It will also serve as a barometer for how Republican voters gauge the criminal charges filed against Trump, including those in Georgia, as he hopes to deal a knockout blow to Haley.

With Trump’s blowout victory last week in Iowa, the verdict was clear. Entrance polls of caucusgoers indicated that about two-thirds say he would still be fit for office if he was convicted of one of the 91 criminal charges he faces.

But there are far more moderate and swing voters in New Hampshire’s electorate than the evangelical conservatives who dominate Iowa’s Republican base. And at least some of Haley’s supporters say they’re more motivated to vote for her by the charges against Trump.

“I absolutely hate Trump,” said Judy Dow, who attended a Haley event in a coastal New Hampshire lobster shack. She warned that the criminal indictments “could bring down” the GOP if Trump is elected and praised Haley as “the kind of person we need” to move on.

A few miles down the road, marketing executive Adam O’Kane was at another seafood restaurant debating how he can use his vote to best damage Trump’s comeback bid.

“I am so dead set against him for so many reasons, but the criminal charges have only hurt my view of him more. How can that not influence me?” O’Kane said with an incredulous note. “Of course, that’s what he’s all about.”

Credit: TNS

Credit: TNS

They could be in the minority. Trump holds a solid lead in most New Hampshire polls, and his campaign expects a decisive victory. His supporters, meanwhile, have brushed off the charges as politically driven attacks. And some see it as a key reason they’re returning to the polls for him.

At one of Trump’s New Hampshire stops, Larry Donovan called him the only candidate who can defeat the “very great problem and danger to our liberty and our freedom.”

Pressed on what that threat is, he said, “an administration that’s out of touch with the people, out of touch with the rest of the world and out of touch with the fabric of reality.”

‘Our best hope’

The sharp divisions among voters serve as the backdrop for the diverging stances from both candidates over the criminal charges as they compete to take on President Joe Biden.

Trump has used increasingly bellicose language to paint himself as a victim of the “weaponization” of the justice system — and lash out at the authorities who have launched investigations against him.

He frequently takes aim at Willis, who last year brought election-interference charges against Trump and 18 co-defendants. At campaign events, he mocks the pronunciation of her name and invokes a legal motion that alleges she engaged in “misconduct” with a special prosecutor.

And at a rally in Rochester on Sunday, he said he would direct an “overhaul of the Department of Justice to investigate every radical, out-of-control prosecutor in America for their illegal, racist and reverse enforcement of the law.”

Haley, by contrast, is more likely to tiptoe around the charges. She’s wary of alienating fellow Republicans who agree with Trump, a position that polls in Georgia and other battleground states show is widespread among likely GOP voters.

She warns that a second Trump term would bring “four more years of chaos” that the nation can’t survive. She said Trump and Biden are both focused on the “investigations that they’re in” but not their visions for the future.

And when an attendee at an Exeter rally yelled “send Trump to prison,” Haley hardly paused before launching into the next part of her stump speech.

Bubba Cromer, a former South Carolina legislator who joined Haley in New Hampshire this week, said her approach is no accident.

“Nikki is showing that being a moderate Republican isn’t a dirty word and that normalcy can win,” he said. “She’s our best hope for that.”

Columnist Patricia Murphy contributed to this article.

Atlanta Journal-Constitution staff writer Greg Bluestein and columnist Patricia Murphy are in New Hampshire to cover its first-in-the-nation Republican primary. Follow their coverage on AJC.com/politics, and follow them on X: Bluestein at @bluestein and Murphy at @MurphyAJC