Status Report: Warning Signs for Trump

Graphic courtesy of The New York Times

A quick check-in on the state of affairs on the other side of the campaign aisle. For some time now, it’s been down to two people, Trump and Haley, and yesterday the GOP primary contest was in Haley’s home state of South Carolina.

Newsflash: Trump won. By a lot.

Still, it’s important to go behind the numbers, just as we did in Iowa and New Hampshire. Everyone knows that Trump is cruising to the GOP nomination, and he will pretty much clinch it on Super Tuesday, which is coming up on March 5. But is he as strong as his successive wins and the headlines suggest?

After all, he beat Nikki Haley in her home state by 20 points. Does that spell the end of the race?

Here’s the thing to remember: The race for the nomination was over a long time ago. The real questions that remain are 1) whether Republicans will fall in line behind Trump once he wins the nomination, 2) if Trump’s base of support among right-wing MAGA voters can carry him to a general election victory, rather than just a primary one, 3) if independents will break for Trump or Biden, and 4) whether the polls are overstating Trump’s strength. And on each of these scores, Trump isn’t looking so strong. Let me walk you through why.

Trouble within his own party

It’s admittedly pretty early to extrapolate what primary election results can tell us about the strength of the candidates come November. But it should be noted that Donald Trump won South Carolina yesterday with around 60 percent of the vote, while Joe Biden won by around 96 percent. Which president seeking re-election looks like he has his party’s support more locked up?

As Haley said yesterday in her concession speech, “I know 40 percent is not 50 percent. But I also know 40 percent is not some tiny group.”

Indeed not. As Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo observed, “40% of the electorate in a deeply Trumpy state like South Carolina voting against Trump is a huge showing of opposition”—even accounting for the fact that this was Haley’s home state. The anti-Trump vote within the GOP is an under-told story by the mainstream media.

You can understand this best by positing what the stories would be like if Dean Phillips garnered 40 percent of the vote against Joe Biden in South Carolina. It would be non-stop calls for Biden to step aside; yet no one in the press is calling for Trump to do the same within his party. (For its part, The New York Times described Biden’s 96 percent win as “an uncertain measure of wider enthusiasm” while heralding Trump’s 60 percent win over Haley as “a crushing blow in her home state” in its respective South Carolina primary headlines.)

Within Haley’s voters, once again, are signs that Trump will have an uphill fight winning over many of them. As Fox News’ Jessica Tarlov noted from the exit polls, “59% of Nikki Haley’s voters say they won't support [Trump] in the general election if he is the Republican nominee. That mirrors what we have been seeing in Iowa and New Hampshire.”

Another way to think about this is this: Around one in four people who pulled the lever for a Republican would not do so for Trump, were the election held today. Granted, some of those Haley supporters were Democrats and independents who showed up to vote specifically in the GOP primary to lodge their protest. And many will come back to the fold when faced with the alternative of voting for a Democrat. But that doesn’t change the fact that many Republicans cannot stomach Trump.

And even if a sizable number of non-GOP voters showed up to participate in the South Carolina primary, the GOP shouldn’t discount that either. It actually signals a strong anti-Trump sentiment, where voters are motivated to make enough to perform the unusual, just to make it clear Trump does not speak for them.

The Republican alternate reality

Another troubling finding from the exit polling relates to the Big Lie. Trump supporters in South Carolina overwhelmingly believe the 2020 election was stolen, while Haley supporters do not. According to CNN exit polling, in answer to the question, “Do you think Joe Biden legitimately won in 2020?” Trump supporters were 87 percent no, 11 percent yes, while Haley supporters were nearly the reverse, with 20 percent no, 77 percent yes.

That makes this one of the biggest divides—and, as a consequence, a huge wedge—within the GOP. It should be front and center in the national election. Notably, this time around, both Fox News and Newsmax, fearful of further liability for defamation and false claims, have been fact checking Donald Trump in real time when he lies in his speeches about the election. That is going to create an interesting dynamic as Republican audiences face denials from the very networks that used to tell them precisely the opposite about the 2020 election.

More fundamentally, a strong majority of Americans simply do not believe the 2020 election was stolen and are willing to vote to keep out election denialists. The 2022 midterms demonstrated that many Republicans will even cross party lines to vote against Trump-backed candidates who espouse election extremism. What will they do when Trump himself, the most blatant Big Lie teller of all, is on the ballot?

Trump depends heavily on white Evangelicals

The Trump Campaign will face one other question over extremism: its close ties with and the support it receives from white evangelical Christians. According to CNN exit polling, Trump won 75 percent of their vote to Haley’s 24 percent.

But among everyone else, Haley actually beat Trump, 51 to 49 percent, according to exit polls. And while white Evangelicals are a huge factor in the GOP primaries, they are far less of a factor in the general election, especially in the swing states.

In order to keep pleasing this base of white evangelical voters—who are notably out of step with most Americans on their values, their positions on cultural and social issues, and in their support of autocratic or even theocratic rule—Trump risks further alienating moderate, non-Bible thumping voters. A good example is Trump’s stance on abortion. To his base he brags that he killed Roe v. Wade, and they eat it up at rallies. But these have become campaign ads in the swing states, where suburban women are not so happy about that fact.

That kind of extremism, which is tied to the lunatic fringe of Christian Nationalism, should also be front and center for November.

Haley actually won independent voters

Exit polls also showed that, among independents who voted in the GOP primary, Haley beat Trump here as well. She garnered 54 percent of them to his 43 percent, an 11 point gap. While this number likely doesn’t reflect the final split we would see between Biden and Trump in November, it does signal that Trump is weak among independents who care enough to show up to vote.

This represents a crucial few percent of persuadable voters who may not be happy with Biden because of things like his age but also may not be willing to overlook all of Trump’s failings. If Trump has to run as a convicted felon following his trials in Manhattan and D.C., he could bleed support quickly from this group. An eyebrow raising 82 percent of Haley voters told exit pollsters that they would not consider Trump fit to serve as president if he were convicted of a crime. That would be a death knell if Trump gets convicted and those numbers bore out in November.

Many of them who cared enough to show up to vote against him in the primary, where he was bound to win, would certainly do so again in a general, where things look more or less tied in the polling.

The polls overweighted Trump, by a bit

Speaking of polling, one final observation: Many polls had Trump winning South Carolina by as much as 30 percent. As Politico noted, the Real Clear Politics polling average (which contains a lot of junk polls) had Trump up by around 23 percent. He finished some 20 percent above Haley, indicating that the polls were fairly accurate as polls go, but may be missing a critical few percent of voters who are anti-Trump, or that they may be oversampling Trump-supporting poll respondents.

Three percent wrong may not seem like a big deal, but it would be the margin in any of the closer battleground states. If those polls were similarly off by an average of three percent, the news headlines would look very different, with Biden leading in most major ones. As it is already, when low quality polls are screened out, the race looks more or less tied right now, and that’s with many Democrats still yet to come back to the fold.

Taking all of this together, as Democratic strategist Simon Rosenberg likes to say, I would much rather be us than them right now. The exit polling in Iowa, New Hampshire and now South Carolina consistently shows that Trump has alienated a huge part of his own party and many independents. And as his rhetoric grows more divisive, lie-filled and ugly, he will turn off many more.

And once Trump is a convicted felon, as the odds say he will be within a couple months, then ordinary, non-MAGA voters in the middle will have a stark choice: vote for the slightly older guy who is presiding over the strongest economy in the G7, will stand up to Putin, and protect our allies and our personal freedoms; or vote for the criminal misogynist rapist serial liar racist dictator wannabe chaos agent.

So who will the swing voters choose? They are starting to tell us already.