… except it’s not.
It’s not the near-equivalent of voting for Trump?
OK, mathematically, it’s half a vote for Trump and half for Biden.
But if you’re truly opposed to Trump, your most effective strategy is to vote for the candidate most likely to beat him.
And if you’re a former congressman and well-respected Republican in your state, you could really hurt Trump by influencing lots of other character-prioritizing Republicans to do the same.
Or you could be a chickenshit like Paul Ryan and throw your vote away while pretending to uphold some moral standard.
Nikki Haley received over 20% of the vote in Indiana’s primary yesterday. If I worked for the Trump campaign that number would keep me up at night.
Too many observers are giving these repeated results too little credence. Even in the battleground states, Trump has to come from behind based on 2020 vote counts (2024 polling be damned). Every bit of support Trump loses gives Biden that much more breathing room, making it safer for Biden to lose a little support himself.
I just don’t think protest votes in a primary are a useful indicator of what these voters will do in the general election. For some, it can be an odd justification for voting for Trump: “Sure, I don’t like Trump. Voted against him in the primary in fact. But when it came down to him or Biden, I had to stick with my party.”
Right, the number of Republicans who voted for Haley in the meaningless primary but won’t vote for Trump is statistically insignificant.
Don’t agree, but we’ll see in six months. A single percent of defecting Republican support would be plenty significant.
Yes a single percentage point would be significant. I don’t think it’ll be close to that.
I don’t think that’s the takeaway here. I’ve read articles showing that Trump has significantly underperformed against certain poll projections (against Haley), which suggests there’s something odd in the polling. Not deliberate, just odd and unexplained.
Combine that with the supposed neck-and-neck Biden/Trump polls in swing states. If the polls are suspect to begin with, what are we to make of the fact that a significant percentage of Republicans are tired of Trump in deep red states?
Certainly not that that state might break for Biden. But if Indiana Republicans in notable numbers have grown weary of Trump, what does that mean in swing states? Maybe nothing, but I think it’s very suggestive of support that is getting at least a bit termite-ridden.
Nobody’s polling the primaries anymore because they don’t matter, but the final South Carolina polls pretty much nailed it. Trump’s final polling average there was 61.6% and he got 59.8%.
Yeah, I get that, and my memory grows worse by the day, but my recollection is that more than one of the early primaries showed a significant variance between poll projections and Trump’s actual performance. I’ll see if I can dig something up.
Thanks, guys!
Yes, it would be better if Ryan said he would vote for Biden, but I’ll take what he’s been willing to give.
Haley getting protest votes this far out is not, I would intuit, meaningless. Think about it. Those people had to say to themselves, “Trump has this locked up, so one would think there’s no point in voting in the primary at all, but I’m going to vote for Haley anyway.” Is there any reason to do so without some emotion–some oomf–behind it?
And yes, Trump has underperformed multiple polls in the primary race, sometimes by wide margins. Michigan is just one example:
Thanks for that cite. That’s the type of commentary I recalled.
His son is gonna be a delegate in Florida, so he’s got that going for him, which is nice.
I was hoping Barron wouldn’t become an explicit enabler of his scumbag father. Too bad for that lad!
Btw, here is a recent (two weeks ago) and interesting YouTube video with people who have been in the discussion above: Brian Karem (former White House correspondent who worked with Trump) and Dr. John Gartner, dementia specialist (also Chip Franklin, whom I don’t know, and the actor Tom Arnold).
Karem repeats his assertion that he doesn’t think Trump will be on the ballot in November. I.e., what I’ve been saying this whole thread.
I don’t know; I think it’s showing they’re actually pretty motivated. In a society where voting turnout is often quite low, they’re showing up to a vote that already has a forgone conclusion. Trump will win the nomination at this point, unless he drops dead. So why drag your ass to the voting both just to put in a protest vote, even though you’re planning to vote Trump in the general anyways?
Anyone putting in a non-Trump vote at this stage seems pretty committed to not voting for Trump, to me at least. I don’t expect they’ll vote Biden, but I suspect a lot of them will just sit it out. And even a few thousand of such people in each swing state could doom Trump’s chances.
I agree that the percentage of Haley votes is meaningful, but I would think that the incentives would work stronger the other way - namely that since Trump has already locked the nomination, voting for Trump in the primary is even more meaningless than the already-meaningless protest message one could send for Haley. So I would think that the amount of strong anti-trump feeling is large, but smaller than the primary results would indicate.
Same.
It’s be hilarious if he became a faithless delegate, and voted for Haley, or someone else. I couldn’t imagine a more dramatic way of telling your asshole dad that you’re abandoning him completely.