The results of yesterday’s New Hampshire primary should be worrying for serial sex abuser Donald Trump (SSAT). Yes, he defeated Nikki Haley 54.5% to 43.3% and is still on course to win the Republican nomination. But the margin of victory is smaller than I expected and much smaller than I think SSAT would have liked. This is because SSAT is like an incumbent in the Republican party and to have nearly half the voters going against you should be worrying. By contrast, on the Democratic side, Joe Biden, who is an incumbent, won with 67% of the vote, even though he was not on the ballot and people had to actually write in his name. (Why his name was not on the ballot is due to esoteric internal Democratic party rule making.)
Complicating the fact is that in New Hampshire, independent voters can vote in either primary and there was an effort by those seeking to stop SSAT to get them to vote for Haley. It is not clear how many did so and perhaps there will be some entrance and exit polling that might give us some idea. But even allowing for the fact that Haley’s totals may have been inflated somewhat by this, this result shows that as far as New Hampshire is concerned, there are quite a few Republicans who voted against SSAT. The key question is how many of those voters will return to the fold and vote for SSAT in the general election, how many will vote for Joe Biden, and how many will sit it out because while they dislike SSAT, they cannot stomach voting for a Democrat.
An initial analysis, as summarized by Paul Begala who is a Democratic party partisan, is not promising for SSAT.
Trump lost a stunning two-thirds of New Hampshire voters who are not in either political party, according to initial results from a CNN exit poll. In Iowa, 43% of former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley’s supporters said they would vote for President Joe Biden against Trump.
There are two very different storylines that emerged from New Hampshire: The first is former President Donald Trump’s cult-like support among diehard Republicans. The more important story, though, is his stunning weakness among independents.
…Trump’s challenge, now that the nomination fight is effectively over, will be to appeal to voters who are turned off by his cult of personality. His angry, bitter speech Tuesday night was a terrible beginning for the general election. Did the grievance-filled rant against Haley sound like a winner to you? No, it sounded like a guy who is in deep doo-doo with independents.
This is a potential disaster for Trump. To attend this year’s Iowa GOP caucuses in the freezing cold, you had to be a very committed Republican. (Unlike New Hampshire, Iowa does not allow independents to vote in the GOP caucus.) And yet nearly half of the loyal Republicans who supported Haley in Iowa say they cannot support Trump in November; Biden wins them by a margin of 20 points.
As another analysis points out, Haley has pulled her punches so far, avoiding hammering him on his many weaknesses.
Haley could have emphasised her spouse’s military record and gone after Trump on his description of fallen solders as “losers” and “suckers”. She could have celebrated her identity as a daughter of Indian immigrants to contrast herself with Trump’s bigotry, nativism and racism. She could have played up her gender and what masterstroke it would be for Republicans, not Democrats, to produce America’s first female president after nearly 250 years.
She could also have been more forceful in making the electability argument, taking her cue from Christie who hammered Trump over his defeat in election after election.
But none of these are deemed viable in today’s party. Instead, when Haley did go bold and against the grain, it was on foreign policy, ardently pro-Israel and anti-Russia, and constantly bashing China. It was never going to win many extra votes but it was sure to alienate the isolationist “America First” wing of the party, personified by Ramaswamy.
Other flashes of courage arrived too little too late. Early on Tuesday Haley appeared on Fox News’s Fox & Friends and said, bluntly, she did not know if they would “tell the truth” about her campaign. Later, in her concession speech, she pushed the electability argument: “The worst-kept secret in politics is how badly the Democrats want to run against Donald Trump.”
If it was such a badly kept secret, why not shout it from the rooftops months earlier?
But like many bullies, Trump’s ostentatious show of strength was motivated by inner weakness. Haley did well enough among independents to raise red flags for Republicans in the general election.
The Lincoln Project, an anti-Trump group, commented: “It’s clear that Trump is political poison to moderates. Sane and moral republicans said their conscience won’t allow them to vote for a chaos-driven maniac who is under 91 criminal counts, a proven sexual predator, and authoritarian wannabe who will shred the constitution and burn this country down.”
