Don’t Dismiss the Republican Anti-Trump Vote

By Noah Rothman

Wednesday, March 06, 2024

 

There’s a nagging discrepancy between what pollsters find when they test a rematch between Donald Trump and Joe Biden and the share of the raw vote Trump has so far generated in Republican primary contests. In November, the polling suggests Trump can count on the support of roughly 90 percent of self-identified Republicans — exactly where he needs to be, according to the conventional wisdom. And yet, a significant number of GOP primary voters continue to say they are not sold on Trump’s candidacy. Some even indicate that they plan to actively oppose him. How do we reconcile this contradiction?

 

I wrote about the phenomenon in the wake of South Carolina’s primary in late February. “Trump’s ceiling, if he has one, is not made up of disaffected Republicans who still identify as Republicans,” I wrote at the time. Likewise, election analysts such as NBC News’ Steve Kornacki have taken up the question. He attributed the apparent inconsistency between the polls and the primaries to an obvious answer: Biden voters. In GOP primaries where independents are allowed to participate, these Democratic voters descended on their ballot boxes to vote against Trump. “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?” Kornacki asked.

 

It’s a good question, but the conclusions we drew in the wake of South Carolina’s primary have been somewhat complicated by subsequent contests. In Michigan, for example, there was something approximating a “meaningful contest” unfolding alongside the GOP primary — at least, insofar as the national press became more interested in how a protest campaign against Biden would unfold in the state. Nearly three-quarters of a million Democratic Michiganders turned out to participate in the Democratic primary, leaving it to Michigan’s Republicans to litigate the GOP’s internal divisions. Trump won, but he ceded nearly 300,000 votes to Nikki Haley — 26 percent of the total vote.

 

The contests on Super Tuesday — all of which Trump won, save Vermont — represent an even cleaner test of the GOP’s support for Trump. The number of states voting simultaneously precluded the prospect that the campaigns could saturate the airwaves with ads and prime voters with their respective narratives. So, if the states that voted on Tuesday were more reflective of the national state of play, the results fell in line with what we would have expected to see.

 

In Virginia and North Carolina, for example, Haley won just 19 and 14 percent, respectively, of voters who identify as Republicans. In Virginia, 31 percent of respondents to exit pollsters said they would not necessarily back the Republican presidential nominee in November. Thirty-four percent said the same in North Carolina. Not all of these voters are self-identified Republicans, but many are. In North Carolina, only 15 percent of Haley voters disapproved of Joe Biden’s performance in office and 34 percent expressed dissatisfaction with the economy — a minority view among GOP primary voters, for sure, but an indication that those voters are gettable for Donald Trump in November.

 

Similarly, just 21 percent of Haley voters in Virginia disapprove of Biden’s performance in office while 49 percent express some level of displeasure with the economy. In North Carolina, only 22 percent of Haley voters describe themselves as “angry” or “dissatisfied” with the “way things are going” in America compared with 86 percent of the overall GOP electorate. In Virginia, 26 percent of Haley voters are “angry” or “dissatisfied” compared with 83 percent of all GOP primary voters.

 

Again, these results don’t suggest that even most Haley voters are likely Republican voters, but many are at least persuadable.

 

These are small subsections of a marginal group of voters, so it’s easy to overread these results. But the degree to which these figures dovetail with the results in the early states should not be dismissed out of hand. The anti-Trump vote on the right is modest, but it illustrates a consistent phenomenon. Donald Trump has a problem with higher-income, degree-holding, high-propensity voters in the suburbs and exurbs, whether they identify as Republican or not.

 

So, how do we square these results with the polling that shows Trump can count on roughly nine out of every ten Republican voters in the fall, or that he retains the support of a staggering 97 percent of voters who backed him in 2020? Perhaps they are indicative of an aspirational sentiment among potential Republican voters. They want to rally around the president, but they’re not there yet. That wouldn’t be counterintuitive if you accept the premise that Haley’s campaign represented a protest vote. Protest votes are designed to nudge the likely nominee toward certain behavioral changes. Those voters will “come home” to their party’s candidate in the fall, so long as their candidate gives them a reason to.

 

If, however, Republican partisans tell themselves that the anti-Trump vote in the primaries is attributable only to “resistance libs” — heaping scorn on the enterprise when they’re not outright dismissing its significance, and insisting that those who are not sold on Trump’s candidacy are “welcome to leave” the GOP (as Trump’s daughter-in-law, the incoming co-chair of the Republican National Committee, recently scoffed) — Republicans will miss the message these voters are sending.

 

Both Joe Biden and Donald Trump are counting on their opponent to do the hard work of generating enthusiasm for their respective candidacies. It would be unwise for either of those two candidates to make their adversary’s job easier. But while the general-election polling suggests it’s Biden who will have the harder time reassembling the coalition that won him the White House in 2020, the raw votes of the 2024 primaries indicate that it’s Trump who must reckon with significant dissatisfaction among what should be his party’s base.