Everyone keeps claiming that Nikki Haley is “performing well” in primary states despite having already dropped out of the Republican race. That’s not true, and even a cursory look at 2016’s data, as well as understanding semi-open primaries, explains that.
Transcript (automatically generated):
Well, happy Monday morning. Monday, May 13, 2024. And the reason I’m doing it this way and embedding this audio for you instead of just writing down my thoughts as I usually do is, number one, I can tell that more and more people want video and more and more people want audio instead of just written word. So I’m catering to you lowest common denominator people. I’m not doing the video right now because it’s 08:00 in the morning, I’m in my bathrobe, and I haven’t brushed my hair. So you’re gonna have to deal with the audio for now.
The thing I wanted to jump on here and talk about really quickly, and I thought this was only going to be a little bit of a flash in the pan over the last week. But it turns out that a lot of people keep spreading this, let’s call it disinformation because it is. There are countless headlines that I’ve seen over the course of the last few days that say, oh, my goodness, Nikki Haley took 20% of the vote in Indiana in the primary. There are just so many mentions of these sorts of stories. The Wall Street Journal had one this morning which really got my goat up, which is why I’m here. I’m here even before having my first slice of raisin toast this morning. Those of you who follow me on X will understand that reference. Latest obsession of mine.
Newsweek has something, ABC has something, and I even got a message from somebody whose work I follow in the political sphere recently who said, oh, my goodness, you know, did you see all this Nikki Haley stuff? What do you make of it? I said, what are you talking about? They said, well, she got 20% of the vote in Indiana. That’s terrible for Donald Trump, isn’t it? I said, did you go back and look and compare and contrast that to the 2016 primary results? Now, obviously not the same situation, but did you even try to see what’s going on using historical precedent? And the answer was no. And I couldn’t believe it. Well, maybe I’m just that naive, but I couldn’t believe you just wouldn’t load up the Wikipedia page or the New York Times Indiana primary results page from May 3, 2016. But they hadn’t. They didn’t. And they didn’t want to sort of contextualize what happened in Indiana just a couple of days ago. That was May 10. We’re now May 13. Or rather, the last update to the results was May 10. We’re now May 13. And people are still talking about this.
So let me go through it very quickly but comprehensively so that people understand that Nikki Haley is not getting one-fifth of the vote in the Republican primary in Indiana.
Now, having said all of that, Nikki Haley got one-fifth of the vote in the Indiana presidential primary, the Republican primary. However, the things you need to understand for that number to make any sense are threefold. Number one, there’s nobody else in the race apart from her and Donald Trump there. You had a situation where it’s not an open, open primary, but it’s not a closed primary. It’s what they call a semi-closed, semi-open primary. And so you do have the ability for independents and Democrats to change their affiliation and cast their votes appropriately. Now, we know this has been happening in the past. We know this has happened for a long time. Over the course of the early part of this year. I even wrote an article about it on February 25, if you want to go and look that up. It’s called 40% of Republicans didn’t vote against Trump. In South Carolina, Obama operatives used Democrat voters to boost her. And in this article, it’s not too long. Impressed with myself. These things can get lengthy when you go into the details, but I went into the detail on this group Primary Pivot, which is another one of these groups convened by Lincoln Project types.
It’s actually conceived by an ex Obama era USAID staffer called Kenneth Schlafler. And they were effectively en masse, texting, emailing, spending hundreds of thousands of dollars in Super Tuesday states to send to Democrats the message that, hey, you can re-register as a Republican and vote against Donald Trump. And a lot of people did that. And that was the source of a lot of votes for Trump’s opponents in the GOP primaries on the run up to Super Tuesday were, in fact, Democrats. I know a lot of you already know that. Just to reiterate that in the context of Indiana, there will be, of course, people who had done that on the run up to Indiana, hoping that they would be able to make a difference. And I suspect a significant chunk of that is reflected in those Indiana results.
