Polls show there’s a cost to Trump alienating Haley voters
When former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley ended her presidential bid in early March, Donald Trump and his allies emphatically told her supporters and “those ” Romney-esque Republicans to take a hike . Those supporters listened, as Pennsylvania proved yet again this week, when more than 16% of Republican voters in the state’s closed primary cast a ballot for Haley and against Trump.
The Washington Post’s Aaron Blake assembled a list of states with Republican-only primaries so far and highlighted the percentage of their GOP voters casting a ballot against Trump. Idaho is on the low end at 15%, while Utah is at the high end, with 44% of Republicans rejecting Trump.
The obvious problem for Trump here—that a meaningful portion of Republican voters continue to stiff-arm him—isn’t the only problem. Haley voters are typically well-situated, highly educated suburban voters , and they are also high-propensity voters —or “likely voters,” in polling parlance. Many Haley voters have also said they will vote for President Joe Biden if Trump is the Republican nominee.
At the same time, we are starting to see a pattern play out where Biden does better in likely voter models, as CNN’s Harry Enten pointed out recently.
Enten’s average of Marquette University and New York Times polling showed Trump up by 2 points over Biden among registered voters, but the two candidates were even among likely voters.
Enten’s hypothesis was underscored earlier this week by a Marist College poll that found Biden gaining several points on Trump among respondents saying they “definitely” plan to vote. Here’s how that looked in the head-to-head and in a multi-candidate field.
Head-to-head
Registered Voters: 51% Biden, 48% Trump, Biden +3
Definitely plan to vote: 53% Biden, 47% Trump, Biden +6
Multi-candidate field (incl. RFK Jr. Cornel West, and Jill Stein)
Registered Voters: 43% Biden, 38% Trump, Biden +5
Definitely plan to vote: 46% Biden, 39% Trump, Biden +7
The Marist survey was a particularly good one for Biden, but its lopsided results aren’t intended to be the focus here. It’s the cross-polling trend that counts, with Biden appearing to gain ground on Trump in likely voter vs. registered voter models.
“So it turns out that this potentially lower turnout, who does it benefit more? It actually benefits Joe Biden more than it benefits Donald Trump at this particular moment,” Enten says.
And if that trend holds, it could flip the script on which party benefits more from a lower-turnout election—and it’s likely Democrats, in this case.
Trump has trashed Republicans who don’t support him, in part, because he thinks he can replace them with working-class Black and Latino voters. It remains to be seen if that’s true, with the Biden campaign pouring considerable resources into courting voters of color.
But regardless of whether Trump manages to attract a wider swath of support among working-class voters, he is trading high-propensity voters from the suburbs for lower-propensity voters—and that appears to be showing up in the polling.