Iowa and New Hampshire are not really representative of the country as a whole, so extrapolating from these two results to what will happen in the general election is not worth the effort. South Carolina is a little more representative but the fact that Haley was once the governor of that state will skew the interpretation of that results of that contest.
Haley is vowing to stay in the race, despite calls from SSAT’s supporters for her to drop out. She may have done better if her attacks on SSAT had been sharper. Let’s see if she now changes tack. I think that SSAT will go ballistic over this result and if Haley stays in, I expect SSAT to launch increasingly vicious attacks on her, to try and pull her poll numbers down and force her out of the race.
Don’t expect Haley to get any help from the corporate media. NBC’s Today show this morning breathlessly reported on Trump’s resounding victory. I expect more of that on the evening news, maybe even on The PBS Newshour. We’ll see…
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“443.3%”? Misplaced decimal point?
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[I corrected it. Thanks! -- Mano]
Edmund Blackadder, when winning with more than 100%: “This merely demonstrates my emthusiasm when voting for myself.”
The MAGA crowd will vote for one “Donald Trump” but will they notice if it the right Donald Trump?
Let’s say you legally change your name to Wycliffe Donald McPearson Trump, and get a bit of cosmetic surgery before running as Donald Trump of the ‘Repurposed Party’ …. are they likely to notice anything odd with the ballot? The ‘butterfly ballot’ in Florida 2000 certainly fucked over Al Gore.
If you run into a voter, you can easily imitate a Trumpesque word salad, just remember to keep a thick layer of orange stuff on your face.
Strategy #1 : Keep courting MAGA voters who will never ever vote for anyone over Trump -- hope that Trump dies and that this finally convinces MAGA voters to vote for someone else (but even this is not certain) , so not come out too strongly against him
There is no Strategy #2
In the end I think even MAGA voters can see it -- if you cant go after your opponent the way Trump does (and this is what appeals to them) , why should they bother voting for you, you arent strong? Even Christie for all his attacks was milquetoast -- I dont recollect any candidate stating out loud -- Donald Trump lusts after his own daughter -- and while many of youll may want to sleep with Donald trump , remember that he wants to sleep with your daughters not you and by the way we also want to ban abortion and contraception.. There is no reason to be nice to a Nazi enabler.
…Haley has pulled her punches so far, avoiding hammering him on his many weaknesses.
And she’ll keep on pulling her punches, for one obvious reason: most of Trump’s weaknesses are weaknesses she, and her entire party, also have. None of them have anything positive or beneficial to offer the people, none of them have any past accomplishments to brag about — despite there being so many Republican governors, Haley included, who coulda shoulda woulda run on their executive accomplishments and experience but can’t, because none of it was actually good for most people.
I hope she starts throwing more stones, and maybe a petrol-bomb or three, but let’s face it — she and her entire party are in one big glass house and can’t be arsed to pack up and move out.
Actually, isn’t it more down to NH trying to dictate terms to the rest of the US and being told where they can stick it?
birgerjohansson@#3:
Something like that actually happened in Canada. In the 1988 federal election, the Liberal leader John N. Turner was running in the riding of Vancouver Quadra, and the Rhinoceros party (generally a joke party) found a different John Turner to run as their candidate in the riding. He got a about 1.4% of the vote, which was higher than the Rhinoceros party got in any previous election in that riding, but not a huge amount more (they’d got 0.9% two elections earlier).
And in doing so kept her head below the ramparts so to speak, letting the other candidates take Trump’s ire. But now that she is his chief rival, she will not be spared his attention and will rapidly sink as the travelling circus that is the R primary hits the next states.
Oh and ‘analysis’ makes these opinion pieces sound credible and weighty, but they are just opinion pieces.
Not sure why this is worth mentioning. It is normally the case that supporters of A want B to go away, and B refuses to go away unless the cause is hopeless. It would only be surprising if this did not take place.
