This is the first segment that I've watched on Fox so far where one of their regular pundits admitted that the forty percent or so of the Republican primary voters that don't want to vote for Trump could actually end up being a problem for him in the general election.
During a discussion about the South Carolina primary on this Monday's Outnumbered, Fox regular and Washington Post columnist Marc Thiessen broke from the usual talking points that I've heard on Fox since the primaries began, which is to claim that all of those voters were Democrats who crossed over to vote for Haley.
Thiessen warned the viewers that this shows a real weakness for Trump, especially when compared to the numbers we've seen so far for Biden.
THIESSEN: Look, it was a big win for Donald Trump, but it also has a warning sign for Donald Trump and for the Republican party. So, if you think about this, this is a a unique election in the sense that we have basically two incumbents.
You have Joe Biden who's running for a second term, and Donald Trump is running for a second term, right? And so how did Joe Biden do in South Carolina? 96.2 percent of the vote. Donald Trump got 60 percent and four in ten voters in the Republican Party said no, even though they know that this race is pretty much over, that he's going to be the nominee, they still voted against him!
That is a problem, because when he says that this is the most united Republican Party he's ever seen, it is not the most united Republican Party. And 59 percent of those Haley voters say they're not voting for him.
Harris Faulkner countered that no one actually knows what those voters will do in a general election and how many of them will hold their nose and vote for Trump, which is true. We don't know how things will go on the general, but it doesn't take a huge percentage of voters in some key swing states either staying home, refusing to vote for Trump, or crossing over to Biden to swing an election.
I'm just shocked that someone on Murdoch's right wing propaganda channel spoke the truth for once that those numbers aren't great news for Trump, or some "crushing blow" to Haley.
If Biden had only gotten sixty percent of the vote in any of the primaries, all of the pearl clutchers in the mainstream media would be writing his obituaries.
I agree with Josh Marshall's take over at TPM:
In a presidential election or even a contested senate election 60-40 is pretty decisive. It’s plenty to make Trump the nominee. But I think we have to be honest and say that 40% of the electorate in a deeply Trumpy state like South Carolina voting against Trump is a huge showing of opposition precisely because the nomination race is basically over.
It’s fair to say that this is Haley’s home state. She was two-term governor. That must figure into the equation. But 40% isn’t that different from the 43.2% she got in New Hampshire or the 40.3% Haley and Ron DeSantis got between them in Iowa.
I’m not going to speculate what it means for the general election. But this is a lot of persistent opposition for a candidate who has always been running as a de facto incumbent. Even if you set that aside, it’s quite a lot for a candidate who is, whatever technicalities you want to get caught up in, the presumptive nominee. 40% of Republican primary voters are still showing up to say they don’t want Trump even when they know they’re definitely going to get him.
