The results on Indiana’s Republican primary on Tuesday evening showed Donald Trump winning with 78% of the vote and taking all of the state’s 58 delegates. That result may sound good, but Trump is running essentially unopposed. The last serious candidate other than Trump, former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, officially dropped out of the race over two months ago.
Despite dropping out well before early voting in Indiana began, Haley still managed to collect over 21% of the vote. That’s not a testimony to the stubbornness of Haley fans, it’s a signal that there are a significant number of Republicans who won’t vote for Trump even when the only alternative is a candidate who is already gone.
Despite recent national polls in which Trump appears to be performing well, results like those in Indiana this week indicate that there is a significant lack of support for Trump within the Republican Party. Though it’s easy and sometimes facile to make the comparison, if President Joe Biden was losing 20% of Democrats to a protest vote in state after state, it would be the leading story in the national news.
Why isn’t the media asking about the anti-Trump protest vote?
In the same primary, President Joe Biden took 100% of the Democratic vote. It’s easy to say that’s because Biden faced no competition, but neither did Trump.
Results in Indiana are similar to results in other recent primaries. Only this time Trump can’t blame the issue on either early voters or mail-in ballots.
He also can’t blame the results on the primary being in a liberal state. Indiana is also not Washington, D.C., where Haley notched a victory just two days before dropping out. This is a deep red state where Trump won by 16% in 2020.
But the protest vote persists.
National polls may look at a few hundred voters and run them through models in an effort to determine how that limited sample represents hundreds of millions of voters. But the state primaries are by far the largest polls being taken at the moment. About 590,000 Republicans voted in the primary on Tuesday, and 127,000 of them placed their vote for Not Donald Trump.
No one voting for Haley on Tuesday believes that she is still in the race, or is somehow going to make a comeback. These votes are pure protest votes, meant to demonstrate a lack of support for Trump.
How these votes will translate into a general election isn’t clear. Voters in both parties have sometimes flirted with protest votes or third parties in the primary season, only to come drifting home when it came down to pulling the final lever. Some of these anyone-but-Trump Republicans may continue their protest into the general election by casting a vote for Robert Kennedy Jr., who is drawing more votes from Trump than Biden in some polls and has added right-wing Republicans to his conspiracy-centric campaign.
Biden has targeted some of these anti-Trump voters with special messaging from the campaign. The ad created for this push features Trump attacking both Haley and Haley voters, telling them they are not welcome in his movement. The ad ends with the pitch “Save America. Join us.”
In recent news, Republicans like former Attorney General Bill Barr have maintained that Trump belongs nowhere near the Oval Office … and then said they would vote for him. But there have also been a steady stream of Republicans at all levels who say they will not vote for Trump under any circumstance. That includes some of those who know him best.
There are a significant number of those who are voting against Trump in the primary, who also say they will not vote for him in the general election. In AP VoteCast surveys of Republicans, one-fifth of Iowa voters, one-quarter of South Carolina voters, and one-third of New Hampshire voters said they would refuse to vote for Trump in the fall.
That’s not a minor issue. That’s a huge cavity right in the middle of what should be Trump’s base. With numbers like that, Trump isn’t going to win swing states.
He might not even win Indiana.
