After his historic victory in the Iowa caucuses last week, Donald Trump’s win in New Hampshire on Tuesday highlights for the second time how he has dominated the GOP nominating contest by bringing together a coalition of Republicans that his rivals have been unable to meaningfully tap into.
Here’s what we know about Trump’s 2024 primary coalition so far, according to a statistical model created by The Washington Post that uses town-level results from 2016 and 2024, as well as demographic data, to determine the likely share of voters a 2024 candidate picked up.
Trump’s biggest boost in New Hampshire came from areas that helped power Republican Sen. Ted Cruz’s third-place finish in 2016, according to The Post’s model. The former president drew about 90 percent of Cruz’s support — much of it coming from the state’s rural areas — showing how Trump has won over conservatives who were skeptical of him during his first presidential bid.
Notably, a similar trend emerged in last week’s Iowa caucuses, where Trump prevailed in the state’s evangelical Christian strongholds and rural areas that broke for Cruz eight years ago.
Trump did lose some of his 2016 base to his lone major opponent, former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley. But similar to what we saw in Iowa, his opponents have been unable to make a serious dent in his support. About 75 percent stuck with Trump, while just 20 percent defected to Haley.
Trump was weakest among more moderate voting blocs of the GOP, but he still managed to siphon some support from the base that split among former Florida governor Jeb Bush, Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) and then-New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie in 2016. He even got almost a quarter of the base that propelled then-Ohio Gov. John Kasich to a second-place finish that year.
In total, Trump picked up more than a third of the moderate vote from 2016, a critical chunk of the base that Haley needed to carry if she was going to overtake him. He also won a majority of support from the handful of candidates who finished in the low single digits in New Hampshire eight years ago.
Haley’s 2024 primary coalition, on the other hand, was much smaller than Trump’s and almost exclusively driven by parts of the state where voters are more likely to hold college degrees. This was also the case in Iowa.
New Hampshire was Haley’s best chance at a close race with Trump based on current polling. To win, she needed to do two things: consolidate the support from the fractured 2016 moderate lane while also making at least some modest inroads among more conservative voters.
She proved unable to do either on Tuesday.
Haley performed well with Kasich’s 2016 base, according to The Post’s model, winning about three-quarters of this bloc. But Haley’s overall 43 percent finish on Tuesday was slightly less than the sum of Kasich, Bush, Rubio and Christie’s margins eight years ago. Haley also took only a sliver of Cruz’s support from 2016, reflecting her struggle to win over other parts of the party, especially more conservative voters.
Despite not having a clear path forward, Haley has vowed to keep fighting for the nomination. “This race is far from over,” she said.
The Post used current and historical voting data from 237 cities, townships, hamlets and other Census-designated places in New Hampshire, as well as demographic data, to model how the state’s Republican electorate shifted between 2016 and 2024. Data is from the Associated Press and the American Community Survey.