Trump wins New Hampshire primary minutes after polls close, but Haley says 'this race is far from over'

• Trump is projected to have won the New Hampshire primary.
• The former president has now won the first two states in the GOP primary contest.

Former President Donald Trump is projected to have easily won the New Hampshire Republican presidential primary.

Minutes after polling closed, The New York Times and Washington Post both projected that Trump will win Tuesday's primary over former Ambassador Nikki Haley. As of 10 pm ET, Trump held a roughly 9-point lead over Haley with an estimated 52% of the vote in, per The Times.

Haley proclaimed it a "great night" while congratulating Trump on his win.

"New Hampshire is first in the nation, it is not the last in the nation," Haley said at an election night rally in Concord, New Hampshire. "This race is far from over. There are dozens of states left to go."

Trump railed against Haley's reliance on independent voters throughout the night, never mind the fact that he used the roughly same playbook in 2016. Addressing his supporters, the former president made sure to emphasize that he won.

"She didn't win, she lost," Trump said describing Haley's speech.

The former president called New Hampshire a "very special place," recalling how he relied on the Granite State to right his first presidential campaign after narrowly losing Iowa in 2016.

"So this was a great evening and I want to thank everybody in the audience and I want to thank the people that are standing behind me," Trump said.

Haley's campaign made clear long before the results were released that she's not going anywhere. But New Hampshire offered her favorable ground that will be difficult to come by in the weeks ahead. The pair won't formally face off again until South Carolina's February 24th primary. It's Haley's home turf, but polls show Trump is favored to beat the former governor in what would be an embarrassing result.

Her best hope is to stay afloat until Super Tuesday when the delegate race will begin in earnest. She is also openly using Trump's 2016-era playbook of trying to get independent voters into the GOP primary process.

Top Republicans are already calling for the primary to effectively end. Just before New Hampshire, Trump trotted out a series of South Carolina-related endorsements to further illustrate that he will take it to Haley.

Trump is nowhere near the number of delegates needed to actually be his party's "presumptive" nominee. By design, none of the early states offer incredibly large delegate hauls in straight up a winner-take-all contest. But Trump and his allies are using the early victories to further the narrative that trying to stop him is futile.

The former president's victory on Tuesday also marks the second straight time Trump's carried a state despite a sitting governor endorsing one of his rivals. New Hampshire Gov. Chris Sununu delighted in tearing into the former president in the race's closing days. And yet, just like Iowa, enough Republican voters decided to ignore their state's top GOP official. Trump has the endorsements of Nevada Gov. Joe Lombardo and South Carolina Gov. Henry McMaster, meaning he won't face a similar situation for a while.

Elsewhere on the ballot, while Democrats technically had an unsanctioned primary, President Joe Biden is projected to have won his contest. Biden's name wasn't even on the ballot after the Democratic National Committee formally punished New Hampshire for insisting on remaining the first primary state despite the party pushing South Carolina ahead.

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