There is usually a certain amount of that when talking about a credible candidate in a primary. A candidate wants to attack other candidates but not so harshly that backers of the other candidates are turned off entirely and don’t vote.
This is a big problem for Haley because Trump doesn’t pull his punches. Haley needs to get part of the MAGA vote if Trump loses or drops out. It’s unlikely Trump will endorse Haley and he might keep on attacking her. Haley still needs those voters to have a chance of winning. Trump doesn’t care, even though he is hurting himself at some point attacking Haley. Trump already has the MAGA side wrapped up, he needs to be pulling in the moderate Republicans and right leaning independent voters who favor Haley. If he attacks Haley too much he loses them but he doesn’t make that sort of calculation. He doesn’t do anything but aggressive personal insult offense.
Haley will need to follow a carefully tuned line here, staying on a strong offense against Trump but not so personal as to turn off hard right voters entirely.
Um, that “other analyst” is not pointing something out, he’s providing his opinion.
(Not the same thing)
Quite obviously, Nikki is not (comparatively) a stupid person, and has calculated just how far she dares to go when criticising the MAGA Messiah.
Too far too soon would be counter-productive.
(Of course, that’s my
analysisopinion; I don’t get paid for it, so maybe it doesn’t count)—
Now, someone who begins their opinion with “The cruelty is the point.” I reckon they are obviously either full of it or pandering to ideologic saps. The point is to win; to get ahead; to garner influence and power, etc. To profit, in short.
I have a hard time believing anyone, especially Haley, entered this contest with any illusions that they could beat Trump. I only wonder what it is each thinks to gain from losing to him.
Holms, you wonder what gain there is in being ahead of every other candidate contending against Trump?
Here, for you: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_Republican_Party_presidential_candidates
[oops. Sorry, Holms — wrong person. My bad, dunno why I somehow assumed it was you, you’ve been good lately. In my cups, is my excuse]
Also, the delusion is strong with this one: a “bad day” is when he wins?
That very fact, right there, is why there are no “bad days” for him. You acknowledge that he’s “like an incumbent” in a process where BY DEFINITION there’s no such position. Even as you’re saying that he’s unassailable, you’re trying to spin a smaller-than-expected margin of victory as a “bad day”.
Misses the point spectacularly. First of all -- you think someone who voted for Haley will switch their vote to BIDEN??? I want some of what you’re smoking. That’s not going to happen. Switching to Trump once he’s the candidate? Entirely credible, even to be expected. Sitting it out because Trump disgusts them? Yeah, I can believe a measurable minority might do that. All of which is academic -- the key question is, how many people will turn out for Biden? Recall that he beat Trump in 2020, but that Trump got the second highest number of votes EVER in a US election, even without any criminal messing about. Biden only beat him because he got the absolute highest number of votes ever, and he absolutely needs to maintain that to have a hope of beating Trump when the time comes, because the polls are really not showing what we’d all hope for (i.e. a Trump wipeout). The fucking voters keep on and on and on endorsing Trump, despite everything, so now is not the time for complacency. Complacency and the arrogance behind it is what put Trump in the White House in the first place. I don’t see such hubris from Biden, but really, the call should be going out to everyone that this is NOT in the bag, it’s NOT a “bad day” for Trump, because what it unarguably actually is is another step closer to getting back into the White House. It’s NOT a setback. If you don’t want Trump back, VOTE, please, and do whatever you can to make sure everyone sensible you know does too.
hope that Trump dies and that this finally convinces MAGA voters to vote for someone else
I hope, if that happens, the CIA have their Qanon department put out the meme that Trump is still alive and should be a write-in vote -- wasting tens of thousands of republican votes.
@mjr, 15:
I don’t think so. Consider: in 2020 Trump polled over 74 MILLION.
You’re telling me that from that lot, the number of gullible morons who’d fall for that would be fewer than a million?
Oh, hang on, they’d need to be able to successfully spell “Trump”.
As you were.