Washington:
She abandoned her White House ambitions two months ago, but Nikki Haley is still capturing a significant share of the vote in the presidential primaries — underscoring the continued refusal of a significant bloc of Republicans to rally behind Donald Trump.
In his latest victory over Haley in Indiana on Tuesday, the polarizing tycoon came away with 460,000 votes but received only 78 percent support, a disappointing figure for a former president who is essentially seen as an incumbent.
In Marion County alone, the most populous part of the state that includes Indianapolis, Haley won 35 percent — an especially sobering result for Trump, considering his rival withdrew after the “Super Tuesday” primaries on 5 March.
“It's hard to imagine Republican voters in deep-red Indiana being so passionate about Haley's non-candidacy,” Kaivan Shroff, a strategist for Hillary Clinton's 2016 election campaign, told AFP.
“What is more likely is that this signals a protest vote against Trump. These voters want to make it clear that they are not happy with the Republican candidate and they are humiliating Trump in these primaries to prove it.”
She would probably disapprove of this allusion, but the persistence of the Haley vote has prompted several US media outlets to frame her continued presence at the primary long after the curtain fell as a “zombie campaign.”
She has not endorsed the 77-year-old former president, telling supporters after dropping out that “it is now up to Donald Trump to earn the votes of those in our party and beyond who did not support him.”
Raids
But Trump has failed to leverage Haley's moderate support, and she has continued to capture a small but significant vote share ahead of the Republican nominating convention in July.
In a comfortable majority of the states and territories that have played a role in the Republican primaries so far, Trump has carried more than a fifth of the electorate.
He lost Vermont and Washington DC outright, and his vote share in another eight contests was less than two-thirds, ahead of the November elections that will be fought on the margins, with almost every vote likely to count in many districts.
Barring a major, campaign-killing convulsion for Trump, Haley has no chance of reviving her candidacy.
But the primaries have exposed Trump's main flaw: his lack of appeal among the moderates, independents and voters with the college degrees he will need to defeat President Joe Biden.
The Biden campaign — wary of its own problems with a coalition of progressives angry about the president's support for Israel's war against Hamas in Gaza — is reaching across the aisle.
Last month, it released a TV spot targeting suburban battleground states with the message: “If you voted for Nikki Haley, Donald Trump doesn't want your vote.”
Scorched earth rhetoric
Trump has shown little sign of moving toward the center since emerging as the Republican presidential nominee, and his increasingly extreme scorched-earth rhetoric at his campaign rallies seems unlikely to win over Haley's supporters.
“There's a lot of talk about how Biden's coalition is threatened by his support for Israel, but not enough about the distaste for Trump among a significant number of Republicans,” said Donald Nieman, a political analyst and professor of history at Binghamton University in New York . stands.
“That disgust — it's better to call it disgust — because Trump and his antics significantly hurt Republicans in the 2022 midterms, and it's becoming the unreported story of 2024.”
Of course, it's not all bad news for Trump.
Moderate conservative publication The Bulwark tempered Democratic delight over the Indiana results in an editorial Wednesday, noting that Trump has been slightly ahead in polling averages for months, and that Biden's effort to narrow the gap has stalled somewhat has come.
Meanwhile, Nicholas Higgins, a political science professor at North Greenville University in South Carolina, cautioned against reading too much into the “open” primary in Indiana, where non-Republicans were allowed to vote.
“This will become more apparent in the next two weeks as Maryland and Kentucky hold closed Republican primaries,” he said.
“If Haley continues to get 15 to 20 percent of the vote in those closed primaries, that's an indication that Trump has a problem in the Republican base.”
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by Our staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)