Why Trump still has a 'Nikki Haley' problem at the ballot box

03 April 2024

President Joe Biden and Donald Trump are the presumptive nominees of their parties, but unlike Democratic primary voters, Republican primary voters don’t seem to have gotten the message.

Comparing the percentage of the each party’s vote in primary states so far, Joe Biden is frequently beating Donald Trump. The results show a pattern that could signal trouble for the ex-president. Trump’s problem isn’t Nikki Haley per se, it’s that in some states there appears to be a Republican enthusiasm gap for Trump, and GOP voters may be voting for Haley to send a message.

In state after state after state, when Nikki Haley was officially on the ballot and after she suspended her campaign on March 6, Republican primary voters have been voting for her, and continue to vote for her, and those vote percentages with a few exceptions have been in the double digits.

On Tuesday, voters went to the polls in Rhode Island, Connecticut, New York and Wisconsin to pull a lever for their party’s only current candidate. In each state President Biden won a larger percent of the Democratic vote than Donald Trump won of the Republican vote. (Note: all data is from the Associated Press via Google and may change as votes are counted.)

“In New York, 70-year-old Steve Wheatley, a registered Republican, said he wishes there were more candidates to choose from. He said he voted for Nikki Haley even though ‘she has no shot’ because of the lack of options,” the Associated Press reports.

With nearly all of the vote counted in the Empire State on Tuesday, Donald Trump won just 82.1% of the vote – and just 131,671 votes⁩ – while Nikki Haley walked away with almost 13% – and more than 20,000 votes. New York GOP voters even handed former New Jersey governor Chris Christie 4% of the vote.

By comparison, in New York Joe Biden won 91.5%, with 276,770 votes, according to the AP. That’s more than double Trump’s number of votes.

University of South Carolina professor and political scientist David Darmofal has been pointing this out.

“There were both Democratic & Republican primaries yesterday in AZ, IL, KS, & OH,” he wrote on March 20, “and President Biden received a higher percentage of the vote in his primary than Trump did in his primary in all four of these states.”

Let’s look at Wisconsin.

In 2020, Joe Biden won Wisconsin by less than one percent — 49.45% to 48.82%, which was barely more than a 20,000 vote difference.

On Tuesday, voters had a far different response.

Trump won the Wisconsin GOP primary with just 79.2% of the GOP vote, or 475,375 votes. Nikki Haley, again, walked away with nearly 13%. On the Democratic side, President Biden won by a much larger margin, and with far more votes than Trump: 88.6% of the vote, or ⁦510,447 votes.

Bill Kristol and Andrew Egger at The Bulwark on Wednesday noted, “the 89 percent of the Democratic vote Biden took in Wisconsin was better than Trump did anywhere last night: 79 percent in Connecticut, 82 percent in New York, 84 percent in Rhode Island, 79 percent in Wisconsin. These are remarkably soft numbers for a now-unopposed candidate, especially given the fact that—unlike on the Democratic side—there’s zero ongoing organized Republican effort to use the primaries to send Trump a message. A fifth or so of GOP voters are still just showing up to pull the lever for somebody else instead.”

In Rhode Island on Tuesday, Trump won 84.5% of the GOP vote, with Haley taking 10.6%. Trump had a slightly better percent than Biden: 84.5% vs. 82.6%, but Biden won nearly twice as many votes: 20,906 vs. ⁦10,808. Rhode Island Democratic voters also dinged Biden with a 14.5% “uncommitted” vote.

In Connecticut, Biden won 84.9% with 55,638 votes. Trump won 77.9, with ⁦34,708 votes. And Haley took 14% of the GOP vote there.

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