No surprise, it’s a big night for Trump
With dominating performance, he nears the GOP nomination
RALEIGH, N.C. — If there is a promising purple-state beachhead for former president Donald Trump in 2024, look no further than North Carolina.
It’s a place that might have opened doors for former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley, given its clusters of highly educated voters and its status as the only one of the 15 states holding primaries on Tuesday where Trump and President Biden finished less than 2 percentage points apart in 2020.
But Trump’s iron grip on his party was evident practically everywhere here.
Trump steamrolled Haley in North Carolina, according to the Associated Press, with Republican voters apparently ignoring her warnings that the former president will be a hard sell in narrowly divided states such as this one. He is moving to install hometown favorites such as the chair of the state GOP to lead Republicans on the national stage. And candidates he endorsed notched downballot victories that will ensure the state’s Republican Party sounds all the more like him in the months to come.
“It speaks to the complete Trumpification of the Republican Party, and you’ll see that statewide,” said Steven Greene, a professor of political science at North Carolina State University in Raleigh. “I don’t want to say Donald Trump changed everything, because that’s hyperbole, but in a hyperbolic sense, he absolutely did.”
On a day widely seen as a possible last stand for Haley — and for the idea of Republican opposition to Trump generally — the former president dominated the polls across the country, running up margins among GOP voters in blue states such as
Massachusetts, purple states like Virginia, and deep red states like Oklahoma, according to projections by the Associated Press. The sole bright spot for Haley came in Vermont, where she was projected to win by about 5 percentage points.
And while Tuesday did not provide enough delegates for Trump to mathematically clinch the nomination — that could happen as soon as next week — he treated the night as a crowning moment, his victory party held not in a state that was actually voting but at his opulent Mar-a-Lago club in Palm Beach, Fla. Haley was not scheduled to speak.
(In the Democratic primaries, President Biden was declared the winner in 10 states, including North Carolina and Massachusetts.)
The results in the Republican race in North Carolina, where Trump won the 2020 general election by little more than 1 percentage point, underscore just how thoroughly he has come to shape a party he cannonballed into in 2016, despite losing the White House four years ago.
“When he got up there and said, ‘My revenge is going to be success,’ I think that for a lot of people, that was the right answer,” said Patrick Donner, 71, a Republican and a credit analyst who cast his ballot in the Raleigh suburb of Cary.
North Carolina Republicans nominated their current Lieutenant Governor Mark Robinson, a controversial candidate who has pushed for abortion bans without exceptions for rape and incest, reportedly made antisemitic comments, and said that men, not women, should lead, according to a projection by the Associated Press.
Trump endorsed him on Saturday at a raucous campaign rally where he called Robinson “Martin Luther King on steroids.” Republicans, who control the state Legislature and both Senate seats, are eager to win back the governorship, which has been held for eight years by the term-limited Roy Cooper, a moderate Democrat. But the divisive Robinson could make that task harder.
“Mark Robinson would be a disaster, and Trump would be a disaster,” said Mary Morris, an unaffiliated but liberal-leaning voter who planned to pull a Republican ballot on Tuesday to vote for both of their primary opponents.
A flood of Trump-supporting Republicans are vying for the state’s newly redrawn congressional seats, while a more traditional Republican, Representative Patrick McHenry, has decided not to seek reelection.
“You’ll see the most Trumpaligned, most conservative, combative, culture-war candidates be the ones who prevail,” Greene, the professor, said.
And beyond the elections here on Tuesday, Trump has thrown his support behind two North Carolina Republicans — the state GOP chair Michael Whatley and his daughter-inlaw Lara Trump, who grew up in the state and has mulled seeking a US Senate seat here — to run the Republican National Committee, which would bind the official party apparatus tightly to his campaign and give him even more control over the party.
Whatley, a lawyer who worked on behalf of Republican George W. Bush in Florida during the disputed 2000 election, won praise from Trump for his focus on “election integrity” after the former president falsely complained about fraud in the 2020 election. He emphasized the recruitment of lawyers and poll-watchers and spent heavily on legal costs.
Democrats, however, view that as a flashing red warning sign that Trump’s false claims, which Whatley has echoed, are going to be institutionalized at the RNC.
“These are things we should be doing across the nation,” said Kyshia Brassington, a Republican National Committewoman for North Carolina and one of the 168 party insiders who will vote for the RNC chair later this week.
Brassington said she was initially hesitant about Lara Trump’s bid to be cochair, because she “wasn’t sure about the depth of long-term political knowledge.” But she said she warmed to her candidacy after Lara Trump sent a “fantastic” letter about her plans to the RNC’s members.
The college towns and suburbs of North Carolina could, however, hold the same warning signs that flashed for Trump in states such as Michigan, New Hampshire, and South Carolina, where his big wins belied some weakness with moderate Republicans.
With 80 percent of the vote counted by 10 p.m. Tuesday, Haley had posted her best showings in the well-educated counties containing Raleigh, Durham, Chapel Hill, and a bevy of prestigious universities. In Durham County, which contains Duke University, Haley had more than 40 percent of the vote; in Mecklenberg County, which contains the city of Charlotte, she had 45 percent.
Trump’s campaign has betrayed little concern about those potentially lost voters, with Trump even going so far as to say that donors to Haley’s campaign should be “permanently barred” from his political movement.
Kristen Soltis Anderson, a Republican pollster, said it is too soon to read much into the primary results for hints about how Trump or Biden might do in a general election — although Trump’s rhetoric about the voters who haven’t supported him in the primaries could yet make a difference.
“The only lingering question is whether Trump will get out of his own way and allow the GOP to reunify or if he will keep picking at the scab and refuse to let the party heal,” said Soltis Anderson. “Comments like saying people who donate to Haley are banned, or ‘we don’t need their votes’-type rhetoric is silly and counterproductive.”
In Cary, Leopoldo Brandt, 58, cast a ballot for Haley but anticipated he would be politically homeless by the fall. An independent voter, he liked how she had served as the ambassador to the United Nations during the Trump administration, he said. He dislikes both Trump and Biden, however, and thinks he won’t support either of them in the fall.
“Unfortunately,” he lamented, “there is no way out.”