Haley May Have Lost, But So Did Trump
On February 25, headlines were rife with Donald Trump’s huge twenty-point victory over Nikki Haley in Haley’s home state of South Carolina. Haley’s candidacy was therefore doomed—as if it hadn’t been before—and Trump was officially the Republican nominee-in-waiting. As a result, the Koch brothers, part of a contingent of smart money donors that were desperate to prevent Trump from leading the party to another defeat, grudgingly suspended their support.
But the same numbers that destroyed Haley’s chances of being president might have destroyed Trump’s as well. The forty percent of the vote Haley received, most among moderates in the population centers, Charleston and Columbia, where she actually won, and won big, might prove far more significant than the sixty percent statewide that she lost.
There is little debate that turnout will be the deciding factor in the November election, but there has been a paucity of analysis of the appropriate scenarios. Beginning with the 2020 results as a base, an election that saw an almost 67% turnout of the voter eligible population, the highest since 1900, there are four ways the numbers can change: Trump can gain or lose voters and Biden can gain or lose voters. In a subset, if either candidate loses voters, will they have defected to the other candidate or opted out of the presidential election. An opt-out will cost a candidate one vote, but a defection is a net of two.
Going in, Trump is at a clear disadvantage. He lost every one of the big six—Michigan, Pennsylvania, Arizona, Georgia, Wisconsin, and Nevada—and needs to win three, perhaps four of these, to change the result in 2024. (North Carolina, which Trump won in 2020, might also be in play, but let us assume it remains red.) Although there are no hard polling numbers—which would be unreliable anyway—Trump’s supporters are so fervent, so worshipful, that most of them almost certainly cast a vote in 2020. They will do so again in 2024—although given the advanced age of many MAGA adherents, some number of them likely have died—but that will not be enough for him to win.
In other words, if Trump has actually topped out with his base, he either needs to gain enough voters or Biden needs to lose enough to change the results. With his entire campaign focused on the angry, the bitter, and the disaffected (many of whom pretend to be fervent Christians, complete with a radical theocratic agenda) it is difficult to discern from where his new pool of voters might emerge. He might gain some votes from Latino men, which will help him in Nevada, but that is only 6 electoral votes. Beyond that, there does not seem to be a whole lot of potential golden sneaker buyers out there. (Announcing that Black men identified with his mug shot might not do the trick. Nor, for all that it is considered a trivial case, will testimony in the upcoming hush-money-to-porn-star trial help his standing with women.)
In fact, as Haley’s strong showing indicates, far more likely is that Trump will lose voters among those who would once have been considered rock-ribbed Republicans. If her share holds at between the 25% she won in Michigan and South Carolina’s 40%, and even 20% of those refuse to vote for Trump or switch to Biden, which now seems like a distinct possibility, he cannot win in any of the big six unless Biden’s turnout is depressed even more.
That is possible. Biden will have no shortage of problems in motivating his voters, especially progressives—everything from migrants pouring over the southern border to a stubborn insistence among many that the economy is in the dumps to—especially—Israel’s refusal to halt what has become a genocidal campaign in Gaza, to say nothing of the perception that he cannot find his way to the men’s room unaided.
As bad as some of these problems seem to be, however, they are less intractable than Trump’s. Biden is moving to deal with the border pretty much as the Republicans would have and was helped when the House, at Trump’s behest, killed a border security bill that gave them just about everything they said they wanted. Although the far left finds border control anathema, the problem has become sufficiently acute that Biden’s embrace of stricter measures should not significantly wound him.
The economy might also be less of a negative as well. With employment numbers continuing to improve and inflation tentatively under control, recent polling has shown a positive trend in both consumer confidence and perspective on the future. If these improvements continue, Biden will have turned a weakness into a strength.
That leaves Gaza, Biden’s biggest threat, as the massive protest vote in the Michigan primary has made clear. The fury engendered by scenes of wanton destruction and horrible human misery, coupled with the arrogant refusal of Benjamin Netanyahu to consider Palestinian civilians as actual human beings, now stretches far beyond Arab Americans, 146,000 of whom voted in Michigan in 2020. Although Biden has a UAW endorsement in his hip pocket, a popular governor in his corner, and a state Republican Party in disarray, he risks losing the state and perhaps the election without taking decisive action to at least try to end the carnage in Gaza.
If Netanyahu continues to press the offensive, words will no longer suffice and Biden may be forced to curtail military aid to Israel. The best he can hope for is that the situation has stabilized by fall, with the United States part of an international coalition to help rebuild Gaza under a non-Hamas government. Gaza will still cost Biden votes in Michigan but his losses will not be Trump’s gain. Arab Americans are unlikely to defect to the man who more or less labeled them all terrorists.
But Biden’s biggest weapon is his opponent. It is not as if Donald Trump is the better choice to control the Israeli invasion or take the lead in implementing humanitarian policies in Gaza. Biden can and will make the argument that as bad as the crisis is now, Trump, who has no respect for human life other than his own, will make it demonstrably worse. Casting a protest vote in February is one thing; casting a tacit vote for Trump by staying home in November quite another.
Even the doddering old man image might be mitigated. Biden’s advisors, who kept his notorious salty language and combative nature under wraps, have now allowed them to increasingly seep out to the public. Biden will never match Bernie Sanders as the old guy who could rip your throat out with his teeth, but a dose of pugnaciousness will not hurt him one whit. Also, Trump is not exactly Thor either and has shown an increasing inability to speak cogently for more than a few minutes at a time.
Demographics will come into play as well. In the same way that Trump’s voters are getting older and, to some degree dying out, younger voters, heavily Democratic, are joining the electorate. This group tends to be dismissed as a force because their participation has historically been anemic as compared with, say, pensioners. But this year, that might not be the case.
In special elections in Kansas, Wisconsin, Ohio, and New York, the turnout was not only a good deal larger than is generally the case in one-offs, but also demonstrated that abortion, gerrymandering, and perhaps gun safety had aroused under thirty voters to a far greater degree than pre-election polls had predicted. If Biden finds a way to successfully manage Gaza, swing states with large student populations, such as Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, will be given a big blue boost.
Even if Gaza remains an open sore, as much as young progressives might find Biden repugnant, it will be pointed out by Democrats that if they stay home they might find themselves facing a national abortion ban, an assault on gay marriage and LGBTQ rights, and gun-toting conservatives shooting down innocents under stand-your-ground laws.
In the end, Biden has work to do to prevent key constituenties from abandoning him, but Trump’s losses seem unrecoverable and permanent. Thus, in a straight up bet on the outcome in November, Biden, weakened as he may have been by the Michigan result, remains the favorite.
Still, this is what is known as a surprise-free projection, and with two aging candidates, myriad legal complications, and international crises that seem to spring up like mushrooms, it will be a surprise if there are no surprises. But surprise is an equal opportunity phenomenon and as the nation moves fully into the election cycle, it is better to be leading than not.