Donald Trump is winning the GOP presidential nomination, but he’s weaker than he looks

There never was any question of the outcome, no matter how much the media tried to pretend otherwise. In the New Hampshire primary yesterday, Donald Trump dispatched his sole remaining competitor, Nikki Haley, by a respectable, but not overwhelming, margin. Trump gloried in the results, trashing Haley and promising to “get even” with her.

Haley, a former U.N. ambassador under Trump, vowed to soldier on, but she has no chance of winning. She’s setting her sights on South Carolina, where she was governor, but Trump rubbed salt in her wounds by having Sen. Tim Scott (R-SC), from the state, show up at his victory speech.

Related:

Donald Trump falters in New Hampshire primary, showing cracks in GOP base

Haley performed better than expected, but Trump isn’t doing too well in national polls.

“You must really hate her,” Trump told Scott. (Scott demurred.)

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Trump is no doubt feeling great because he’s got the nomination locked up. But the New Hampshire results point out all the weaknesses Trump will bring into the general election.

For one thing, running essentially as the incumbent, Trump won New Hampshire by less than ten percentage points – hardly the blowout you’d expect from a strong candidate.

More to the point, polling in New Hampshire and Iowa reveal that there is a significant portion of Republican voters who simply will not vote for Trump. An Iowa poll found that more than 40 percent of Haley’s supporters in that state would vote for Biden before they would vote for Trump. Exit polls in New Hampshire found that self-described moderates were avoiding Trump by a wide margin. (Haley was hardly a moderate either, especially on LGBTQ+ issues.) He also fared poorly with college-educated voters, especially women.

In general, Biden has stronger support among Democrats and independents who lean Democratic than Trump does among their Republican counterparts. The differences aren’t huge – just five percentage points – but in a tight election, that’s more than enough to tip the balance in Biden’s favor. New Hampshire is representative of the kind of state that Trump will need to make headways in if he is to win in November, and he didn’t exactly wow his own party there.

There are a few other signs that Trump is facing some headwinds. For one thing, most Americans simply aren’t paying attention to the election this early in the year. It probably hasn’t sunk in that we’re about to see a replay of 2020, with some twists. For one thing, we had an insurrection egged on by Trump. That inspires his base, but it turns off a lot of others.

Then there are the 91 indictments. Polls indicate that Trump loses even more independent voters if he is convicted of a crime before Election Day. That’s one reason why Trump is so frantic to delay his trials. (The other is so that he can pardon himself.)

That’s not to say that Trump can’t win. A lot can happen in the next nine months. Biden has his own problems, including a GOP-fed narrative that he’s a doddering old man. But whatever his perceived drawbacks, Biden is the alternative to Trump.

Haley likes to say of Trump that “chaos follows him.” In fact, he is the chaos. With any luck and help from the candidate himself, it won’t take much to remind voters outside the MAGA universe of that.