Roughy one in five GOP voters cast a ballot for someone other than Trump in Tuesday night’s primaries.
Former President Donald Trump scored decisive victories in Tuesday evening’s primaries.
But a closer look at the electoral margins shows that a sizeable chunk of voters in several primary states cast protest votes for non-Trump candidates, yet another warning sign for the presumptive GOP nominee’s 2024 coalition ahead of an election that could be decided by tens of thousands of votes in a handful of swing states. Former presidential candidate Nikki Haley captured double-digit support from Republican primary voters in Ohio, Illinois, Arizona, and Florida, costing Trump about one-fifth of the primary electorate in those states.
Trump’s worst performance of the night was in Kansas. With more than 95 percent of ballots counted as of this writing, he notched 75.5 percent of the vote, Haley drew 16.1 percent, and another 5.2 percent selected “none of the names shown.”
To be sure, early voting began in Ohio, Kansas, and Illinois in February, weeks before Haley dropped out, on March 6, after a poor Super Tuesday showing. Still, the margins suggest the former president’s 2024 team has work to do in shoring up support from the minority cohort of disaffected Republicans who are on the fence about or adamantly opposed to casting their ballot for Trump in November. The fact that so many Republicans were willing to go to the polls just to cast a vote for a candidate who’s no longer in the race doesn’t bode well for those efforts, even if Trump is willing to make the attempt.
“For the most part, Republican primary voters have come home. But there is this persistent group who — for lots of different reasons — don’t like Trump, don’t want to see the rematch, or want somebody else,” veteran GOP strategist David Kochel said in an interview. “These are not small numbers, they’re real numbers.”
In Ohio, 18 percent of Republican primary voters indicated they don’t plan to support Trump in November, according to an ABC News analysis of exit polling. Ten percent of those voters said they’d prefer Biden.
Though much attention has been paid to progressive efforts to have voters in several states select “uncommitted” on the ballot, Biden has largely been spared the embarrassment of a large protest vote.
The incumbent president faced a much smaller protest vote than Trump in Ohio, Illinois, and Arizona; his vote share neared or exceeded 90 percent of the Democratic primary electorate in each of those states, according to current vote totals. (Florida’s Democratic Party didn’t hold a presidential primary this cycle.) One slight exception to that trend Tuesday evening was Kansas, where current totals show Biden notched roughly 84 percent of the Democratic electorate and “none of the names shown” scored more than 10 percent, with a smattering of other votes going to other primary candidates.
The Biden campaign was quick to take a victory lap, arguing that Tuesday night’s anti-Trump protest vote proves the former president “simply cannot build the coalition necessary to win 270 electoral votes.”
We wouldn’t go quite that far: Unlike Biden, Trump competed in a technically contested primary, which helps to explain the relatively larger protest vote he faced Tuesday night, though that excuse will be cold comfort for him if anti-Trump Republicans decide to stay home in November. The Trump camp will have to think critically about how to win over independent and Republican-leaning voters who are uneasy about casting their ballot for the former president, Kochel said. “It’s something I would be concerned about, if I were them. Do they want to try to bring them into the coalition, or did they just sort of double down on trying to expand the electorate with working-class voters?”
The Trump camp is optimistic about polls that suggest that certain minority demographics — particularly black and Hispanic men — are breaking for the former president. And the RNC plans to continue operating community centers focused on outreach to minority voters, committee co-chair Lara Trump said this week, despite recent reports suggesting many of those centers have already been shuttered.
“I can assure you: At the RNC and at the Trump campaign, this is a wide-open tent,” she said. “And the idea that this is a party closed off to anyone is false. We want everyone to come in. We want everyone to vote, because we want everyone in this country to succeed. So those reports are not correct.”
Earlier this month, the former president’s campaign tapped former Representative Mark Walker of North Carolina to lead faith-based and minority outreach for the 2024 campaign. Walker told NR last week that while the details are still being worked out, he expects to kickstart his minority outreach efforts in Georgia and North Carolina.
