Haley Is Exposing Trump's Electoral Weakness

The numbers from South Carolina are bad for Trump. They're also part of a pattern.

(JEFF KOWALSKY/AFP via Getty Images)

1. South Cackilacky

I’ve been taking the under on Nikki Haley for several weeks now and I’ve been wrong every time. So I looked under the hood on the South Carolina results and what I see is a signal that Trump is weaker than he looks.

Let’s start with the exit polls.

Haley kept it close: independent voters made up 22 percent of the electorate and she won them 62-37. South Carolina is an open primary, so this was a case of independents showing up to vote against Trump in a meaningless contest. That’s bad news for him.

Among people who thought the economy was either “good” (Haley +73) or “not so good” (Haley +1) Haley fought Trump to better than a draw.

This matters because Biden’s theory of the case is that the economy is good and people are going to recognize that. If Biden can even get voters to “ehhh, the economy is not so good,” suddenly voters are much less receptive to Trump.

Haley beat Trump by +9 with voters with a college degree. That’s expected, but still a point of weakness.

Not expected: Among married Republicans Trump was only +3. In recent elections, married voters have been a huge area of strength for Republicans—Trump was +7 among marrieds in 2020. South Carolina shows us that half of a core Republican bloc is turning out to vote against Trump even when his opponent has no chance of winning. Not great for him.

But it keeps getting worse: Nearly a third of the voters said that Trump isn’t fit to serve as president and Haley won them by Saddam Hussein numbers.

Last data point, which is something I’ve been fixated on since I did The Focus Group a couple weeks ago: Among voters who believe that Trump lost in 2020, his numbers are ghastly.

Important to note: 36 percent of the electorate said that yes, Biden won fair and square. And with those people, Haley was +64.¹

I am growing convinced that forcing Trump to claim that he actually won in 2020—and belaboring that point over and over and over again—is a key to victory in 2024. When people see Trump lying about something they know isn’t true, it pits him against them, makes the relationship between Trump and the voter adversarial. The voters say, “Wait a minute, this guy is trying to scam me.”

And Trump is trapped because he’s so committed to the Big Lie that he can’t back down from it now.

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Side note: Long time readers know that I don’t do hopeium here. I might be the most fatalistic guy at The Bulwark. But I’m realistic, too, and the numbers here demonstrate very clearly that Trump has a couple of giant soft spots that can be exploited with voters.

If you want measured analysis—not cheerleading, but not doomscrolling either—then you should be with us this election. We don’t play both-sides games. We don’t platform bad actors. We see the world clearly and we fight for liberal democracy. That’s the job.

Come ride with us.

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2. Underperformance

Trump’s softness isn’t new. I went back through the 2016 Republican primaries and looked at his vote-share versus his final polling average: