“It was definitely not a good night for Donald Trump,” said Mike Madrid, a California Republican strategist and co-founder of the anti-Trump Lincoln Project.
“According to most indicators, [stopping Trump] It has become much clearer,” Madrid said. “The anti-Trump line stands out. It's obvious. That's big. This is something we can work on in a real and meaningful way.”
On the surface, the results in Iowa and New Hampshire look very bad for the anti-Trump movement. The former president, who spent his time between the courts and the campaign trail facing 91 criminal charges, won more than 50% of the vote in both states. In New Hampshire, where the number of Republican candidates was quickly reduced to two, independent voters, who had overwhelmingly supported Haley in exit polls, were overwhelmed by Republican Trump supporters.
The next two races are much less likely to disrupt Trump's march toward the nomination. Haley is not competing for any delegates in Nevada. And Trump is leading her by double digits in polls in her own home state of South Carolina.
Leaders of efforts to warn voters about a second Trump term say focusing on the primaries is a lost cause. They argue that Trump's nomination is inevitable and that the focus should now be on defeating him in the general election.
“The primary is grim and bleak,” said Charlie Sykes, a conservative political commentator in Wisconsin. “But this has been predictable for a long time.”
Trump's detractors point out that data from Iowa and New Hampshire show warning signs for Trump, especially among independents and moderate Republicans. In New Hampshire, 64% of undeclared voters sided with Haley, according to exit polls.
An NBC News/Des Moines Register/Mediacom poll of Iowa voters found that 43% of Haley supporters said they would support President Joe Biden over Trump.
And in New Hampshire, 46% of Republican primary voters said they would be dissatisfied if Trump were the Republican nominee, and 35% said they would not vote for him in November.
Exit polls also showed that four out of 10 people who voted for Haley in New Hampshire said they voted because of their dislike of Trump. And 94% of Haley voters said they would be dissatisfied if Trump were nominated.
Half of Iowa's Republican caucus attendees said they were not part of Trump's Make America Great Again movement. In New Hampshire, even more (63%) said the same.
It is encouraging to both Sykes and Madrid that significant numbers of voters in two different (though still overwhelmingly white) constituencies have shown similar resistance to Trump.
“If you look at these numbers and Trump’s overall approval, [ratings] “Republicans and the results of the last three elections all point in a direction that is going to get worse for Trump, not better,” Madrid said.
Fergus Cullen, a “never-Trump” Republican and former New Hampshire Republican Party chairman who voted for Haley on Tuesday, said those statistics were “the best results from yesterday.”
“Imagine if 35% of Republican elected officials said the same thing,” Cullen said, referring to the 35% of voters who said they would not vote for Trump in the general election. … “Those of us who oppose Trump may not be able to stop his nomination, but we should be able to prevent him from becoming a general.”
Still, Trump has defied political gravity before, and after he left office, many of his critics once believed he had little chance of winning the nomination. Cullen said President Trump “has the ability to find new voters and expand the electorate.”
Biden and Trump declared that the general election was in fact underway, but Haley did not. The former South Carolina governor vowed to continue until Super Tuesday. Her campaign argues that open and semi-open primaries will give her a fighting chance.
And some Never Trump supporters aren't ready to look ahead to a general election just yet. They want her to continue.
“She has a ton of ammunition to make that claim. [Trump] Former New Hampshire Sen. Gordon Humphrey, who left the party after Trump won the presidential nomination in 2016 and supported Haley in Tuesday's primary, said she was “unfit to be president.”
But Sean Van Anglen, a New Hampshire political consultant who was an early Trump supporter in 2016 but voted for Haley this time, is already making his move. Van Anglen, who has said he would consider leaving the presidential candidate line blank on the November ballot rather than voting for Trump or Biden, is seeking to help down-ballot Republicans who he believes may struggle with Trump back on top. We are exploring efforts together. of tickets.
“We have to keep our children from losing their temper,” Van Anglen said. “Then let the adults come back to their rooms and take control of our party and our country.”
Jessica Piper and Steve Shepard contributed to this report.