A Large Percentage of Republican Primary Voters Can’t Stomach Trump

AP Photo/Steve Helber

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.Former president Donald Trump easily swept to victory in a handful of additional Republican caucuses this weekend, looking ever more imperious in his bid for the GOP nomination. But new data from the Associated Press suggests his easy victories are hiding a serious potential problem: Never Trumpers aren’t changing their minds.
The AP reported on Sunday that even though a huge majority of Republicans appear to be enthusiastically on board with Trump, a significant fraction of those who voted in the first three GOP nominating contests say they will never vote for him in the general election. According to the analysis of Republican voters, 2 in 10 Iowa voters, 1 in 3 New Hampshire voters, and one quarter of South Carolina voters said they would not vote for Trump. While those numbers aren’t huge, Trump needs every last vote to do better than he did in 2020 when—as he often denies—he lost to Joe Biden.
The AP report did find, however, that just because those voters said they didn’t want to vote for Trump—ever—it didn’t mean they were Biden voters.
As gloomy as the AP’s findings were for Trump, Biden got his own bad polling breakdown news on Sunday as well. The New York Times released its own analysis of polling data that said 47 percent of Biden’s voters strongly agree that he is too old to be an effective president, and another 26 percent somewhat agree. Biden, who is 81, is battling voter perceptions that he is too elderly and possibly senile to be president. In a sign of the times in which elderly politicians are the norm (the median age for U.S. senators is 65 and House members is 59), Trump comes out relatively in better shape in the NYT poll, with only 42 percent of his own voters agreeing that he is too old to be an effective president.