Trump’s weaknesses with GOP voters go beyond the suburbs

The battle for Trump-skeptical Republican voters isn’t just about the suburbs.

It’s true that the hundreds of thousands of GOP primary voters who voted against former President Donald Trump this year were concentrated in highly educated, suburban areas that have swung blue over the past decade.

But a POLITICO analysis shows there’s also a significant bloc of voters who did not want Trump in more exurban, red-leaning counties — the kinds of places that were skeptical of Trump in the 2016 GOP primary and, while largely voting for him in the 2016 and 2020 general elections, have remained somewhat resistant to his takeover of the Republican Party.

The analysis of GOP presidential primary results from more than 1,000 counties shows warning signs for Trump, especially as Republican voters continued to vote against him in closed primaries after he clinched the nomination. And it makes clear that, while independents and crossover voters may have boosted former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley in some primaries, a chunk of true Republican voters still wished for someone else to be the party’s nominee.

“You hear a lot of moderate Republicans now who say that they’ll never vote for Trump again,” said Parker Fairbairn, county GOP chair in Emmet County, Michigan, on the northern end of the state’s Lower Peninsula, where Trump won 55 percent of the vote in the 2020 general election. In last month’s primary, he got two-thirds of the vote there.

What distinguishes Emmet County and similar geographies from the other suburban ones is their broader politics. These aren’t the kinds of suburbs on the outskirts of major cities, where wealthy, educated professionals have already fled the Republican Party.

They’re farther away from urban areas. They’re less densely populated, and they have fewer voters with college degrees. These places — which include North Carolina’s Republican-leaning exurbs, and conservative but less Trump-inclined counties several hours north of Michigan’s major cities — still vote predominantly for Republicans, both at the presidential and local levels. In 2016, when both parties held contested primaries, the Republican voters in these counties backed candidates like Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) over Trump, and in the general election they voted for Trump at lower rates than the deep-red rural areas.

Republicans are banking on the fact that partisanship usually wins out. This is far from the first contentious primary to leave bruised egos and hurt feelings, and usually the vast majority of voters come home to their party’s presidential nominee eventually. By Election Day, voters tend to return to their partisan camps.

And the skepticism of Trump doesn’t mean Biden has an easy road. Voters looking for what Fairbairn described as “commonsense conservatism” aren’t likely to find it with the incumbent Democratic president, either. And Trump could benefit from a political environment where polls have repeatedly shown a majority of American voters are dissatisfied with the state of the economy and the direction of the country.

“The cost of living has just skyrocketed. So I think Trump has that going for him,” said Fairbairn, the Emmet County chair.

But in a close election fought on the margins, even small shifts matter. Republicans’ success at bringing those voters back into the fold will help determine whether Trump ousts Biden from the White House. Democrats’ ability to draw away even a small percentage of the non-Trump GOP voters — or, at the very least, convince them to stay home — can help keep him there.

That push and pull sets the stage for a battle over the hundreds of thousands of non-Trump primary voters. Biden’s campaign has been overt in its overtures, including releasing an ad on Friday that featured a string of Trump’s insults of Haley and implored her supporters to join his campaign instead. If Democrats can buck historical trends, such voters could play a particularly outsize role in deciding swing states: Candidates other than Trump got at least one quarter of the Republican primary vote across more than 60 counties across North Carolina, Michigan and New Hampshire.

In Georgia, which held several weeks of early voting before Haley dropped out, Trump struggled among early voters in key areas, including Cobb County, a longtime GOP stronghold that has swung sharply toward Democrats over the past two presidential elections.

And in Arizona and Florida, two states with closed Republican primaries that voted after Trump became the party’s presumptive nominee, candidates other than the former president still got around 20 percent of the vote.

“We will pick up a few of these Republicans, I believe that,” said Sam Edney, Democratic county chair in North Carolina’s Transylvania County, a county southwest of Asheville where Trump got 67 percent of the GOP primary vote this year.

“I also hope a substantial number simply don’t vote in the Trump and Mark Robinson races, that will help Democrats as well,” he added, referencing the Republican gubernatorial nominee, who is an ally of the former president. “You know, it’s politics.”

