It’s been three weeks since former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley suspended her bid for the Republican presidential nomination. Despite her departure, Donald Trump has continued to lose significant numbers of primary voters to Haley.
As Daily Kos’ Kerry Eleveld has reported, President Joe Biden has reached out to appeal to these Haley voters. Trump … not so much. According to The New York Times, Trump has made no move to contact Haley or to reconcile with the voters who sought another option in the primary.
It’s not just Haley voters who Trump refuses to woo. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis dropped out of the race in January and promptly endorsed Trump. But months later, DeSantis is not joining sycophantic former candidates Sen. Tim Scott and Vivek Ramaswamy at Trump rallies, and Trump is encouraging a MAGA candidate to jump into the House race against a Florida representative who initially supported DeSantis in his White House run.
Voters voicing their displeasure during primary season but returning to the party fold on Election Day: It’s a tale as old as American democracy. But that divisiveness can still do some damage—and no one is as divisive as Trump.
In an ABC News exit poll, nearly half of those who supported Haley in the GOP primary in Ohio said they would vote for Biden in November. That matches earlier data from Iowa where 43% of Haley supporters in the caucuses said they would vote for Biden, compared to only 23% for Trump. In North Carolina, a CNN exit poll found just 7% of Haley voters in the primary saying that they would vote Republican on Election Day if Trump is the nominee.
In January, Trump warned that he would blacklist those who donated to Haley’s campaign, saying that they would be “permanently barred from the MAGA camp. We don’t want them, and will not accept them.”
Those numbers and that statement would seem to make a “Kumbaya” moment of Republican unity unlikely. Haley made that clear before her withdrawal, when she backed away from her commitment to support the eventual Republican nominee.
Still, a 2016 study looked at how divisive primaries affect results and found that the effects can be profound … sometimes. These effects seemed to be strongest when primary results were particularly close, such as those leading to a runoff election. In other cases, no matter how vocal and how ugly the exchanges, they had little effect on voters in the general election. For example, predictions about how the fractious Republican primary season would weaken Trump—including a warning from Nate Silver that “divisive nominations have consequences”—proved not to be true in 2016. It wasn’t just Republican politicians who moved out of Camp Never Trump once the nomination was certain: It was Republican voters, too.
On the other hand, the harder-fought contest on the Democratic side saw over 200,000 voters who went for Sen. Bernie Sanders in critical swing state primaries flip to Trump in the fall. That fits with a pattern in which primary races that are closer at the polls are more likely to have a lingering effect on the general election.
Compared to past races, the big gap between Trump and all other Republican contenders in the 2024 contest would seem like a signal that, no matter how angry supporters of Haley, DeSantis, or some other GOP candidate may be now, they’ll trudge to the polls wearing a red hat come November.
Only … will they? They are still not making nice with Trump in the primaries, though no other active candidates remain. The broad schism running through the Republican Party is visible in everything from resignations in the House to Republican leadership that can survive only with the help of Democrats. There is simple divisiveness and there is intra-party hate, and Republicans seem to have an ample supply of both.
When push comes to shove, voters usually stick to their party in the fall, but with Trump actively pushing some of those GOP voters away rather than trying to pull them in, past experience may not be a great predictor of what to expect in 2024. It’s possible that Haley voters and DeSantis backers will just stay mad—or that they’re actually serious about believing Trump to be unfit for office.
Those voters may not have been enough to win Haley the nomination. But they may be enough to cost Trump the election.
The President and CEO of Center for American Progress Action Fund, Patrick Gaspard, joins us to give his thoughts on what the Republican Party’s actual message is.