After a third-place finish in Iowa, Nikki Haley is facing an ultimatum from her donors heading into New Hampshire.

RELATED: The Hubris of Never Trump

According to a new report, simply coming in second in the first primary contest of the cycle isn't going to suffice. Her donors want her to either win New Hampshire outright or "seriously compete," which one would presume means losing by only single digits.

Former U.N. ambassador Nikki Haley is facing pressure from some of her top fundraisers to either seriously compete with, or outright defeat, Donald Trump in next week’s New Hampshire primary, after finishing third Monday in the Iowa caucus.

“I would still like to see her get somewhere, but the mountain she has to climb is enormous,” Andy Sabin, a New York businessman and Haley fundraiser, told CNBC. “As much as I like Haley, I don’t even know what Trump could do to stop himself right now.”

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Several Haley fundraisers who spoke to CNBC conceded that, unless she gets a very close second to Trump or manages to pull off an upset win in New Hampshire, the race could effectively be over for her after that.

For Haley's part, she's spinning her performance in Iowa as a positive, claiming she surpassed expectations. That's not going to be a viable talking point in New Hampshire, where she's invested a massive amount of resources to secure a victory. I don't even think a close second-place finish there would be enough. I think she's got to win it outright to have any chance at shifting the narrative and momentum by South Carolina, her home state. 

If we are talking hypotheticals, her path is a win in New Hampshire, to keep it very close in South Carolina, and then make it to Super Tuesday still alive. The word "hypothetical" is doing a lot of work there, though. As I explained in my post-Iowa piece on Haley and the Never Trump movement, her problem is that she simply doesn't have the ceiling of popularity without the Republican Party to overcome the odds. 

Theoretically (but not practically anymore because he needed to place closer in Iowa) Ron DeSantis does because he still enjoys high favorable ratings within the party despite what you may hear from a small minority of bitter people online. In contrast, Haley doesn't even break 50 percent in favorablity among GOP voters. How does someone win in a two-way race with that dynamic hanging over their head? I would think it would prove very difficult, if not impossible. 

In the end, I'm not sure Haley is going to have accomplished anything but ensuring Trump is the nominee. Defeating the former president was always a long shot after Alvin Bragg indicted him, leading to a sudden and sharp rise of his support within the GOP. Still, Haley was never the person to take that shot because she didn't have broad enough popularity within the party. Perhaps she plans to hang around in hopes something prevents Trump from receiving the nomination at the convention, but such a scenario seems incredibly unlikely.