Trump In The Primaries: A Tour De Force

Haley In Those Same Primaries: A Tour De Farce

The Republican primaries and caucuses to date have made one thing abundantly clear: The GOP rank and file voters want Donald Trump as their candidate in the fall, and as President come next January. There is not much room for lingering doubts about this, especially after the GOP caucuses held on Saturday, all of which were handily won by Donald Trump.

Donald Trump’s dominance in the GOP contest is such that he made a clean sweep of the 125 delegates at issue in the weekend caucuses. Nikki Haley did not get a single vote in Missouri, only received 36 votes in Michigan, and had her best night in Idaho, where she carried a whopping 3,457 votes, or 13.8% of the vote total—not enough for any delgates.

The Republican Party is Donald Trump’s party. It is no one else’s party.

It is not even the Republican donors party — a reality that Nikki Haley is not grasping, and which could be the most significant outcome of the 2024 election cycle.

There is a perverse irony in looking at the polling data for many of Trump’s latest victories—namely, there is a distinct lack of polling data, and almost no polling history.

RealClearPolitics did not even report on any polls in Idaho.

FiveThirtyEight shows a single poll for the general election in the fall, but none for the primary.

Even the Michigan polling was sparse, with fewer than 10 polls conducted by all polling firms since last summer.

FiveThirtyEight reports a whopping five polls in Missouri, all by Morning Consult, with the latest one being nearly a month old.

RealClearPolitics only bothers to carry the last Morning Consult Poll for Missouri.

How dominant is Trump among Republican voters? So dominant that the polling firms are apparently seeing little point in conducting any polls. Trump is going to win the Republican nomination in the most dominant performance in any race since Secretariat won the Belmont Stakes in 1973¹.

Arguably, Donald Trump erased any concern from his “underperformance” inthe Michigan primary with his domination of the Michigan caucus. Having captured over 97% of the caucus vote to go with his 68% of the primary vote in that state, as well as capturing 100% of the caucus vote in Missouri and 84% of the caucus vote in Idaho.

There is, I suspect, a bit of humor to be found in the fact that Nikki Haley had her best performance of the weekend in Idaho, a state with the least number of delegates in play. Haley lost the least badly in the state with the least. This is not a sign of a serious campaign.

There is only one reason why Nikki Haley is still able to continue her campaign: The usual cadre of Republican deep pocket donors are continuing to refill her campaign coffers, even as Donald Trump has expressed more than a little displeasure at such efforts by the donor class.

Both Nikki Haley and the corporate media are attempting to make this into a campaign issue by criticizing Donald Trump and calling him out for his “threat”.

When Republican rival Nikki Haley refused to exit the 2024 presidential race after losing the New Hampshire primary, Donald Trump came after her. His move: Put a chokehold on her money.

Anyone who gave Haley a dime, the former president warned, would be "permanently barred from the MAGA camp."

But so far, those donors have refused to kowtow to the GOP front-runner’s demands, which they say exemplifies why Republicans should go in a different direction.

Instead, donors continue refilling Haley’s coffers, allowing her to spend heavily in South Carolina ahead of the state’s contest Saturday.

"Every time (Trump) opens his mouth, he offends someone," said Munir Lalani, a Haley donor and Pakistani immigrant who attended a fundraiser for Haley in Dallas last Thursday.

Lalani, a registered Republican who voted for Trump in 2016, and his wife have forked over $30,000 combined to the Haley campaign and two pro-Haley groups in 2023, according to Federal Election Commission records.

Haley last week took this stance even farther, claiming that Donald Trump was “pushing people out” of the party.

Campaigning in North Carolina Saturday, Republican Presidential candidate Nikki Haley criticized former president Donald Trump’s campaign for threatening those who don’t vote for him in the Washington, D.C., primary election.

“That’s not how you win an election,” Haley told reporters after a rally in Raleigh. “This is about candidates wanting people to come into their fold, not threatening them, not pushing them out of their club. Is that what we want as a leader? The majority of these people will tell you no, they’re done with that.”

Haley was responding to a Donald Trump campaign official who told POLITICO Friday that the campaign would be tracking who votes in the Washington, D.C., presidential primary. And lobbyists who don’t vote won’t gain access to Trump if he returns to the White House.

“If you don’t bother voting, don’t bother calling,” the campaign official said.

Given how badly Haley lost Michigan, Idaho, and Missouri, her comments about not winning elections have obviously not aged at all well.

