Trump’s primary triumph masked quiet weaknesses
Donald Trump’s daunting level of Republican support helped him vanquish a field of presidential primary rivals in under two months.
But he still hasn’t won over one small but crucial group of voters — the men and women who cost him a second term in 2020.
His overwhelming primary victories, including more than a dozen Tuesday that pushed Nikki Haley from the race, have masked his long-term problems with voters who live in the suburbs, those who view themselves as moderates or independents, and Republicans who backed Joe Biden in 2020.
On Tuesday, Trump lost suburban precincts in Virginia despite carrying the state by 28 percentage points. In North Carolina, his 51-point victory was tempered by much narrower margins in the highly educated and affluent suburbs around Charlotte and Raleigh.
While many Republican strategists anticipate that most Haley voters will eventually support the party’s nominee, Trump’s failure to bring these voters into the fold less than four years after they helped block him from a second term in the White House raises pressing questions about what he can do in the next eight months to win them over.
He has not seemed especially concerned about this challenge, recently threatening to excommunicate his rival’s donors from his political movement. On Wednesday, he posted on social media that Haley “got TROUNCED last night, in record setting fashion,” even as he invited “all of the Haley supporters to join the greatest movement in the history of our Nation.”
Trump’s inability to broaden his support stands among the biggest threats to his party’s efforts to reclaim the presidency. Notably, Haley appeared to be a stronger November candidate: Polls including a recent New York Times/siena College survey suggested that she would have had an easier time unseating Biden.
But Republican voters aren’t resisting Trump’s electoral risks; they’re running toward them.
Throughout the Republican primary race and in last week’s Super Tuesday contests, Trump amassed blowout winning margins. Voters rallied around him
even as he accumulated 91 felony charges in four criminal cases and looked past their party’s disappointing elections under his leadership in 2018, 2020 and 2022.
His victory last month in Iowa, the first nominating contest, was declared before many caucusgoers had even weighed in, a fitting metaphor for the air of inevitability he proudly carried into the race. The Republican primaries in New Hampshire and South Carolina drew record turnout, thanks mostly to Trump voters, and he swept every Super Tuesday state except Vermont, where Haley won thanks to the tiny state’s large percentage of college-educated voters.
“That’s the big lesson from the primary states so far: There are a significant number of Republican voters who wanted a choice in this primary process, and they are people the former president has to win over by the time November comes around,” said Rob Godfrey, who served as a top aide to Haley when she was governor of South Carolina and as a senior adviser to Gov. Henry Mcmaster’s reelection campaign in 2022. “He can do it if he runs a disciplined campaign on policy and not personality, and one that focuses on the perceived failures of his opponent.”
Trump’s campaign expects to focus heavily on turning out supporters but will look for ways to reach out to disaffected Republicans. The former president has been looking to again calibrate his position on abortion rights, with Republicans still feeling the backlash of the overturning of Roe v. Wade by a conservative Supreme Court majority he helped usher in.
Two unpopular nominees in waiting
Biden, for his part, is struggling to hold his winning 2020 coalition together. He is significantly less popular than he was four years ago, and polls show that Democrats are skeptical of his second campaign.
Just 83% of voters who backed Biden in 2020 said they would do so again this year, a stark contrast from the 97% of Trump voters planning to stick with the former president, according to the Times/siena poll.
Biden’s age, his support for Israel in its war in the Gaza Strip and lingering economic unease have chipped away at his support among young Democrats, Black voters and progressives.
“We can learn a little bit from these primaries — for one, Trump has reenergized his base,” said Adam Geller, a longtime Republican pollster who has worked for past Trump campaigns and super political action committees. “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.”
Shying away from Trump in the suburbs
Trump has repelled suburban moderates since his takeover of the Republican Party in 2016. He has yet to draw them back.
In the suburbs, Trump split the vote with Haley in Iowa and New Hampshire, even though he won both states with ease. He carried the suburbs in South Carolina, but by a smaller margin than his overall victory in the state.
Those trends continued Tuesday in Virginia, where Haley won suburban precincts by 1.8 percentage points.
In North Carolina, where Trump scored an easy victory by 74% to 23%, he finished only 7 points ahead in Mecklenburg County, home to Charlotte and its suburbs. Haley also cut heavily into his edge in Durham, Orange and Wake counties, highly educated, affluent suburban areas where Democrats see an opportunity to compete in the state.
“Trump can’t expand his reach beyond the MAGA base,” two of Biden’s top campaign aides, Jennifer O’malley Dillon and Julie Chávez Rodríguez, wrote in a memo Wednesday. “In exit poll after exit poll, he has consolidated support only among the most conservative voters.”
Trump’s loss in 2020 was driven in part by independent voters, who soured on him after helping him win his 2016 campaign. The most recent Times/siena poll showed independent voters split, 42% to 42%, in a rematch between Biden and Trump, but primary results signal persistent struggles for the former president with these voters.
Disagreement on abortion 2020 election
A small yet significant share of Republicans continue to express concerns about Trump’s criminal cases, which remain pending after several financially damaging setbacks for him in civil suits.
CNN exit polls Tuesday found that 1 in 5 Republican primary voters in California and nearly 1 in 3 in North Carolina said Trump would not be fit for the presidency if he were convicted of a crime. An overwhelming majority of these voters backed Haley on Tuesday.
“There are a lot of Republicans and independents voting against Trump, even though they know he’s going to win,” said Sarah Longwell, an anti-trump GOP pollster. “That tells me there is a real weakness in the party for Trump.”
The Super Tuesday results highlighted other softness for Trump. He lost to Haley among Republican primary voters in Virginia who oppose a nationwide abortion ban, an issue that has driven independents and even some moderate Republicans to Democrats, exit polls show.
The same polls found that she also won Republican primary voters in California, North Carolina and Virginia who said Biden had fairly won the 2020 election and those who said immigrants in the country illegally should be given a chance to apply for legal status. A majority of the party disagreed that Biden’s victory was legitimate and preferred deportation as an immigration solution. Trump carried both groups by overwhelming margins.