How Trump’s Struggle to Win Over Suburban Voters Could Impact the 2024 Election

2024-03-08 20:04:22

Donald Trump, former president and candidate for re-election in 2024.

Photo: EFE – CRISTOBAL HERRERA-ULASHKEVICH

The overwhelming level of Republican support for Donald Trump helped him defeat a group of rivals in the presidential primaries in less than two months.

But he has yet to win over a small but crucial group of voters: the men and women who cost him a second term in 2020.

His overwhelming primary victories, including more than a dozen on Tuesday that knocked Nikki Haley out of the race, have masked his long-term problems with suburban voters who see themselves as moderates or independents. and the Republicans who supported Joe Biden in 2020.

On Tuesday, Trump lost suburban constituencies in Virginia despite winning the state by a staggering 28 percentage points. In North Carolina, his 51-point victory was tempered by much narrower margins in the highly educated and wealthy suburbs outside Charlotte and Raleigh.

Although many Republican strategists predict that the majority of Haley voters will end up supporting the party’s nominee, Trump’s failure to bring these voters into the fold (less than four years after they helped prevent him from a second term in office) White House) raises pressing questions about what he can do in the next eight months to win them over.

He has not been particularly concerned about this challenge, as he recently threatened to excommunicate his rival’s donors from his political movement. On Wednesday, he posted on social media that Haley “was DESTROYED last night, in record fashion” and invited “all Haley supporters to join the largest movement in our nation’s history.”

Trump’s inability to expand his base of support is one of the biggest threats to his party’s efforts to regain the presidency. It’s worth noting that Haley appeared to be a stronger candidate in November: polls, including a recent one from The New York Times/Siena College, suggested she would have had an easier time unseating Biden.

But Republican voters are not resisting Trump’s electoral risks; rather they are running towards them.

In this week’s Republican primaries and Super Tuesday contests, Trump racked up overwhelming margins of victory. Voters rallied to him even as he racked up 91 felony charges in four criminal cases and looked beyond his party’s disappointing elections under his leadership in 2018, 2020 and 2022.

His victory last month in Iowa, the first nominating contest, was declared before many voters had even spoken, an apt metaphor for the air of inevitability the former president proudly carried into the race. The Republican primaries in New Hampshire and South Carolina saw record turnout, thanks mostly to Trump voters, and he swept every Super Tuesday state except Vermont, where Haley won thanks to the large percentage of college-educated voters there. in the small state.

“That is the big lesson of the primaries in the states so far: there are a significant number of Republican voters who wanted options to choose from in this primary process, and they are people that the former president has to win over by November,” he said. Rob Godfrey, who was a top adviser to Haley when she was governor of South Carolina and a senior adviser to Governor Henry McMaster’s 2022 re-election campaign. “She can do it if she runs a disciplined campaign based on politics and not in personality; one that focuses on the perceived failings of his opponent.”

Trump’s campaign hopes to focus primarily on getting supporters to the polls, but will look for ways to reach angry Republicans. The former president has sought to recalibrate his position on abortion rights as Republicans continue to feel the fallout from the overturning of Roe v. Wade by a conservative Supreme Court majority he helped establish.

Two unpopular candidates

Biden, for his part, is struggling to keep his winning 2020 coalition together. He is significantly less popular than he was four years ago and polls show Democrats are skeptical of his second campaign.

Only 83 percent of voters who backed Biden in 2020 said they would do so again this year, a stark contrast to the 97 percent of Trump voters who plan to stick with the former president, according to the Times/Siena poll released last week.

Biden’s age, his support for Israel in its war in the Gaza Strip and lingering economic unrest have eroded his support among young Democrats, black voters and progressives.

“We can learn a little bit from this primary: On the one hand, Trump has revitalized his base,” said Adam Geller, a veteran Republican pollster who has worked for previous Trump campaigns and super political action committees. “But beyond that, the jury is still out, because all the public polls show that moderate general election voters are not ready to give a bouquet of roses to either Trump or Biden yet.”

Trump is shunned in the suburbs

Trump has repelled suburban moderates since taking control of the Republican Party in 2016. He has yet to attract them back.

In the suburbs, Trump split the votes with Haley in Iowa and New Hampshire, although he won both states easily. He won the South Carolina suburbs, but by a smaller margin than his overall victory in the state.

Those trends continued Tuesday in Virginia, where Haley won suburban districts by 1.8 percentage points despite losing the state by 28 points.

In North Carolina, where Trump scored an easy victory 74 percent to 23 percent, he finished just 7 points ahead in Mecklenburg County, home of Charlotte and its suburbs. Haley also greatly narrowed Trump’s lead in Durham, Orange and Wake counties, highly educated and affluent suburban areas where Democrats see an opportunity to compete in the state.

“Trump cannot expand his reach beyond the MAGA base [Hagamos a Estados Unidos grandioso de nuevo]” two of Biden’s top campaign advisers, Jennifer O’Malley Dillon and Julie Chávez Rodríguez, wrote in a memo on Wednesday. “In exit poll after exit poll, she has only solidified her support among more conservative voters.”

Trump’s 2020 loss was due in part to independent voters, who became displeased with him after helping him win his 2016 campaign. The most recent Times/Siena poll showed independent voters were divided, 42 percent to 42 percent, in a rematch between Biden and Trump, but the results of the primaries indicate that the former president continues to have problems with these voters.

Disagreement over abortion and the 2020 election

A small but significant portion of Republicans continue to express concern about the criminal cases brought against Trump, which remain pending after several setbacks that have hurt him financially in civil lawsuits.

CNN exit polls revealed Tuesday that 1 in 5 Republican primary voters in California and nearly 1 in 3 in North Carolina said Trump would be unfit for the presidency if convicted of a crime. An overwhelming majority of these voters backed Haley on Tuesday.

“There are a lot of Republicans and independents who are voting against Trump, even though they know he’s going to win,” said Sarah Longwell, a Republican pollster who opposes Trump. “That tells me there is a real weakness in the party regarding Trump.”

The Super Tuesday results highlighted another weakness for Trump. He lost to Haley among Republican primary voters in Virginia who oppose the nationwide abortion ban, an issue that has led independents and even some moderate Republicans to side with Democrats, polls show. urn

The same polls found that Haley also won over Republican primary voters in California, North Carolina and Virginia who said Biden had won the 2020 election cleanly, and citizens who said immigrants living in the country illegally They should be given the opportunity to apply for legal status. Most of the party did not agree that Biden’s victory was legitimate and preferred deportation as a solution to immigration. Trump won both groups by overwhelming margins.

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