The race for the Republican presidential nomination in 2024 remains a two-person affair, though how long it will remain so is in question after former President Donald Trump defeated former South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley in her own state Saturday by a margin of 59.8% to 39.5%.
Trump has won all five primaries and caucuses held so far, and between now and March 5, an additional 20 U.S. states and territories will hold their nominating contests. Those include the delegate-rich states of California and Texas, which makes it possible, even likely, that by the end of the first week of next month, Trump will have amassed an all but insurmountable lead.
Haley, however, has indicated that she intends to remain in the race at least through next Tuesday’s contests, continuing her attacks on the former president, who is currently facing 91 separate criminal charges in four different jurisdictions, even as he attempts to retake the White House in November.
“I'm a woman of my word,” Haley told a crowd in Charleston, South Carolina, after the vote there. “I'm not giving up this fight when a majority of Americans disapprove of both Donald Trump and [President] Joe Biden."
She said that the remaining states “have the right to a real choice, not a Soviet-style election with only one candidate. And I have a duty to give them that choice.”
Money matters
“What determines whether she can continue or not is basically whether people continue to give her money, so she can afford to campaign,” John Mark Hansen, a professor of political science at the University of Chicago, told VOA.
After her loss in South Carolina, though, Haley lost at least one significant financial backer. Americans for Prosperity, a political advocacy organization funded by conservative billionaire Charles Koch, announced Sunday that it would no longer fund her campaign.
“Nikki Haley has shown us again and again that we made the right decision in supporting her candidacy and she continues to have our strong endorsement,” AFP President Emily Seidel wrote in a public statement announcing the withdrawal of support. “But given the challenges in the primary states ahead, we don’t believe any outside group can make a material difference to widen her path to victory.”
Hidden weakness
While Trump has won all five Republican nominating contests by wide margins, in looking toward the general election, experts told VOA that it is important to consider the context in which these votes have been taking place.
The race for the 2024 Republican presidential nod is unlike any nominating contest that a major U.S. political party has held in more than 100 years, in that a former president is on the ballot. Not since Grover Cleveland ran as the Democratic nominee in 1892 has a president who was voted out of office after one term — as Cleveland had been in 1888 — run again for his party’s nomination.
As the party’s most recent president and presidential nominee, Trump has run his campaign as though he were an actual incumbent. For example, he refused to debate any of the other candidates for the nomination, including Haley, maintaining that they should step aside and allow him to claim the nomination.
However, the former president’s vote totals in the nomination contests so far have been considerably lower than one might expect an incumbent to receive. His 60% showing in South Carolina was more than enough to drub Haley, but compared poorly with the 96% of votes that Joe Biden received from the state’s Democratic voters on the same night.
Republican discontent
Grant Reeher, director for the Campbell Public Affairs Institute and a professor of political science at Syracuse University, told VOA that Trump’s numbers suggest significant gaps in his support among Republican voters.
“Even among the Republican primary voters, there are 40% of the people in that state who preferred Haley to Trump,” he said. “So, bearing in mind that Trump is a former president, has four years of a presidential record, lost a pretty close election in 2020 — despite all those things — there's a significant chunk of the Republican Party that is not happy with him.
“That could suggest some weakness in his support and certainly has some ramifications for how he's likely to do in a general election,” Reeher said. “He's handily winning the nomination, but there are clear indications that there are cracks in the armor when we're thinking about how he might do in a general election.”
Will voters come around?
Hansen of the University of Chicago agreed that if Trump is judged by the standards of an incumbent president, his showings in the primaries have been unimpressive. He added, however, that when the time comes for the general election, he expects that many of the Republicans currently expressing a preference for a different candidate will ultimately vote for the party’s nominee.
“I would say most will come around,” said Hansen. “That's kind of the nature of partisanship. Once the nominee has been determined, the question is no longer 'Who would I rather see as president among the people who more or less share views with me?' It's 'Do I want the guy from my party? Or do I want the guy from the other party?' ”
Still, he said, given the closeness of the past two presidential elections, even bleeding a little of his party’s support could be a major problem for Trump in November.
“There is a not insignificant fraction of the party that is not going to reconcile with Trump,” he said. “And we're in a situation now where the parties are so evenly matched at the national level, that that can matter. It can matter if they just decide they'll sit the whole thing out. Or it can matter if they decide, as many did in 2020, that if the alternative is Trump, they’re going to vote for a Democrat for the first time in their life.”
