Feb.28

electoral-vote.com

Dem 51

   

GOP 49

One Last Look at South Carolina

South Carolina Republicans cast their ballots on Saturday, which kinda means that election is old news. However, 3 days is enough time to really crunch some data, and there are some interesting things to note:

• Other exit polls we mentioned found that 50% of Haley voters said they would not vote for Trump in the general election. Fox has now shared their exit polling, and they found that 60% of Haley voters won't vote for Trump. There's clearly a real phenomenon here. Some of those voters are Democrats who crossed over, others will ultimately change their minds and vote for Trump, but clearly some of Haley's rather sizable voter base is NeverTrump. And while that won't matter in South Carolina, it will certainly matter in swing states. To take Michigan as an example, if just one Haley voter in five does not vote for Trump, then that's almost certainly going to cost him the state, even if Arab-American and Muslim voters are angry with Joe Biden.
  
  
• To slice and dice that another way, as former Trump White House official (and now Trump apostate) Alyssa Farah Griffin puts it, a sizable majority of the country does not want Trump as president. That is not going to be easy to overcome, even up against a Democrat who is himself unpopular with the voting public. Griffin thinks this problem is serious enough that the Trump campaign and the RNC should be treating it as a "five-alarm fire," even though they are not doing so.
  
  
• CNN's exit polling found that only 5% of people who voted in the South Carolina primary were registered Democrats. So most of Haley's support is coming from actual Republicans, and not ratfu**ers. To put a finer point on it, if you randomly selected 40 people who voted for Haley, you'd likely end up with roughly 21 Republicans, 14 independents and 5 Democrats. Trump doesn't need those Democrats, but he does need the Republicans and most of the independents.
  
  
• CNN also learned that Trump voters are vastly more likely (by 30+ points) to rate immigration as their top issue. Put another way, Joe Biden would certainly like to do something about the southern border. But if he can't get it done, the voters he's really going to anger are largely the ones who aren't going to vote for him anyhow.
  
  
• Yet another interesting thing from CNN's exit polls is that 87% of Trump voters think he's mentally fit to serve as president, while a staggering 97% of Haley voters think he isn't. So, hammering on his mental fitness would appear to be a winning strategy, particularly if there are more "is that E. Jean Carroll or is that my wife?" incidents.
  
  
• Also, 82% of Haley voters think Biden won in 2020, whereas only 18% of Trump voters think that. Writing for The Bulwark, Jonathan Last argues that the lesson here, for the Biden campaign, is to goad Trump into re-living the "theft" of the 2020 election, over and over, because that sort of talk drives voters out of Trump's arms and into the arms of his opponents.

It's just one election, of course, and an election that only involved voters from one side of the political aisle in a medium-sized, not entirely representative state. That said, the numbers do suggest that the Trump campaign has weaknesses that it's not addressing (and that it's arguably making worse by feeding so much red meat to the base). They also suggest a viable strategy for Joe Biden of hammering on Trump's mental fitness and getting him to keep relitigating 2020. Of course, the Biden campaign has far better data than we do (or CNN does, or Fox does). And it also has people whose job it is to parse what the data really means. So, you can bet the President knows all of these things. Trump could, and should, know all of these things, too, but he tends to be more of a shoot-from-the-hip, I-don't-need-no-pointy-headed-number-cruncher-to-tell-me-what-to-do kind of candidate. (Z)