Does Trump Really Have a Republican Problem?

By Noah Rothman

Monday, February 26, 2024

 

With Donald Trump’s ascension to a third presidential nomination all but assured, political analysts are scouring the results of the early GOP primary contests for clues that might reveal the contours of a Trump-Biden rematch. In an otherwise sleepy Republican primary season, South Carolina’s Saturday contest, in which the former president won just under 60 percent of the vote to Nikki Haley’s 39.5 percent, suffices for drama. But the excitement, such as it is, will have to wait until November.

 

Across the first three early contests in South Carolina, New Hampshire, and Iowa, a consistent pattern has emerged: Trump underperforms his polling. The average of Trump’s performance in polls heading into the Iowa caucuses pegged his lead at just under 34 points over his nearest competitor, Ron DeSantis. In the end, Trump’s margin of victory was just shy of 30 points. Likewise, Trump went into the election in New Hampshire beating Haley by over 19 points in the polling average. He beat her by about eleven points. The spread in South Carolina favored Trump by over 23 points, but his margin of victory ended up at around 20 points.

 

These relatively small discrepancies hardly constitute polling error once the peaks and valleys in the polling landscape are smoothed out in the aggregate. But, as Cook Political Report analyst Amy Walter wondered, these results may also suggest Trump’s vote share in pre-election polling represents a hard ceiling on his support — a threshold he approaches but never quite achieves, much less exceeds.

 

Some have attributed Trump’s relative softness at the ballot box to the dynamic of the primaries themselves. The former president’s boosters are quick to attribute Haley’s nearly 40 percent of the vote in South Carolina to Democratic interlopers, who, as was the case in New Hampshire, were able to participate in the GOP’s nominating contest if they met certain conditions. By contrast, as Trump’s defenders might insist, genuine Republicans are foursquare behind Trump’s renomination. The exit polling in South Carolina doesn’t bear that out.

 

Of the 68 percent of South Carolina primary voters who describe themselves as Republicans, 30 percent voted for Haley. The state’s former governor won the backing of 16 percent of voters who identify as “very conservative” and 43 percent of those who say they are “somewhat conservative.” Together, these two ideological orientations accounted for 77 percent of the South Carolina primary electorate. Only 16 percent of voters surveyed said Saturday’s election was the first GOP primary in which they had voted previously. The other 84 percent described themselves as veterans of the Republican nominating process and, of them, Haley won the backing of 36 percent. In Iowa (15 percent), New Hampshire (20 percent), and South Carolina (16 percent), a substantial number of GOP primary voters said they would be disappointed if Trump emerged as the party’s presidential nominee.

 

Taken together, Trump’s failure to meet the expectations set in pre-election surveys and exit polling indicating that roughly one-quarter of self-identified Republicans who voted in the early contests are still not sold on the former president’s candidacy. Observers might therefore conclude that Trump could have a real problem unifying GOP voters behind him in November. If so, we should also expect to see evidence of that in the polling of a potential head-to-head matchup between Trump and Joe Biden in the fall. But we don’t.

 

In recent polls that provide a breakdown of their results, regardless of whether those polls find Trump beating Biden or losing to him, the GOP is united behind their candidate. For example, the latest survey conducted by Quinnipiac University pollsters from February 15–19 found Trump coming up short in November with 45 percent of the vote to Biden’s 49 percent. But Trump isn’t losing for want of Republican support. Ninety-one percent of self-identified Republicans backed the president. The Economist/YouGov’s February 18–20 results showed Biden and Trump in a dead heat, with 42 and 43 percent of the overall vote, respectively. When voters who only “lean” toward one party or another were included, Trump has the support of 86 percent of Republicans when voters who lean toward one or the other party were included in that total. Without them, Trump’s total support among self-identified Republicans clocks in at 87 percent. Earlier this month, just one week after New Hampshire held its primary, an NPR/PBS/Marist College poll showed a tight race in November with Biden edging out Trump by one point at 47 to 48 percent. But Trump could nevertheless count on the support of 93 percent of Republicans to Biden’s 91 percent of Democrats.

 

None of these polls suggest Trump will struggle to unite the party around him as its presidential nominee, but you could be forgiven for assuming there is a crisis of disunity in the GOP’s ranks given the frenetic efforts from party officials to mute the appearance of intra-party tension. An increasingly vocal faction of the party has run out of patience with Haley’s quixotic candidacy — partly, as Audrey Fahlberg reported, because its continued existence postpones the onset of the “coming home” phase of hotly contested election. But Republican voters seem perfectly willing to tell pollsters they plan to abandon their misgivings about Trump by Election Day.

 

The general-election polling that forecasts a united GOP by Election Day isn’t hard to believe. That’s what we would expect following an exhausting and unusually prolonged general-election campaign that polarizes the electorate around the two party’s respective nominees. Trump’s ceiling, if he has one, is not made up of disaffected Republicans who still identify as Republicans. It would be composed of high-propensity suburban and exurban voters, voters with college and post-graduate degrees, and voters at the higher end of the income spectrum.

 

These voters may or may not still consider themselves Republicans such that they’re willing to describe themselves that way in conversations with pollsters. Indeed, according to Gallup’s January polling, only one-quarter of American adults now volunteer their identity as “Republican.” But most indications suggest that this 25 percent are either Donald Trump devotees or willing to subordinate their grievances with him to the objective of ejecting Biden from the White House.

 

“I just want to say that I have never seen the Republican Party so unified as it is right now,” Trump exclaimed in a two-minute victory speech on Saturday night. Even if Trump is describing a smaller universe of potential Republican voters than the one he inherited in 2016, the data do not suggest that he’s wrong.