But there is another dimension to Haley’s rhetoric and the corporate media coverage that deserves mention:

Donald Trump’s Truth Social posting “threatening” Nikki Haley’s “donors” is unambiguously targeted at the professional political class of consultants, fundraisers, and other hangers-on. There is little doubt that cadre of political influencers is the source of the majority of Nikki Haley’s funding—it has been reported before, and was a point of attack for both Ron DeSantis and Vivek Ramaswamy in the fourth GOP debate in December.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and Vivek Ramaswamy both attacked Nikki Haley’s economic views and financial ties in the fourth Republican primary debate in Tuscaloosa, Alabama.

Haley’s surge in polls has sparked a recent wave of donations from Wall Street veterans and other high-profile donors. Haley raised over $500,000 on Monday at a glitzy New York City penthouse event packed with financial heavies, CNBC reported.

“Nikki will cave to those big donors when it counts,” DeSantis said early in the debate.

It is these mega-donors, from Wall Street and elsewhere that Donald Trump “threatened” back in January.

We should also not lose sight of the fact that major Democratic donors have also been contributing lavishly to Haley’s campaign.

Reid Hoffman, the co-founder of LinkedIn and a prominent Democrat donor, says he has donated to a super PAC supporting Republican presidential contender Nikki Haley because the ongoing GOP primary fight represents the first of just two opportunities to stop Donald Trump from winning the White House again.

In a post on LinkedIn, Hoffman said he will “enthusiastically vote” for President Joe Biden next November, but he noted his “first priority is American democracy and the integrity of our legal system.”

“That means my first priority is to defeat Trump, and the primary is the first of two chances to do so,” he added.

Hoffman has donated $250,000 to a pro-Haley super PAC, the SFA Fund, his political adviser Dmitri Mehlhorn confirmed to CNN.

Nikki Haley has responded to Trump’s social media “threat” by claiming that Donald Trump brings division rather than unity to the GOP:

Haley argued that it’s a pattern of behavior for Trump, and it turns off voters.

“Donald Trump can say that we’re unified,” she told reporters. “This crowd will tell you there’s no unity with Donald Trump. All they hear are threats and the fact that he bars them from being a part of his club.”

Haley has ramped up her rhetoric against Trump in the weeks leading up to Super Tuesday, and she continued that trend in Raleigh and in Charlotte the night before.

Donald Trump made that Truth Social posting on January 24 of this year. Since then, Trump has won every GOP primary and caucus that has been held.

Nikki Haley might want to look closely at the election results thus far. Her claim that voters are “turned off” by Trump’s rhetoric is not squaring at all with Trump’s election wins. With record voter turnout in New Hampshire and in South Carolina, the one thing Donald Trump’s rhetoric is not doing is discouraging voters from casting their ballot for him.

If anything, it is this rhetorical divide between Donald Trump and Nikki Haley that is fueling his massive margins of victory over her. Haley might not realize it, but Donald Trump and her prior opponents in the GOP debates this election cycle succeeded in branding her as the candidate of the monied elites—the professional political donor class that many feel buy access and privilege with their donations.

What Donald Trump is doing is telling this donor class that if they want to continue to be a part of the Republican Party after Trump wins the election this fall they need to embrace Donald Trump today, and embrace Trump’s MAGA movement today. Donald Trump is at least striking a pose of almost pure populism—voters are perceiving him as the champion of “the little guy”, and Haley is the champion of the monied elites.

Dennis Milosch, 87, a Trump supporter, said the former president's dominating win on Saturday underscored how the party has been transformed from one aligned with big business to one focused on the working class.

"Wherever he goes, whatever he does, he pays attention to, responds to, the average person," Milosch said.

Donald Trump is remaking the Republican Party as a populist party of “the average person”. Nikki Haley’s shmoozing with the donor class not only ignores this very obvious trend from the primary voting patterns, but it is arguably fueling their anger at her and amplifying their support for Donald Trump.

Nikki Haley loses because the monied elites may have the funds to throw at her campaign, but it is all the “average people” who have the votes to secure for Donald Trump the GOP nomination. And the “average people” are quite pleased that Donald Trump says he wants to eject all the cynical “power brokers” and “donors” who arguably try to buy access.

Will Trump’s pro-populist purge of the GOP donor class win him the nomination? At this juncture, the odds are very much in his favor.

Will Trump’s pro-populist purge of the GOP donor class win him enough crossover appeal and independent voter appeal to win the general election in November? It is far too early to say for certain, but it is hardly an impossibility.

1. There are few words that will do Secretariat’s performance in the third of the Triple Crown horse races justice. One has to watch it to appreciate just how completely he dominated the field that year. No horse since has even come close to that crushing a victory—and the race has rightly become a metaphor for unbelievable dominance ever since.