Trump will struggle for support outside Maga
He was cast out of the White House in disgrace in 2020. But criminal suspect Donald Trump has won the 2024 Republican presidential nomination in convincing fashion.
It would have seemed unthinkable, after the wreckage of the Capitol riot or the Republicans’ 2022 mid-terms flop, that Trump’s grip on the GOP would be so unshakeable.
The former president has wooed the populist Maga crowd and persuaded career-minded Republican politicians to back him. But his mass appeal is less secure, with the 77-year-old most vulnerable in the centre ground.
Millions of floating voters, who didn’t like him the first time around, aren’t enamoured by the idea of a Trump II regime.
Todd Landman, an American political scientist at the University of Nottingham, thinks that both the businessman and his rival, Joe Biden, face a challenge in attracting voters outside their core base.
“Trump needs to win the support of swing voters, independents, and disenfranchised Republicans,” he says.
Biden strategists insist this could be beyond him.
“Trump can’t expand his reach beyond the Maga base,” two of the US President’s top campaign aides, Jennifer O’Malley Dillon and Julie Chávez Rodríguez, wrote last week. “In exit poll after exit poll, he has consolidated support only among the most conservative voters.”
A large part of Trump’s problem is that he has repelled suburban moderates since his 2016 Republican Party takeover and has yet to win them back.
Dillon and Rodríguez claim Trump’s primary performances are “a major warning sign for the GOP, and an opportunity for President Biden to expand his coalition”.
They say that a significant share of moderate and Nikki Haley voters have indicated that Trump cannot count on their votes in the election.
And they also note that a third of Republican primary voters indicated that they would consider Trump unfit for the presidency if he were convicted of a crime. But a conviction before 5 November is far from certain.
Adam Geller, a Republican pollster who has worked for past Trump campaigns, puts a different spin on things, though he admits in The New York Times that Trump still has work to do.
“We can learn a little bit from these primaries – for one, Trump has re-energised his base,” he said.
“But beyond that it remains to be seen, because all the public polls show that moderate general election voters aren’t ready to give a bouquet of roses to either Trump or Biden quite yet.”