The second part you need to understand is how primaries work. The idea of a primary isn’t necessarily for the leading contender to take 100% of the vote, otherwise, there wouldn’t be anybody else in that race. And when you look at the results from 2016 as an example, before the race had been settled, of course, so you have to take that into consideration. You see how I actually give you both sides of my point, rather than just like, oh, well, of course, you know, Indiana was. Was so much for Nikki Haley. It’s unbelievable. Should just make her the nominee now. Right? So, in 2016, Donald Trump got 53% of the vote in Indiana. I compare that to 2024, where he got 79% of the vote in Indiana. Ted Cruz, by the way, that was in 2016. 590,000 votes. In 2024, it was 461,000 votes. Now, hold that in your mind, because you might be thinking like a lot of these people seem to be thinking in the corporate press. And beyond that. Oh, my goodness, Donald Trump’s numbers of votes have gone down. Yeah, he’s already effectively the nominee. People don’t go out. People don’t turn out if they think the race is turned up already. Already sewn up. Sorry. And I think, actually, the 46, 460,000 people turning out to vote for Trump obviously secured 58 delegates for himself in that process. Nikki. Haiti, by the way, securing zero.
I think that’s still quite a large number of people who turned out. I’ll get into that more. Ted Cruz in 2016. 406,000 votes. And 36%. John Kasich. 83,000 votes. 7.6%. Ben Carson, 9000. Jeb Bush, six and a half thousand. Marco Rubio. 5100. Rand Paul, 4200. Chris Christie, 1700. Carly Fiorina. Who remembers Carly Fiorina? Not me. 1491 votes. Now, in 2016, Ted Cruz carried. I’m gonna butcher these American names. Elkhart County, Whitley County, Allen County, Wells County, and Adams County. Donald Trump carried all of those this year as well. And, in fact, if you want to break down on a county by county level, um, Fort Wayne, I suppose, uh, which would be Allen County. This is the other thing about American counties. And everything that I don’t understand is the counties are rarely named for and after the major towns in those counties, or vice versa. Um, and Marion county, which is, uh, Indianapolis, really saw some of the largest votes for, um, Nikki Haley in those areas, which. Which, you know, these are. These are more densely packed, more city-type areas. And so you will understand what I mean when I say that it is more likely for independents, moderates, and Democrats, in fact, to register as Republicans and vote for somebody other than Donald Trump in those areas. But you see what happened in Indiana in 2016. You had a total turnout there. Gosh, that is a lot, isn’t it? You had a total turnout there of 1.1 million. You had a total turnout in Indiana in 2024 of just. Just under 600,000. And that is specifically because it’s already done. The primary is over. You don’t. I mean, the fact that. And here’s the thing. Okay, then play that game. And bear in mind, there’s over. There’s under. There’s just over half the number of votes that were cast in 2016. That cast in 2024. Okay, now think about this. How many votes did Joe Biden get in 2024? 178,100% of the vote, because he’s running unopposed in the Indiana Democrat primary, but 178,000? Well, by 2016, you had 700,000 votes cast in the Democratic primary in Indiana, which, by the way, Bernie Sanders won 335,000 votes versus 310,000 odd votes. 606 hundred. 40,000 votes. And cast in total. Sorry to be more specific.
So why is nobody talking about the fact that less than a third of Democrat voters went out to cast their votes for Joe Biden, but everybody is commenting on the fact that 20-odd percent of, you know, so-called republican voters cast their votes for Nikki Haley in Indiana. I suggest to you that the data point is totally irrelevant. I suggest to you that this is mostly chicanery on the part of moderates, independents, and Democrats who are attempting to make Donald Trump look less popular. And I think the media coverage of such an arcane data point actually proves that out. Bears that out. I then think, of course, of course, you will have a certain number of so-called Republicans, RINO Republicans, etc. Who are embittered and who are emboldened, therefore, to vote for Nikki Haley. I would put that about half of Nikki Haley’s vote. So in reality, perhaps Nikki Haley got about 10% of the vote in. In Indiana. But the rest, I would say. I would say, comes down to. Comes down to things like the, what do you call it? The primary pivot organization and all those sorts of things that have been going on for some time.
Anyway, you know, it’s bothered me because I keep seeing it pop up, you know, especially in places like the Journal. Who? Just these throwaway lines that they use. I was even reading one this morning. They’ve got this op-ed out. Who’s this op-ed by? Oh, it’s the editorial board. It’s the Wall Street Journal editorial board, which basically means Rupert Murdoch. And it says. And it says, mister Trump needs a comparably reassuring choice this year. They’re talking about Mike Pence to win over the suburban, college-educated, and women voters who cost him re-election in 2020. They’re still giving Ms. Haley upwards of 20% in the GOP primaries, though she ended her campaign long ago. It’s a falsehood. And if that’s what the editorial board is basing their political analysis on, then perhaps you will join me in shredding, in printing, by the way, and then shredding the Wall Street Journal’s political analysis.
And that’s it. Thank you very much.
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