Haley’s eye-popping support raises questions for Trump – The Hill
The Big Story
Indiana’s presidential primaries, expected to be a sleepy affair on Tuesday, instead became the latest groundswell in the protest vote against Donald Trump, as former rival Nikki Haley racked up more than 128,000 votes.
© Illustration / Samantha Wong; Greg Nash; and Getty Images
Trump handily beat Haley in the Hoosier State — but he only notched just over three-fourths of the vote in the GOP primary.
In Marion County alone, the highest populated county in the state and includes Indianapolis, Haley earned 35 percent of the vote share, underscoring the staunch refusal among a notable cohort of Republicans to coalesce around Trump as their presidential candidate.
Those numbers are particularly eye-popping, given that Haley dropped out two months ago, and as Trump has earned enough delegates to win the GOP nomination.
Other GOP primaries in states like Michigan, Arizona, and Pennsylvania have also shown warning signs for Trump, who saw marked portions of the GOP electorate defect for Haley.
Rewind the tape: Haley told her supporters after dropping out following the Super Tuesday primaries in March that “it is now up to Donald Trump to earn the votes of those in our party and beyond it who did not support him.”
Yet Indiana’s GOP primary shows he’s failed to make headway with many of her supporters.
At the same time, President Biden is not without his own concerns heading into November as protest votes around his handling of the Israel-Hamas war have bedeviled the president in states like Michigan, Minnesota and Wisconsin, some of which are critical battleground states Biden will need to clinch in order to prevail this fall.
The looming question remains which candidates sees those same skeptical voters come home to their party in November, and which one bleeds more support.
The next set of primaries to watch for will be next Tuesday. They include: Maryland, Nebraska and West Virginia.
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