The challenge for Democrats is overcoming the partisan polarization that has come to dominate elections, and Republican voters’ deep skepticism of Biden. The reality is that many Republican primary voters are, in matters of ideology and policy, closer to Trump than the Democratic president. That makes crossing party lines a tough sell, despite the aversion toward Trump that Democrats are hoping to capitalize on.

“Republicans’ substantive policy differences with President Biden’s administration vastly outweigh any objections there may be with President Trump’s unique personality and approach,” said North Carolina state Sen. Tim Moffitt, a Republican who represents a western North Carolina district that includes Henderson County, in an email to POLITICO.

One figure exemplifying that: New Hampshire Gov. Chris Sununu, who endorsed Haley and traversed his home state arguing a GOP ticket headed by Trump would lead to major losses for the party. He has now backed Trump.

“For anyone to act surprised that when the contest is left between President Biden and President Trump — that, ‘how dare Governor Sununu support President Trump?’ — at the end of the day, Gov. Sununu is a solid Republican,” said Jason Grosky, GOP chair in the state’s swingy Rockingham County, along the border with Massachusetts. “What else was he going to do? Vote for President Biden? Zero percent chance.”

Of course, some of the Haley voters weren’t really Trump voters — or even Republicans — in the first place. In states with open primaries, some committed Democrats crossed party lines for the opportunity to vote against Trump in the primary, alongside independents and moderates who favored Biden in 2020 and voted for Haley, but fall firmly in the category of anti-Trump voters. Those types of voters should be easier pickups for Democrats, but would not improve Biden’s margins compared to four years ago.

“Where President Trump gets hurt is educated, suburban women and independents,” said Michigan state Rep. Mark Tisdel, a Republican and Haley backer who represents a swath of Detroit suburbs won by Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer in 2022. “If he's going to win this election, he's going to have to find a way to bring those soft Republicans and those independents back to our side of the ledger.” (Tisdel said there was an “overwhelming probability” he himself would vote for a straight Republican ticket in November, “no matter who's at the top.”)

But Haley’s vote share, particularly in Republican areas, also reflected that some tried-and-true Republicans wanted to avoid Trump as the nominee.

Those voters are the target for groups like the super PAC Primary Pivot, which relaunched this month as Haley Voters for Biden after the former South Carolina governor dropped out.

Republican voters would be “the most difficult group” to win over, said the group’s senior adviser, Robert Schwartz. He said the super PAC has learned some early lessons as it works to refine its messaging, including not talking about Jan. 6, which “most conservative voters don’t like hearing about even if they think it was wrong.” Schwartz said messaging on things like “loyalty to the military, or talking about NATO and being anti-Russia” are more appealing topics.

But most important is reaching these voters soon.

“There’s still a lot of raw feelings about how Nikki Haley and her family were treated, and about the way that MAGA and Donald Trump are treating Nikki Haley supporters and the whole ‘permanently barred from MAGA,’” he said. “As we get closer to the election, those kinds of feelings of resentment are going to fade away. … We want to lock in that feeling of resentment and disgust toward the way Trump treated them.”

He acknowledged “a significant amount of” the non-Trump GOP primary voters will end up voting for the former president in November. But, he argued, “This year is different than most years in terms of just a deep enmity of these people toward coming back home to Trump again.”

Democrats hope so. Even if voting for Biden may be out of the question for some, Democrats know that those who would otherwise vote GOP choosing to stay home or cast their ballots for a third party would also improve the party’s chances.

“We’ve got to educate these Republicans who are disgruntled with Trump,” said Edney, the Democratic chair in Transylvania County, North Carolina.

Those voters will also be a particular target in newer battlegrounds like Cabarrus County, North Carolina — a rapidly growing Charlotte exurb that Trump won by a bit under 10 points in the 2020 general election that is among the counties where the Biden campaign is already opening field offices. Last cycle was the first time in more than four decades that a Republican presidential candidate didn’t win by double digits there. And in the state’s GOP primary this month, Trump got 73 percent of the vote.

“We have to chase every vote,” said Mackenzie Reedybacon, chair of the Cabarrus County Democratic Party. “Every single one of those 27 percent of folks who didn’t vote for him is someone worth talking to.”