Inside Trump's iron grip on state GOP's loyalty: report

04 March 2024

If polls are accurate, Super Tuesday is likely to bring 2024 GOP presidential frontrunner Donald Trump even closer to securing the nomination. This Tuesday, March 5, Republican primary voters in 16 states and one territory will choose between Trump and the only other candidate left in the primary: former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley.

In an article published by Politico the day before Super Tuesday, political science professor Seth Masket — director of the University of Denver's Center on American Politics — examines the influence that pro-Trump voters have had on Republican Party chairs at the county level.

"As I surveyed GOP county chairs across the country," Masket explains, "I thought they would provide an early signal as to where the Republican nomination would end up. County chairs are influential in local GOP circles, party leaders who can offer the kind of endorsements that candidates are eager to collect. They’re also still close to the rank-and-file grassroots, and their shifts, I imagined, would signal where the rest of the party was going."

Masket continues, "But instead, I found that the county chairs didn't lead their voters. For the most part, they followed them — to Donald Trump. Last February, the county chairs were less supportive of Trump than Republican primary voters as a whole. Yet as time went on, and Trump consolidated support among rank-and-file voters, the chairs fell in line."

The Center on American Politico director stresses this is a major change from pre-2016 Republican presidential primaries0.

"In the pre-Trump era," Masket notes, "GOP leaders clearly played more of a role in steering the direction of the party. The 2012 campaign is instructive: Many different candidates were briefly the favorites of rank-and-file Republican voters, from Rick Perry to Herman Cain to Newt Gingrich to Rick Santorum. But throughout the cycle, party elites' money and endorsements stayed focused on Mitt Romney, and that's who got the nomination. This year's ongoing survey of county chairs illustrates how Republican elites are now more responsive to the grassroots rather than the other way around — either because they lack the interest or the ability to do anything else."

Whitman County, Washington Republican Party Chairman John Goyke told Masket that "there is now no other viable Republican candidate other than Donald Trump," and Masket notes that many GOP county chairs who formerly supported Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis in the primary are now supporting Trump.

But Jo Daviess County, Illinois Chairman Michael Dittmar is supporting Haley and refuses to get behind Trump.

Dittmar told Masket, "I supported Trump, but after January 6, I will not support him. Haley has experience as an executive, has experience with foreign policy and is younger."

Read Seth Masket's full report for Politico at this link.

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