The GOP is, of course, still Donald Trump’s party. His coronation is set for this July in Milwaukee, and Republican grandees continue to bend the knee, saying they will support him even if he is convicted of felonies by a jury of his peers.
But the images out of New York, coupled with the latest state primary results, ought to spread disquiet in the party ranks.
In Pennsylvania this week, former U.N. ambassador and one-time presidential candidate Nikki Haley got nearly 157,000 votes in the GOP primary, despite having dropped out of the race over a month ago. Meanwhile, President Joe Biden continued to roll, winning 93% of the Democratic vote.
In Pennsylvania this week, former U.N. ambassador and one-time presidential candidate Nikki Haley got nearly 157,000 votes in the GOP primary.
Emboldened by the result, Biden’s campaign announced a new ad push Thursday targeting Haley voters in the state. “For months, Donald Trump told Nikki Haley voters that he didn’t want their support, and they heard him loud and clear — that’s why more than 157,000 of them voted against him in an uncontested primary. Our campaign has been clear from the beginning that we welcome anyone who knows that four more years of Trump would destroy our freedoms and devastate our country,” campaign communications director Michael Tyler said in an email blast.
Of course, the usual caveats are in order: Primaries do not reflect November’s electorate and do not always predict how voters will behave in the general election.
But there are important clues here. Because Pennsylvania is a “closed” primary, you can’t blame the results on Democrats or independents making mischief. These are registered Republicans who are refusing (so far) to endorse their party’s presumptive nominee.
That Haley got over 16 percent of the Pennsylvania GOP vote also continues a pattern that we’ve seen throughout the primary: A sizeable number of Republican voters simply do not want to vote for Donald Trump.
Back in March, when she officially ended her campaign, Haley said: “It is now up the Donald Trump to earn the votes of those in our party and beyond it who did not support him. And I hope he does that.”
So far, though, there are few indications that Trump is making much of an effort to win back Haley’s supporters. “They’re going to all vote for me again, everybody, ” he told NBC News back in January. “I’m not sure we need too many.”
Some of the loudest voices in the MAGAverse seem to have a similarly dismissive attitude toward this voting bloc. “Screw Nikki Haley — we don’t need her endorsement,” Stephen Bannon sneered on his podcast. “They’re all going to vote for Biden anyway.”
But are they?
Since Haley dropped out on March 5, here are the percentages of Republicans who have voted against Trump in closed primaries and caucuses (this includes votes for Haley, Ron DeSantis and others):
- March 19 in Florida: around 19%
- March 19 in Kansas: over 24%
- April 2 in Connecticut: around 22%
- April 2 in New York: 18%
- April 23 in Pennsylvania: around 17%
Many of these non-Trump voters may drift back to Trump. Others will eventually vote Biden; some will vote for a third- or fourth-party candidate; others will simply sit out the race. But exit polls suggest neither Trump nor Biden can afford to write them off completely.
An NBC News/Des Moines Register/Mediacom poll taken before the Iowa Caucus found that fully 43% of Haley supporters in Iowa said they would vote for Biden if Trump is the GOP nominee, while only 23% said they would vote for Trump.
In North Carolina, where Haley got 23 percent of the vote, one poll found that the vast majority of her voters would not commit to supporting Trump in the fall. Sixty-three percent of Haley’s supporters said that Trump would not be fit for office if he was convicted of a felony.
It was roughly the same story in Ohio, where an exit poll found that nearly half of Haley’s voters said they would vote for Biden in November.
In a tight election, losing even one in 10 GOP voters could cost Trump the election.
Which brings us back to the swing state of Pennsylvania, where the results were particularly revealing. Haley did especially well (and Trump especially poorly) among Republican voters in suburban counties. She got around a fourth of the vote in Chester, Delaware and Montgomery counties, which surround Philadelphia.
As the Cook Report with Amy Walter noted, Haley also did well “in the more swingy counties” of Cumberland (23%), Erie (20%), as well as Berks and Lancaster. Biden can’t afford to lose any more ground in rural counties, Erin Covey and Walter noted. But the primary suggests “Trump’s base in the Keystone State is not rock solid.”
Meanwhile, as his lawyers argue before the Supreme Court that he ought to have absolute immunity, Trump is stuck in a Manhattan courtroom. Neither storyline seems likely to lure back swing voters. Indeed, a new Quinnipiac poll, which found Trump tied with Biden, also found that 60 percent of voters think the charges of falsifying business records are either very serious or somewhat serious. Five percent of Trump’s supporters say that a conviction would make them less likely to vote for the former president.
But, former White House communications director Dan Pfeiffer argues, “The political damage to Trump is not what is said in the courtroom; it’s how he looks.” Trump is basing his campaign on his “power and strength,” but the first few days of the New York trial made him “look weak, tired, and scared.”
“More than any testimony or even a conviction,” Pfeiffer wrote, “the image of the former president sitting silently and sadly at the defense table, stripped of the pomp and circumstance upon which he has relied, could be his final undoing.”
We’ll find out soon enough.