I was nodding along, as usual, with Dan McLaughlin’s article today until the very end. He’s right that Trump’s support was multifaceted, right again that the complaint that an excess of partisanship paved the way for him makes little sense. But I am not yet convinced that he is right to suggest that the chief factor behind Trump’s primary victories was the distrust of the party leadership by the party’s base, a distrust fueled by some in the conservative media. This distrust surely helped Trump among some conservative voters. But Trump’s victory owed more to moderate voters, and he generally did worse among the voters who consider themselves “very conservative” — the voters most likely to consume conservative media, to think that Republicans had wimped out on Obamacare, and so on — than among all Republican voters. In Indiana, where he became the presumptive nominee, Trump won 61 percent of moderates, 55 percent of “somewhat conservative” voters, and 45 percent of “very conservative” voters.
Consider his crucial victories in New Hampshire and South Carolina as well as the one in Indiana. In all three cases, the best exit-poll question we have for gauging primary voters’ hostility to the party leadership ran this way: “Do you feel betrayed by Republican politicians?” And in all three cases, a lot of Republican primary voters answered yes. The electorate in all three states was split roughly down the middle on the question. But in all three states Trump only slightly overperformed with the voters who answered “yes”: They were not much more likely to vote for him than the people on the other side of the question. In Indiana, for example, Trump got 55 percent of the yeses and 53 percent of the nos.
A lot of Republican voters are hostile to Republican politicians. But that hostility didn’t lead to many defeats for incumbents in congressional primaries. It may not have been the deciding factor in the presidential primaries, either.
Did Anti-Establishment Voters Win the Primaries for Trump?