Donald Trump’s dominating GOP primary performance doesn’t add up

Of all the 2024 political events I believed were irrelevant, the GOP primary campaign has been at the top of the list. But I was wrong. As it turns out, this cycle’s primaries, which have commonly been touted in the media as decisive evidence of the Donald Trump juggernaut going into the fall election, are illustrating a major weakness in his coalition — and it’s one that we have been seeing since the day after he won the 2016 election.

There is a substantial faction of Republicans and Republican-leaning voters who simply cannot stand Donald Trump. Yes, he is overwhelmingly popular among his MAGA base which makes up about three-quarters of the GOP and the majority of them are blindly devoted to the man no matter what he does. They are not just enthusiastic about voting for him, they are ecstatic. The media sees this as a sign that he is virtually unbeatable even to the extent of pushing the narrative that he is the frontrunner for the general election and that incumbent President Joe Biden is on the ropes despite the polls saying that the race is very close.

It’s not that Trump is in any danger of losing the nomination. He is on track to wrap it up very quickly and has won every race so far going away. His last remaining rival, Nikki Haley, insists that she isn’t “going anywhere” (always a weird thing for a losing candidate to say) but after her defeat in her home state on Saturday, her biggest donor, the Koch Network, is pulling out and it’s only a matter of time before she runs out of money. Trump is going to be the nominee. But we knew that. There was never any doubt from the time he announced his candidacy. He’s been the president in exile running the Republican Party from his gaudy social club in Mar-a-Lago from the moment he left Washington on January 20, 2021. And except for a few brief moments after January 6 and the 2022 election, his popularity among the faithful barely waned. It was always his for the taking and if he didn’t stand to make a higher profit from fundraising if he declared later in the cycle he would have declared his candidacy immediately, as he did when he first became president. 

Given that the majority of Republicans believe Trump won the 2020 election, he’s basically running as an incumbent. Now that we’ve had the first round of Republican primaries a pattern is emerging that suggests that as an incumbent candidate, Trump is weaker than the narrative that’s been laid out would have us believe. 

Donald Trump can’t win the general election with just his hardcore MAGA base. He must expand his coalition and he’s not getting that done. In every state so far, he has underperformed expectations. Nevada was a very weird situation with both a primary and a caucus so it’s hard to discern what the electorate was saying there but in Iowa, New Hampshire and S. Carolina, a solid 40% voted against Trump. It’s a primary so that’s not unusual. But who makes up that 40% is a problem for Trump. He’s completely lost self-identified liberals which isn’t surprising. But moderates have abandoned him as well, along with the GOP-leaning independents. And the ongoing shedding of college educated and suburban voters has not abated.

It doesn’t matter so much in the MAGA-centric GOP primary, but Trump cannot afford to lose those voters in the general election. His numbers aren’t adding up. He dominates rural America but that’s it, as Axios put it:

If America were dominated by old, white, election-denying Christians who didn’t go to college, former President Trump would win the general election in as big of a landslide as his sweep of the first four GOP contests.

Fortunately, that is not a majority of American voters. 

One of Trump’s biggest liabilities is his ongoing insistence on flogging the Big Lie about the 2020 election. While it’s true that 70% of Republicans believe President Biden was not legitimately elected, of the 30% who believe he was, the vast majority have voted against Trump in these primaries. Yet, that remains a huge part of Trump’s pitch, even now, and there is a large faction that simply isn’t following him down that rabbit hole. 

He won’t shut up about it. On Sunday night he did an interview with Fox News’ Brett Baier who surprisingly grilled him on the subject, asking him what he would say to the female suburban voter who feels that way. Trump insisted that he won and angrily repeated his usual litany of lies about stuffed ballot boxes and bogus analyses in the face of Baier’s attempts to push back with the facts. Baier was trying to give Trump the opening to say something like, “It’s fine if someone believes that but I think my record as president and my plans to make America great again will be enough to convince the voters that I’m the best man for the job” — but Donald Trump just couldn’t do it. 

Around 20% of GOP primary voters (59% of Haley voters in South Carolina) say they won’t vote for Trump in November. Will they vote for him anyway? Who knows? But most of them aren’t voting for him in the primaries so far and he’s going to need every last one if he wants to win back the White House. 

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Despite all this it’s likely that Nikki Haley will be out of the race after Super Tuesday and everyone is wondering what it is she thinks she’s been doing since the writing was on the wall pretty much from the beginning. She’s clearly not going to be chosen as Trump’s running mate and her recent sharp remarks about him have placed her firmly in the anti-MAGA camp, rendering her future in the current GOP pretty tenuous. But you will notice that aside from her differences with Trump on foreign policy, her critique is simply that he can’t win. 

She has said this over and over again and her calculation may be that even if she ends up endorsing him, which is entirely possible, she will still be virtually alone among her peers in going on the record warning the party that he will lose in November. If he wins, it’s all over for her anyway and if not, she has some credibility as the one who sounded the alarm. I don’t know if the party will reward that but what choice does she have? She’s spent the last year with fellow Republicans and Independents who are telling her they will never vote for Trump again. Maybe she’s convinced they really mean it. After all, it only takes a handful of voters in a handful of swing states for her to be right.