Karoline Leavitt of New Hampshire became just the second Gen Z candidate — and first Republican — to win a House primary in 2022.Leavitt, a former Trump press staffer who amplified his false claims of a stolen 2020 election, ended up losing in the general election.

Now a national spokesperson for Trump's political action committee, Leavitt doesn't believe the former president is facing a similar fate. She pointed to his landslide victory in Iowa as a sign of his momentum — and told Morning Edition's Steve Inskeep that Trump is already focusing on the general election matchup against President Joe Biden.

"It's time for us to turn the page away from this Republican primary and move forward to focus on our ultimate opponent, which is Joe Biden and the Democrats," she said.

She said Nikki Haley and Ron DeSantis don't have a practical pathway to the nomination, and said it is "unfortunate" that they didn't back out, as fourth-place finisher Vivek Ramaswamy did. She called on them to "stop wasting millions of dollars, so we can take this fight to the Democrats."

NPR's Franco Ordoñez, who covers the presidential campaign, says the Trump camp wants big wins in Iowa and New Hampshire to stop the momentum of its rivals — but faces an uphill battle in New Hampshire, where there are more independent voters (which is not where Trump tends to perform best).

Leavitt says Trump will be holding campaign events in New Hampshire "pretty much every single night" before the primary on Tuesday.

Trump has a busy schedule this week for other reasons, as another civil defamation trial against him by writer E. Jean Carroll is being held in New York. Leavitt confirmed Trump plans to be there, and made the case for his ability to balance those commitments.

"There is no one that has more tenacity and a greater work ethic than President Trump," she said. "He arrived last night in New York at 3:30 in the morning, he's going to the courthouse this morning, and then he's on his way back to New Hampshire to give a raucous rally speech in front of a very large crowd."

Trump, who is facing 91 criminal charges across four different cases, is expected to face a busy year of court proceedings. Leavitt accused Democrats of election interference by scheduling those trials during the presidential campaign cycle — though, as Inskeep points out, those judges and officials have not explicitly discussed the reasons behind those decisions.

"But it's not going to matter because people see right through it," Leavitt added. "They believe in the president, and they want their lives to return to what they felt like under his leadership."

Leavitt went on to argue that most Americans have concerns about election integrity, and repeated Trump's calls for paper ballots and same-day voting. She said voters should be able to learn election results the night they cast them.

When asked if that would be feasible with paper ballots, Leavitt responded that "we did it for hundreds of years before voting machines."

"America has done it for 200-plus years, actually, as a matter of fact, and many nations around this world do that as well and you hear their results in the exact same night," Leavitt said.

Inskeep added, "When it's not close, that is."

Ordoñez points out that the Republican Party expressed more openness to mail-in voting after the 2020 election, feeling that Democrats had gotten an advantage from early voting (dozens of election officials and court cases across the country have disproven Trump's claim of fraud).

But in recent months, he says, Trump has been pushing for a return to paper ballots and a single day of voting.

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