On the surface, Tuesday’s New Hampshire primary looks as if it may be a struggle between the soaring Donald Trump and the aspiring Nikki Haley, with Gov. Ron DeSantis staying in to try his luck after a second-place finish in Iowa.

But that’s not what New Hampshire, or the campaign for the Republican nomination, may really be about. Instead, it could be about one candidate who is desperately trying to pull an upset and keep her fragile nomination hopes alive, and another who bowed out after the Iowa caucus results were clear.

Forget Trump versus Haley. It may really come down to Haley versus… Vivek Ramaswamy.

The Trump-Haley contest is, to be sure, a struggle for the character of the 2024 Republican Party. But there’s a separate struggle, one that won’t be resolved in New Hampshire — a shadow campaign that could mean much more than Tuesday night’s results.

It is between a candidate in the ascendancy in New Hampshire and a former candidate in eclipse in the Granite State, and it is about the future of one of the great political parties in American history, one that gave the nation Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, and Ronald Reagan, none of whom would venture inside the GOP convention in Milwaukee this coming July.

Why Ramaswamy?

Because he is the leading edge of a new brand of American conservatism, personified in 2024 by a 77-year-old retread who nonetheless set the party in a new direction. The Trump campaign is less about the future than about the past: Should Hillary Clinton have gone to jail, was the Russia investigation baloney, did the Democrats steal the 2020 election, is he being prosecuted for phony crimes by politically motivated stooges?

The rest — immigration, woke policies about school bathrooms, crime in Democratic-controlled cities — are merely objects of opportunity for Trump. His campaign is about retribution against his enemies and restoration of his reputation.

Not so what Ramaswamy has set in motion. He performed poorly in Iowa, to be sure. But in many ways, he is simply Trump 3.0 — the logical extension of the original Trump message, shorn of the personal campaign of retribution.

The proof is in an email he sent to supporters only four days before Iowa.

It is a frontal attack on the American Establishment, which anyone older than the age of 40 knows once was best understood as the Republican Party. Dwight Eisenhower was the beau ideal of the business establishment; his cabinet was known as “nine millionaires and a plumber.” The Bush Republican dynasty began with Prescott Bush, who entered politics after a career with Brown Brothers Harriman, a private banking firm. Mitt Romney was a pioneer in the private-equity business.

The British suffragette Agnes Maude Royden once remarked that the Church of England was the Tory Party at prayer. In like manner, the American Establishment was the Republican Party at leisure. Trump took on the Establishment. Ramaswamy seeks to obliterate it.

“This isn’t just a race for president,” he told supporters, “it’s a battle against the Establishment.”

He set out what he might have called, borrowing the title of a 2004 Philip Roth novel, the plot against America. It involves creating a two-person race of Trump against “a puppet they can control.” (Implicit message: Haley.) Then he goes on to say that the Establishment would “trot their puppet into the White House.”

As prophecy it is gravely faulty; Haley may be trotting nowhere except back home if she doesn’t pull within seven or so points of Trump on Tuesday, and even if she does.

Trump created the new GOP constituency. Ramaswamy has provided what might be the sinews of campaign 2028, when Trump could be barred from another term.

The profile of Trump caucusgoers in Iowa suggests the makings of an even more fervent rebellion against American elites. Iowa has been the seat of rebellion before; the farm states provided the oxygen for the great 1890s populist rebellions. They might, in the phrase attributed, probably wrongly, to 19th-century activist Mary Elizabeth Lease, raise less corn and more hell. (She disavowed being the author of the phrase but embraced its meaning.)

Meanwhile, the Establishment rump, and it is a small one, is considering its options. One of them is not Trump.

“We can survive bad policies,” Rep. Liz Cheney, the very model of the old GOP Establishment, said on “The View,” adding, “We cannot survive torching the Constitution.”

None of this is on the menu Tuesday, when Haley and DeSantis seek to derail the Trump bandwagon. Theirs is an important campaign, conducted in the sort of redoubt of continuity the Establishment always has embraced.

Small New Hampshire towns from 1887 to 1896 held flamboyant coaching parades — matched teams of horses hauling lavishly decorated stagecoaches and wagons at summer’s end. They were the staging ground for the Old Home Week movement, invented here by Gov. Frank Rollins 125 years ago, and the traditions continue, at least in the mountain towns. Last August, Sandwich, N.H. (population 1,466) — aptly named, as it is sandwiched between the state’s Lakes District and the White Mountains — held its 125th Old Home Week. It included a reunion for those who attended one- and two-room schoolhouses.

But that world is swiftly receding as the suburbs spread northward. Its remnants still have their power, of course. Only in New Hampshire would political professionals wonder about the wisdom of DeSantis departing Iowa Monday and flying to South Carolina before decamping in New Hampshire. The old parochial style of honoring New Hampshire’s status as the home of the first primary would have required a Granite State visit immediately.

Should that sort of thing matter today?

The guardrails of politics are falling, the traditions are disappearing, the assumptions are being undermined. It is reminiscent of the remark of Edmund Burke, the 18th-century British political figure and philosopher who once was the balladeer of American conservatives.

As the tumult in revolutionary France deepened, and as the conservatism that Burke loved was in peril, he wrote, “(T)he age of chivalry is gone. That of sophisters, economists and calculators has succeeded; and the glory of Europe is extinguished forever.”

No quote from one century applies fully to another. But the lesson of Burke is to respect history and the patterns of the past.

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