Despite buzz about Trump’s weaknesses in the primary, he’s still dominant among Republicans and competitive among independents.
New Hampshire’s Republican presidential primary confirmed Donald Trump’s dominant front-runner status in the two-candidate GOP field, while giving Nikki Haley just enough hope to sustain her campaign for a while, assuming donors continue to contribute. But what, if anything, did it tell us about the very likely general-election rematch between Trump and Joe Biden, who brushed aside two opponents via write-in votes in New Hampshire’s unsanctioned Democratic primary? There was certainly a lot of Primary Night media buzz suggesting that Trump’s win was a pyrrhic victory foretelling a possible disaster in November.
First of all, we shouldn’t overestimate the predictive significance of such early party primaries. Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama all lost New Hampshire primaries on the road to their first terms as president; Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter (running for reelection in 1980), and Mitt Romney all won their Granite State primaries before losing in November.
Trump’s win by a less-than-expected margin, then, doesn’t inherently tell us much of anything about November. But because the New Hampshire Republican primary electorate is significantly more similar to the national general electorate than, say, those who participated in the January 15 Iowa Republican caucus, it’s worth a closer look.
According to exit polls, 82 percent of Iowa caucusgoers self-identified as Republicans, compared to just 50 percent of New Hampshire GOP primary voters. Despite the decline in his margin of victory from 30 points in Iowa to 11 in New Hampshire, Trump actually increased his percentage of the vote among self-identified Republicans from 54 percent in Iowa to 74 percent in New Hampshire. So you could argue he is actually consolidating his already strong support among GOP base voters. On the other hand, both contests have shown there is a hard kernel of Republican voters who seem bitterly unreconciled to Trump as their general-election candidate, as the Wall Street Journal reports:
The first task for any candidate is to unify the party. But 21% of Republicans who cast ballots in New Hampshire said they would be so dissatisfied with Trump as the nominee that they wouldn’t vote for him in November, according to AP VoteCast, a survey of primary voters. Similarly, 15% of Republicans who participated in Iowa’s caucuses last week said they wouldn’t support Trump in the general election.
This degree of intraparty alienation is not showing up in national polling. The most recent Biden versus Trump poll, from Economist/YouGov, shows Trump losing just five percent of Republicans in November. Partisans tend to return to the party fold during highly polarizing general-election campaigns, so any current intraparty opposition to Trump should be taken with a grain of salt. In the 2016 New Hampshire Republican primary exit polls, 46 percent of voters said they would not be “satisfied” if Trump won the nomination. In November (according to exit polls) only 8 percent of Republicans defected. That number dropped to 6 percent in 2020. But persistent Republican opposition to Trump should be assessed regularly.
Trump was famously trounced among independents in New Hampshire. But his percentage of self-identified independents merely dropped from 42 percent in Iowa to 39 percent in New Hampshire. The difference is that they represented 16 percent of caucusgoers in Iowa and 44 percent of New Hampshire primary voters. In the 2020 general election, Trump won 41 percent of self-identified independents. In this most recent 2024 national general-election poll matching Trump and Biden (which overall shows the race even), from Economist/YouGov, Trump has 44 percent of those who call themselves independents.
New Hampshire’s Republican electorate does resemble the national electorate (certainly more than Iowa’s) in some important ways. Only 19 percent of GOP primary voters were Evangelicals (compared to 55 percent in Iowa); in the 2020 general election, the percentage was 28 percent. Twenty-four percent of primary voters were from rural areas; that percentage was 41 percent in Iowa and 19 percent nationally in 2020. Sixty-one percent of Iowa caucusgoers favored a national abortion ban; that dropped to 27 percent in New Hampshire, approximating the 25 percent of Americans generally who (per Pew Research) “strongly” supported the Dobbs decision eliminating a federal right to abortion. Forty-eight percent of New Hampshire GOP voters were college graduates; not far from the 41 percent who voted in the 2020 general election.
But while it’s possible to view Trump’s weaknesses in New Hampshire as vulnerabilities in November, it’s important not to forget that he won this primary by double digits, despite being outspent significantly by Nikki Haley in campaign advertising and also despite a noncompetitive and largely irrelevant Democratic primary that tempted Democratic-leaning independents to support Haley.
Sooner rather than later, we are going to embark on one of the longest general-election campaigns ever, between two universally well-known candidates with significant strengths and weaknesses, during a period of time when all sorts of external factors (from the economy to Trump’s criminal court proceedings) that we cannot fully know will influence their relative standing. It’s certainly legitimate to read the tea leaves from what is likely to be a very brief GOP nomination contest to give us new information about this strange man who is on his way to a third straight presidential general election (the only candidate to do so other than FDR and Grover Cleveland). But let’s not overinterpret a January primary as telling us much about what will happen in November.
