Hard To Imagine That There Are Actually People Eager To Vote For Trump... But It's True, There Are!

Nikki Haley has 97 delegates to the GOP shit show, most of them won after she dropped out of the race. Let’s forget the states where Nikki Haley actively ran against Trump in the GOP primary— including DC, where she trounced him 62.8% to 33.3% and won all 19 delegates. These are the states where over 20% of Republicans voted for her, not because they want her but to registered negativity towards Trump.

• Vermont- 45.9%

• Utah- 42.7%

• Massachusetts- 36.9%

• Virginia- 35.0%

• Colorado- 33.3%

• Michigan- 26.6%

• Minnesota- 28.8%

• Maine- 25.3%

• Maryland- 22.3%

• Indiana- 21.7%

• Iowa- 21.3%

She gave Trump a lesser-of-two-evils endorsement this week. But do her voters care what she has to say, especially when it was that transparently weak of an endorsement based entirely on her careerist instincts? As David Frum put it yesterday, “Haley’s announcement today that she intends to vote for Trump won’t raise their opinion of him; it will only lower their opinion of her.” He also noted that “Pollsters suggest that about two-thirds of Haley voters preferred Joe Biden to Trump. Do the math, and that’s two-thirds of one-fifth of all Republicans. That’s not a lot of people in total. But it may be more than the margin of national victory in 2024. Polls in swing states that find that young voters and voters of color are drifting away from Biden also find that older and more conservative white voters are sticking with him.” 

Those who cast their votes for Haley in the Republican primaries are sometimes denigrated as out-of-date and out of touch. There is much truth to those jibes. Very clearly, the party is trending in a new direction. Those who object— but who for one reason or another have not yet quit the party altogether— are clearly a waning force. But they’re not quite an extinct force. They are motivated by what they cherish: the country, its democracy, its place in the world, its Constitution. Nobody will change their mind about those things. Haley was their instrument, not their leader. When the instrument ceases to serve its purpose, it can be thrown away without a pang of regret.

Charlie Cook had a related thought— who’s even going to vote in November when so many people like neither Trump not Biden? He noted that in 2020, “Biden either received 94 or 95 percent of the vote of Democrats and Democrat-leaning independents, while Trump pulled between 91 and 94 percent of the vote from Republicans and GOP-leaning independents… Few true partisans ever defect to the other party; if they’re unhappy with their nominee, they are more likely to just stay home or skip over that office on the ballot. True independents, on the other hand, are a fickle lot, prone to turn against the party they supported four years earlier. Their behavior recalls one of the great lines from the early 20th-century starlet Mae West, who once said,’Between two evils, I always pick the one I never tried before.’”

We have a group of voters who are not enthusiastic about either candidate, and many may well end up deciding not to decide. In some minds, not casting a ballot is becoming a very real and deliberate option, a way to show their displeasure with their choices and the nominees that the two parties have offered up. They look at the field of independent or third-party candidates and do not see a political knight in shining armor worthy of their support.After record voter-turnout levels in the 2018 midterm and 2020 presidential elections, and an impressively high participation rate in 2022, this election looks to break that streak. But will it be disproportionately lower or higher for either side, or is it more about some demographic groups being even more disillusioned than the others?If we knew the answer, we’d probably know who’s going to win.

Yesterday, the New Yorker published a discussion between Isaac Chotiner and Democratic strategist Simon Rosenberg, who feels that “as people get closer to voting and have to go through that process of deciding who they’re going to get behind, Republicans lose ground and Democrats gain ground. And this has been particularly true after Dobbs. The whole political landscape in America changed fundamentally with Dobbs. And so any comparisons to 2016 and 2020, for example, I think are not valid because I think everything changed in 2022.”

Rosenberg feels certain that Trump is a much weaker candidate today than he was in 2016 (when he won 46.1% of the popular vote) or 2020  (when he won 46.8% of the popular vote). “[H]is performance on the stump is far more degraded. He’s clearly diminished. He’s far more erratic. He’s making a lot of mistakes that are hurting the campaign when he speaks. Second, his agenda is far more extreme, more dangerous, and will be far easier to exploit by the Democrats… There are six things now that are true about him that were not true in 2020, that all voters are going to come to know in the following months— they are that he raped E. Jean Carroll in a department-store dressing room…  that he oversaw one of the largest financial frauds in American history, and has been fined hundreds of millions of dollars for that; that he stole American secrets, he lied to the F.B.I., he shared those secrets with other people, it’s the greatest betrayal of our national security by a former President in all of American history; he led an insurrection against the United States, he led an armed attack on the Capitol, and he’s promised to end American democracy for all time if he’s in the White House in 2025; he and his family have corruptly taken more money from foreign governments than any family in American history; and sixth, and this is really important, is that he’s singularly responsible for ending Roe... It’s my belief that, when you prosecute all of these things, and establish this basic idea that Joe Biden has been a good President, and the country is better off, which is manifestly true— that in the prosecution of all of this, Trump will fall down, and we will win.”

Rosenberg insisted that “In this election, you have this combination, you have an unprecedented set of circumstances where the Republican coalition has splintered. Now you have Mitt Romney going on TV, consistently telling Republicans not to vote for Trump. We’ve never seen anything like this, and I think it would be dangerous for commentators, who in 2022 got the election so wrong, to dismiss what we’re seeing.”