Hey guys – guess what? All of a sudden, the GOP primary contest is beginning to get interesting because Trump’s tidal wave of support in New Hampshire is beginning to crash down. For the first time since mid-April, when the first polls reported by RCP had Trump with a lead of less than 20 points over DeSantis and the rest of the field, he’s down to slightly less than 14 points against Haley, 43% to 29.3%.
Trump hasn’t been at 43% since August, with a high point of 47.6% reached on November 13, a date at which Haley was at 15.5%. Her poll numbers have doubled since that date and now she’s not just surging by taking votes away from the collapse of the DeSantis campaign, but she’s beginning to pull support directly away from Trump as well.
Where Haley’s support is not quite as strong as the numbers alone seem to suggest, unfortunately, is a breakdown of the ages of her supporters versus the ages of the poll respondents who still support Trump. The latest poll came out today from CNN, and for the first time, a poll has Haley as he top pick by more than 30%.
But if you go into the details of the poll itself, you find that Haley’s greatest strength is among young voters between 18 to 34, while Trump is still stronger in all the other age groups. Except of the four age groups who comprise the entire respondent pool, it’s the youngest group which is usually the group that doesn’t show up at the polls.
For all the talk about how abortion is going to be a major factor in determining the female GOP vote, at least in New Hampshire, Trump has managed to duck this issue entirely because his support among female voters is still slightly higher than the numbers going for Haley on the question of reproductive rights.
Back in 2016, the last time there was a contested GOP primary in New Hampshire, Trump won with 35% of the vote. But that year there were four other candidates, each of whom received between 15% and 10% of the vote. With the collapse this time around of DeSantis, the New Hampshire GOP primary race is turning into a two-person show, which might make it easier for Haley to close the current gap between herself and Trump.
Nationally, Trump still has more than 60% of the votes in all the GOP national polls. But all this number indicates is that the primary campaign is just getting started and Haley, in particular, isn’t yet that well known outside of the earliest voting states. On the other hand, Haley going from 18% to 30% in slightly more than a week is the fastest surge of any candidate in any state since RCP started publishing polls back in April of last year.
And by the way, I notice that Haley’s inability to remember that the Civil War was fought over slavery has kind of slipped away as a media issue, if only because Trump’s comment about how he could have ‘negotiated’ an end to the Civil War before it began is so fucking dumb that the media will now give Haley a pass on what she doesn’t know about the history of the United States.
Of course, let’s not forget that Trump, after all, is the guy who developed the ‘art of the deal.’ And when you’re Donald Trump, it really doesn’t matter what you say about anything anyway. The media long ago realized that judging Trump based on whether anything he says is even remotely true is a dead end.
But talking about dead ends, if Haley adds another 8 points to her numbers and Trump sees 6 points slip away over what is now exactly the two weeks until the New Hampshire primary date, all of a sudden, an eight-year, seven-month and one week presence in national politics may come to an end.
Couldn’t happen to a….
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