Trump won South Carolina, but...

The meme of the morning, being pushed by Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo and G. Elliott Morris at FiveThirtyEight is worth paying attention to.  “If Biden was winning only 60 percent, people would be freaking out,” wrote Morris last night, shortly after the polls closed.  “Face it:  This is a weak showing for Trump in South Carolina,” is the way Josh Marshall put it.

I agree with them both.  Trump has been the presumptive nominee of the Republican Party for months now.  All the pip-squeaks who took the Trump-less debate stage late last year deluding themselves that they had a shot at beating him – I’m talking to you, Ron “Landslide” DeSantis – are licking their wounds and sadly reviewing the piles of campaign bills they haven’t paid.

You’d think Trump would be romping to victory in these states that his campaign has been working and spending money in for nearly a year, but 40 percent of Republicans in South Carolina voted against Trump and for Haley, knowing that she has no real chance at the nomination.

In New Hampshire, 43 percent of Republicans voted against Trump, and Haley and DeSantis combined to take 40.3 percent of Republicans away from Trump in Iowa.

The Iowa and South Carolina numbers are real stinkers.  Trump had held more rallies in Iowa than the state has tractors, and his campaign had been preparing, studying caucus rules and gathering supporters, for nearly a year.  South Carolina is a deep south red hats and pickup truck Trump state, flat out.  Despite having been governor of the state, Haley isn’t particularly loved there.  Trump should have easily walked away with well north of 70 percent.

The number in South Carolina should be especially worrisome to Trump when you look at who turned out to vote in the primary.  An NBC poll before the primaries began showed that 69 percent of those planning to vote in Republican primaries or caucuses are not college graduates.  That figure alone should be running chills down Republican spines, because the low-education vote is not a growth area among likely voters in the future.  Voters without college educations are “both a growing presence in the party and Trump’s main source of strength,” according to the Wall Street Journal.  But even among his strongest supporters, Trump didn’t exactly shine:  he won 71 percent of that non-college educated vote yesterday in South Carolina, and only about 60 percent in New Hampshire and Iowa.  That means a significant percentage of voters who are supposed to be his strongest supporters voted for someone else in those three primaries.

The group that should give Trump the biggest nightmare are independents.  According to APVoteCast, only a third of independents backed Trump in South Carolina, while Haley picked up 53 percent of them.  It was worse for Trump in New Hampshire, where Haley took 67 percent of independents, compared to Trump’s 30 percent.

So what’s going to happen with all these Republicans who voted against Trump in Iowa, New Hampshire and now South Carolina?  Yesterday, 16 percent of people who voted against Trump told exit pollsters that they “would be so disappointed if Trump was the nominee that they would not back him in November,” the Wall Street Journal found.  Twenty percent of Republicans in New Hampshire and 15 percent in Iowa said they would not vote for Trump if he is the nominee. 

The New York Times interviewed nearly 40 people in South Carolina after they cast votes for Haley and asked which way they would vote in November if Trump is the nominee.  Most of them, according to the Times, fell into what pollsters are calling the “double-haters” group, voters who don’t like either Trump or Biden.  But among the interviewees, only about half told the Times that they stick with Trump in November, “while expressing varying degrees of discomfort.”

Think about that for a moment.  That leaves the other half who say they won’t vote for Trump, giving reasons like the Jan. 6 insurrection and his disrespect of the military.  But some of these voters told the Times they couldn’t vote for Biden because the Democrats “are worse,” indicating they may just sit out the election if Trump and Biden are the nominees.

Trump may have won the primary in South Carolina, but down in the weeds of the vote, he has some real problems.  Haley is staying in the race at least through Super Tuesday coming up on March 5.  The Trump campaign announced that after last night’s South Carolina results, their strategy for dealing with Nikki will be to ignore her. In terms of getting the Republican nomination, that’ll work for Trump.  Haley won’t be a factor from now on.

But her voters will, and Trump will ignore them at his peril.