And it’s not just minority voters whom Trump needs to win over to score another Electoral College victory. “The candidate who earns the support of the ‘Haley voter’ will be the candidate who wins in November,” said Olivia Perez-Cubas, a GOP operative who worked on the 2024 presidential campaign of the former South Carolina governor and U.N. ambassador.
The Trump camp has also been emboldened by Biden’s poor approval ratings, which have not rebounded since his administration’s chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan and continue to rattle Democrats. The Democratic National Committee announced last week that for the first time, the national party is launching a team of operatives who will spend the cycle directly targeting independent and third-party presidential candidates, another sign of the national party’s fears that so-called “spoiler candidates” could tilt the election in Trump’s favor.
The Biden coalition is also working behind the scenes to court Haley donors, CNBC reported this week, a potential boon to the incumbent’s already full campaign coffers. By contrast, Trump is struggling to fundraise as his campaign drowns in legal fees.
The Trump campaign formed a joint fundraising committee with the Republican National Committee (RNC) and dozens of state GOPs — the Trump 47 Committee — which will allow the former president to rake in larger sums at a time. Though RNC fundraising slowed last year, national party members and operatives have insisted for months that poor cash hauls are typical in off years, and that the fundraising efforts will rebound once the GOP has a formal nominee.
The RNC is also working to continue its early and absentee voting push — a difficult task for any national party apparatus alongside a former president who continues to disparage the casting of votes outside of the ballot box. “If you have mail-in voting, you automatically have fraud,” Trump told Fox News host Laura Ingraham last month.
Trump’s commitment to his false rigged-election claims further threatens his odds with these moderate voters. His stolen-election rhetoric also runs the risk of discouraging his most ardent supporters from turning out in November, much like during the Georgia runoffs in 2021.
Despite troubling signals for the presumed GOP nominee in the presidential primary, the Ohio GOP Senate primary was a show of strength for Trump, as his preferred candidate, businessman Bernie Moreno, sailed to a decisive victory over Ohio secretary of state Frank LaRose and state senator Matt Dolan.
Around NR:
• Biden is right to fear Trump, Luther Ray Abel writes:
NBC published a piece on Sunday titled “Behind the scenes, Biden has grown angry and anxious about re-election effort,” and Biden is right to be both angry and anxious — angry at himself for not picking a competent VP to whom he could hand his agenda while stepping aside after four years, and anxious because Trump is on the outside this time and not burdened with the Covid fallout (shutdowns, economic stoppages, and civil unrest) in which the real-estate mogul was drowning during the previous go-around. If, as many wrote in 2020, that presidential election was a referendum on Trump, 2024 looks to be a referendum on what Biden has done since then.
• New reporting indicates that the DNC is launching a team that will focus on combating independent and third-party candidates in 2024. As Audrey Fahlberg explains, “the move demonstrates how seriously President Joe Biden’s coalition is taking the threat of spoilers this time around, as the incumbent continues to battle abysmal approval ratings.”
In an early glimpse of what this effort may look like over the next few months, the DNC has already begun taking special aim at Democrat-turned-Independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the anti-vaccine activist and environmental lawyer who Biden-aligned Democrats fear could siphon off enough votes to tilt the election in Donald Trump’s favor.
• Elon Musk may make a last-minute presidential endorsement. The Tesla CEO told Don Lemon in a new interview that he may endorse a candidate in the final stretch and that he is “leaning away from Biden.” Caroline Downey has more here.
• Progressives are beginning to come to terms with the fact that they will have to beat Trump fair and square in November, writes Rich Lowry:
There is now a cottage industry of progressives coming to grips, however ruefully, with the fact that lawfare might not work against Trump and that they might have to convince people to vote against him without help from the courts.
• The media’s recent misrepresentation of Trump’s “bloodbath” remarks is the latest example of dangerous tribalism within the profession, Charles C. W. Cooke said during an episode of The Editors:
Too many people in our political world and our journalistic world are terrified that if they evaluate the truth about Donald Trump fairly, they will be accused of being on the wrong team. This is tribalism. This is what we are supposed to avoid in the West. It’s extremely dangerous.
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