FRANKLIN, N.H. — It was bright outside but dark in the windowless VFW hall where former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley was about to appear on Monday.
The other candidate, former President Donald J. Trump, was far away and otherwise busy for a brief appearance in court.
One more day to go.
The first-in-the-nation primary neared its finish on Monday, as Haley made a show of criss-crossing the state — albeit with limited press and few opportunities for voters to ask questions — while Trump, the front-runner, had no plans to be in New Hampshire until a late-night rally in the remote Lakes Region.
And while Haley supporters are holding out hope the state will deliver the kind of surprise result that has long burnished its political mythology, the campaign’s closing days have felt decidedly strange, feeding a creeping sense that perhaps nothing here — not the months of campaigning or the millions of dollars spent — really mattered in the face of Trump’s dominance.
“You can make a case that there was a never a fork in the road, that it was all just kind of — we were all just kind of going through the paces and pretending there was a competition when there never really was in the mind of the voters that matter,” Dante Scala, a professor of political science at the University of New Hampshire, said in an interview. “If this all wraps up after tomorrow that would tend to give credence to that [theory]. And that would be weird.”
Voters themselves couldn’t help but feel they were part of a strange spectacle, too.
“Boy, what a circus, I think there’s more media than people,” said Scott Firth, 57, as he looked around the dark VFW hall, where reporters were trying to interview the same people over and over. “I’ve never seen it like this where you have one leading candidate in court.”
Firth, a property manager, said he was planning to cast a vote for Haley on Tuesday, although he is not really expecting that she will win.
“I like what she’s saying and I think it’s time for a new direction,” he said. “But I think Trump’s just got too much support.”
Still, Haley sought to press her case, urging her supporters to ignore prognostications about the race already being over.
“Donald Trump won 56,000 votes out of 3 million in Iowa. America doesn’t do coronations. We believe in choices,” she said.
Later in the day, at a rally in Salem, Governor Chris Sununu of New Hampshire sought to pump up the crowd by dialing up expectations.
“She’s guaranteed not just a second place, but now we’re just a stone’s throw away from doing what nobody thought was possible, and that’s delivering Donald Trump a loss in the first primary of the country,” Sununu said.
Trump, who has dipped in and out of the state for rallies, has left much of the daytime campaigning to surrogates including his son Donald Trump Jr., who appeared in Hollis on Monday, and Matt Gaetz, the bombastic US representative from Florida, who spoke with reporters at the Trump campaign headquarters on Sunday afternoon.
The headquarters — a one-story building that shares a plaza with a thrift store and a business called Wisdom Motor Enterprise — is significantly smaller than Trump’s 2016 headquarters here. Inside, there is a mural-sized painting of Trump’s head overlaid with the American flag, as well as withering pothos plants in containers fixed with stickers that show Trump’s face and say “I’ll fix this.”
Gaetz took questions on the federal budget process, changing New Hampshire voting laws, and — in a possible reference to a sex trafficking investigation in which he was never charged — who was the youngest woman he had ever slept with.
Outside, the perennial Democratic presidential candidate Vermin Supreme, who wears a boot on his head, used a bullhorn to tell Gaetz to come out.
Supporters of President Biden, meanwhile, have found themselves standing out on intersections and traffic circles with signs urging people to write the name of the current president onto their ballots on Tuesday. It is a deeply unusual campaign necessitated by a dispute between this state’s Democrats and the Democratic National Committee over whether the state should lose its first-in-the-nation status.
“It’s different. It’s never happened before that I know about,” said former Senator Gordon Humphrey, a Republican who supports Haley and is deeply opposed to Trump. He worried that the write-in effort might siphon independent voters who he hopes instead cast their ballots for Haley.
Democrats agree with Humphrey’s assessment that they are doing something kind of weird.
“I’m just interested to see how this rather odd primary plays out. It is pretty quirky,” said Frank Hyer, an architect and painter from Portsmouth. Hyer was standing in the butter yellow living room of former House Speaker Terie Norelli, a Democrat, for an event promoting the effort.
But even some of the devoted Democrats who showed up here admitted they had a rare rooting interest — or something like it — in the proceedings on the other side of the aisle.
“I’d rather a politician I disagree with than a politician I think is an existential threat to the Republic,” said James Pringle, 55, a professor of oceanography, who said he is hoping to see Haley beat Trump on Tuesday.
“It’s not rooting for Nikki Haley,” Pringle clarified. “It’s a hope for a stable, non-potentially tragic political system.”
Jennifer Mandelbaum, a 32-year-old public health researcher who is running for state representative as a Democrat, said she had never followed an election as closely as this one — and she did not mean the action on the Democratic side.
“I would rather Haley win,” she said, maybe a little wistfully. “I’m just very concerned about another potential Trump-Biden showdown.”
For Democrats, a campaign stop by the long-shot Democratic candidate Representative Dean Phillips of Minnesota was a rare chance to experience something like campaign trail buzz.
“We just don’t have the hubbub,” said 70-year-old Marlene Morgan, who plans to vote for a Democrat, before Phillips addressed a couple dozen members of the local rotary as they enjoyed chicken parmesan and fruit salad. “I haven’t really gotten any calls. But it’s more just the opportunity to listen to the candidates — it’s not anywhere near like it used to be.”
And why the change this year?
“I hate to say — it’s that five-letter word,” Morgan said: T-r-u-m-p.
Carol Baldwin, who leads the nonprofit organization Nashua Adult Learning Center, said after Monday’s lunch with Phillips that in a typical primary year candidates ask to hold events at her organization’s spacious home downtown. This year, she said, none have come calling, an indication of how many fewer retail stops are being made.
“It’s a very weird time for the primary,” said 79-year-old Don Reilly, of Merrimack, over a low rendition of “Copacabana.” “It’s screwed up this year.”
The surreal closing of the primaries might have been clearest Friday, as Haley snaked through a crowded diner in Amherst, where the walls of mirrors caught glimpses of her face, taking selfies with voters, shaking hands, and leaning in to have short conversations with diners.
“It’s like a funhouse in here,” one camera operator remarked.
James Pindell of the Globe staff contributed reporting.
Jess Bidgood can be reached at Jess.Bidgood@globe.com. Follow her @jessbidgood. Emma Platoff can be reached at emma.platoff@globe.com. Follow her @emmaplatoff.