HOOKSETT, N.H. — The sky is Windex blue, the breeze Charmin soft, the air apple-crisp warm. Anytime the temperature in late November is in the mid 30s up here, it’s regarded as a “bluebird day” — and a gift from the weather gods. Yet a Republican presidential candidate is shivering in a driveway while chatting with New Hampshire Gov. Chris Sununu, and moments later, microphone in hand inside the Oscar Barn wedding venue for a campaign event, she speaks of “this unbelievable cold.”

Sununu, who once ran a ski area in the state, had some wise counsel for Nikki Haley, a former governor of toasty South Carolina. “This,” he tells her, “is not cold.”

Actually, Haley — newly crowned as the principal alternative to Donald Trump in New Hampshire, which in less than two months holds the first primary of the 2024 campaign season — has been greeted with great warmth in the Granite State: steadily growing poll numbers. Increased attention. And, here in Hooksett, a crowd so big that an overflow of voters was ushered behind the barn to listen on loudspeakers. 

The latest Washington Post/Monmouth poll puts Trump at 46% and Haley at 18%, roughly the same as the CNN poll taken by the University of New Hampshire Survey Center. Both put Gov. Ron DeSantis with about half the support of Haley; his decline is as astonishing an element of the Republican campaign as her rise. And while DeSantis is staking his destiny on the Iowa caucuses, which occur eight days before the Jan. 23 New Hampshire primary, Haley has planted her flag in the cold ground of this state.

So far, her calculation is reaping benefits. A steady stream of appearances in small venues and town-hall settings, along with strong debate performances, have combined to catapult the former United Nations ambassador to a strong second-place position here. But second place may mean little if Trump records double her vote when New Hampshire finally goes to the polls in January, on a day far colder than that November warmth.

There are two ways to look at the Haley Phenomenon. Is she Gary Hart redux? Or is she the second political incarnation of Bruce Babbitt?

Hart, a longshot presidential candidate in 1984, came in second place in Iowa and then moved on to New Hampshire, where former Vice President Walter Mondale was thought to have created an impregnable wall of support. Yet Hart, on the strength of the sort of campaign organization that Haley is trying to replicate, worked the back roads and the American Legion halls and emerged with a stunning victory. One of the architects of that ground campaign was a young activist named Jeanne Shaheen, later governor of the state and now its senior senator. 

“We activated a grassroots network,” Hart said in an interview the other day. “We worked New Hampshire very hard. I spent a lot of time in every part of the state. It was all about dealing with everyday people in small towns and recruiting volunteers. It wasn’t big politics. It was small politics.”

Babbitt, a former governor of Arizona, was the personification of a hardy phenomenon in American politics: a thoughtful figure who became a press darling. “I knew from the beginning it was a very, very long shot, but I had something to say, and I was really interested in the issues then current,” he told me over the phone. “There was a bubble for me and for a while I had a nationwide audience — but I would’ve been surprised had it lasted.” It didn’t. He received only 5% of the vote in New Hampshire. So much for the argument that the national press has an outside influence in presidential politics. 

The kingmakers in presidential politics in New Hampshire sometimes bear the name Gov. Sununu. The first one, John Sununu, endorsed George H.W. Bush in the 1988 Republican primary and salvaged the campaign of the vice president after he was defeated by Sen. Bob Dole of Kansas in the Iowa caucuses. He campaigned relentlessly with and for Bush and succeeded so brilliantly that he was selected chief of staff in the Bush White House. 

Now it’s the turn of Sununu’s son, currently in his fourth term as governor. That’s why there was a flutter when he accompanied Haley onto the stage in Hooksett after setting her straight on North Country climate matters. But Sununu has appeared with virtually all the GOP candidates — all but Trump, whom the governor regards with not-so-veiled contempt — so there was no endorsement, at least that afternoon. One — for someone — could come as early as next week. 

Sununu’s father says even he doesn’t know who will win that prize — only that, as in 1988, a gubernatorial endorsement will make a difference.

Meanwhile, Haley will continue to plug away, recording more campaign days here than her rivals. Without seeming ungrateful for Trump’s confidence in her in appointing her to the U.N. position, she separates herself from the former president, who now calls her “Birdbrain.”  

“President Trump was the right president at the right time,” she said here. “But the reality is that chaos follows him. When we’ve got an economy out of control and wars around the world, we can’t afford any more chaos.”

That puts her at odds with the new Republican orthodoxy and the Trump view of the world. Also at odds are her positions on aid to Ukraine (the better to keep Vladimir Putin at bay and Russia out of Poland and the Baltic nations); the new GOP isolationism (she’d prefer to signal to China that it should keep its hands off Taiwan); and the record of congressional Republicans (guilty, she says, of busting the budget and playing the old Capitol Hill game of loading up legislation with favored local projects). 

Running against the Republican grain is not in the usual GOP playbook, but that is what a moderate Republican candidate has to do in a party that has ingrained the Trump outlook and combative style. He was the outsider once; she is the outsider now. And while she may be on track to win the support of moderate Republicans, he remains in the inside track for the nomination. But she is gaining fast. The question is whether she is gaining enough.

A Swampscott High School Class of 1972 member, David M. Shribman is the Pulitzer Prize-winning former executive editor of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.