Former President Donald Trump is rolling toward the 2024 Republican nomination, but there are questions about how unified the party is behind him.
Former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley has lost every primary and caucus, but she has done well enough to stick around, at least until Super Tuesday. More concerning for Trump, exit polls show her cleaning up with independents, and a high percentage of her supporters ready to balk at the likely Republican nominee.
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“Donald Trump had a great night in Michigan, but Nikki Haley yet again held him under 70%,” plugged-in conservative commentator Erick Erickson wrote on Wednesday morning. “She won’t be the nominee, but Trump does need to figure out how to unify his party in the same way Biden must unify his.”
But the national polls show a competitive race against President Joe Biden. Moreover, they find Trump narrowly leading among independents and showing few GOP defections. Trump frequently exceeds 90% support from Republicans.
It is hard to imagine Trump being in a tight race with Biden if he is also hemorrhaging 40% of Republicans and GOP-leaning independents. Yet Trump is up 2.1 points in the RealClearPolitics polling average and doing even better in the battleground states.
What gives? For one thing, primaries far more competitive than the 2024 GOP race have featured diehards who say they will never vote for a nominee other than their preferred candidate. In the 2008 Democratic contest, there were the Hillary Clinton-supporting PUMAs — Party Unity My A** — who insisted they would take their fight against Barack Obama all the way to November.
Obama won Democrats 89% to 10%, according to the Roper exit poll. He won liberals by a similar margin. As political analyst Amy Walter notes in the Cook Political Report, these proclamations sometimes need to be taken with a grain of salt.
A large subset of Haley’s voters are more dug in against Trump than the PUMAs were against Obama: College-educated white suburban voters, especially women, power both the Resistance and Never Trump. They may also be creating a different pool of independent voters in the relatively low-turnout primaries than what we are seeing in the general election polls.
NBC News’s Steve Kornacki observes that at least some of Haley’s support is coming from people who already voted against Trump in 2016 and 2020. “To them, these primaries amount to a bonus opportunity to cast yet another vote against Trump,” he writes.
“The rules in New Hampshire, South Carolina and Michigan all allow for mass participation by non-Republicans, meaning there has been little barrier for ‘resistance’-types to take part,” Kornacki added. “They may not consider themselves Republicans, but they are supremely eager to vote, so why wouldn’t they join in en masse, especially with no meaningful contest on the Democratic side?”
Maybe some of these voters would support a different Republican nominee, a partial explanation for why Haley often outperforms Trump in head-to-head matchups against Biden. Some of them might not vote for any Republican.
It’s noteworthy that when coinciding with the first Democratic primary where Biden encountered any meaningful challenge, in this case from “uncommitted” rather than any of his token primary opponents, Haley won just 26.5% on the Republican side.
That is actually closer to where exit polls have pegged Haley’s share of voters who identify as Republicans in the states where she has done relatively well with the help of independents and, to a lesser extent, Democrats.
In a close race, a small number of defections could still matter. Trump lost in 2020 because of the types of voters Haley is winning. They have also cost Republicans numerous special elections and contributed to the GOP’s disappointing performance in the midterm elections.
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“I’ve never seen the Republican Party so unified as it is right now,” Trump declared after winning South Carolina on Saturday night. This is standard Trumpian hyperbole — pockets of anti-Trump opposition have endured in the GOP for the nearly nine years he has been running for office, including the four he served as president.
But the level of Republican disunity, at least based on what we have seen so far, is being exaggerated too.
