Haley, a former accountant, was her time working as a bookkeeper for her family’s South Carolina dress store.

“When I first met her, we talked about the challenges of running a small business,” the former Goldman Sachs vice president said, recalling when Haley came into his store after her event over the summer.

The pair talked like colleagues about the metrics behind the business – sales growth, profit margins, overhead costs – and Glocker said it gave him faith both in Haley’s financial policy plans and her ability to dig into the granular and big picture as president.

“As a small business owner, one of the things is everybody at your firm looks to you for leadership and how to handle a situation,” Glocker said. “I think being honest and blunt, those types of things, is important. And I think Nikki Haley has some of those characteristics.”

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: The elite factor: How Nikki Haley is swaying affluent voters in New Hampshire