Trump ‘nervous his base is going to leave him’: Sununu

New Hampshire Gov. Chris Sununu (R) on Tuesday dismissed a new ad targeting 2024 GOP candidate Nikki Haley, whom he endorsed last week, and said it only points to former President Trump’s concern that his base would leave him.

The ad, launched by a Trump-aligned super PAC, accuses Haley of flip-flopping on support for a gas tax hike while she was governor of South Carolina. CNN’s Jake Tapper, noting that her support for the tax hike was contingent on being offset by other tax hikes, asked Sununu how Haley’s team should respond to such an ad.

“You don’t worry about it. He’s scared. That’s actually the best part about this ad, is that clearly Trump is scared,” Sununu told Tapper. “Clearly, he knows momentum’s on her side. She has a ground game that he doesn’t have: the door-knockers, the folks on the phone, the connection. She’s answering questions, doing things that Trump is not and will not do over the next four or five weeks.”

“So, yeah, when he starts spending money on attacking someone directly, you know, he’s very nervous about losing,” Sununu added.

Sununu further pointed to Trump’s recent rhetoric suggesting immigrants were going to poison the blood of America and said that kind of language shows Trump is appealing directly to his base, which, Sununu said, he wants to make sure he doesn’t lose.

“It’s funny … he was here over the weekend and he spent all this time saying this horrible rhetoric against illegal immigrants and all this sort of thing. And all he’s doing there is trying to spur up his base,” Sununu said. “He’s nervous his base is going to leave him at this point. That’s why he gets so extreme in some of these speeches he’s giving.”

“And he does it around the immigration issue, because he doesn’t want people to remember, by the way, you were there for four years, buddy,” Sununu continued, in comments first highlighted by Mediaite. “You had a chance to secure the border. You had a chance to make Mexico pay for it, as you told us you would. You didn’t do any of it. So he’s doing everything he can to distract from the fact, almost like he wasn’t president.”

Since Sununu endorsed Haley last week, he has acted as a surrogate for her, campaigning in his state ahead of the primary early next year.

Also since his endorsement, Haley has seen a boost in the New Hampshire polls. A recent survey from CBS News/YouGov shows Haley narrowing the gap against Trump in the Granite State, with the former president at 44 percent support and Haley at 29 percent.