Haley didn’t mention exit polling conducted in California, North Carolina and Virginia on Tuesday showing that at least 3 in 10 Republican primary voters said they wouldn’t vote for the party’s nominee regardless of who it was. She didn’t need to; that bit of data was quickly elevated by Trump critics to offer the same warning. To wit: A lot of people who Trump needs to win aren’t sold on his candidacy.
That warning is overwrought, if not entirely dismissible. And the exit polls show why.
In each of the three states where Edison Research conducted exit polling on Tuesday, a large chunk of the electorate in the Republican primary consisted of people who said they weren’t Republicans. In California, it was 40 percent of voters. In Virginia, just under a third. In North Carolina and Virginia, those non-Republican voters contributed most of the votes that Haley received (about 6 in 10 votes in each case). In California, they contributed about 40 percent of Haley’s total.
This pattern isn’t new. Haley’s support in New Hampshire, for example, was overwhelmingly a function of non-Republicans, voters who showed up to vote against Trump in a contest that was viewed as pivotal for blocking his path to the nomination.
What’s new is that question about whether voters would support the eventual Republican nominee. In each of the three states, the percentage saying no was about the same as the percentage of non-Republican voters. In North Carolina, for example, 34 percent of voters weren’t Republicans and 34 percent said they wouldn’t necessarily support the eventual nominee.
That’s overly neat; it’s not the case that a bunch of non-Republicans came out to vote and all swore to oppose Trump. But in each state, non-Republican voters were more likely to indicate that they weren’t committed to voting for the eventual nominee.
At least a fifth of all voters in each of the three states were non-Republicans who said they wouldn’t necessarily support the eventual nominee.
You might justifiably be wondering what difference it makes. If a fifth of primary voters won’t back Trump? Or more, given Republican hostility? That’s bad news!
Not really. Primaries are good at figuring out who parties want as their nominees. They are not great at telling us much about the general.
Consider this question: Who was more motivated to turn out in recent Republican primaries, people who support the guy who was going to win the nomination or people who wanted to make his win as painful as possible? Even Republicans who don’t support Trump had a motivation to vote that Republicans who do support him didn’t have.
In New York Times-Siena College polling released over the weekend, only 6 percent of Republicans said they planned to support President Biden in November — far lower than the vote Haley got in each of these states and lower than the percentage of Republicans that said they wouldn’t necessarily support the nominee. (Among Democrats, 7 percent told the Times they’d back Trump.)
The numbers here are relatively small. In Virginia, there were about three votes cast for Trump in 2020 for every vote in this year’s primary (as of this writing). There were about 14 times as many Trump votes in 2020 as non-Republican, won’t-commit-to-the nominee votes. Not that Trump won Virginia in 2020 anyway.
Those small numbers mean that an energized opposition can have a bigger effect. It seems likely that one reason primary polling keeps overestimating the margin between Trump and Haley in primary contests is that more non-Republicans show up to vote than pollsters are predicting. (This pre-New Hampshire poll, for example, was based on 55 percent of the vote coming from Republicans. Exit polls there suggest that only half the electorate identified themselves as members of the party.) Again because there was motivation for Trump opponents to turn out to send precisely the message that Haley now hopes to leverage.
There remain questions about how motivated voters will feel in the general election, certainly. But no one can plausibly argue that a third of Republicans won’t vote for Trump in November. It’s hard to even argue that the opposition from about a few hundred thousand non-Republicans to Trump’s nomination is significant either; millions of residents of these states voted against him four years ago!
What we can say is that the nominating fight is over and that Trump won easily. We’ll see what happens next.
Scott Clement contributed to this report.