Trump’s Numbers Don’t Add Up
He did not ‘trounce’, ‘crush’, or ‘destroy’ Nikki Haley
The words in quotes above are all from headlines in mainstream media and to say they are misleading is an understatement. Yes, he won in South Carolina and won definitively by 60% to Haley’s 40%, but when you look at those numbers the story is not of a crushing win.
Don’t get me wrong, he will probably get the Republican nomination, barring a miracle. But Haley’s 40% in an extremely conservative Trump loving state is a scary number if you are a Republican campaign strategist because it is a significant percentage of the Republican vote and an indication that a lot of Republicans are not too happy with their guy.
In the context of expectations, Trump did not do that well in a state that he should have owned. The question now is, how many of those dissatisfied Republicans will vote against Trump in the general election? Those numbers were very low in 2020 but they are estimated to be triple this time around, from an estimated 6% in 2020 to 18% this year.
Bear in mind that it is only February and we have endless months of watching Trump in court, Trump struggling to raise money for both legal bills and fines, and Trump increasingly appearing to show signs of early onset dementia, as he substitutes words with nonsense in his…
