Indiana Republicans came out strongly for the dormant candidacy of former South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley in the state’s primary yesterday. Frontrunner and presumptive GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump dominated the voting, but Haley — who suspended her campaign for president nearly two months ago — still pulled in more than one in five GOP primary voters, a protest vote that challenges the Trump-driven narrative that the former president has remade the Republican Party as the party of Trumpism/MAGA.
Trump won 78.3 percent of the Indiana vote, while Haley took in 21.7 percent according to the Associated Press. Haley has continued, despite dropping out, to win significant percentages in numerous states and the Indiana vote represents her highest primary percentage since she left the race after Super Tuesday.
It’s almost as if…more and more Republicans, each day, are rejecting Trump. Perhaps these voters heard what their former congressman and Governor and later Vice President Mike Pence had to say about the president he served?
In all seriousness though, this is not a Nikki Haley… https://t.co/BV751RY5IX
— Amanda Carpenter (@amandacarpenter) May 8, 2024
Notably, while Indiana’s primary makes manifest a dissatisfaction with Trump among many rank-and-file Republicans, it’s Haley’s showing in Arizona (17.8%) Pennsylvania (16.5%) that potentially do more than challenge the Trump-dominance narrative. Those so-called “swing states” are in play nationally in 2024 in a way Indiana is not.
Indiana has lodged a significant primary anti-Trump protest vote, revealing latent Trump weakness even in a deeply conservative state, but Indiana will not determine the outcome of the 2024 presidential election. Indiana has been reliably red — that is, a Republican stronghold — since long before anybody started labeling states with colors. Ballotpedia data says Indiana has, since 1900, voted Democratic 16.1% of the time and Republican 83.9% of the time.
But Indiana’s primary vote does prove — as does the divided Republican conference in the House — that it’s a mistake to think all Republicans are on the same page. The rise of MAGA and its usurpation of the party from the traditional GOP standard-bearers like Indiana’s Dan Quayle, the former U.S. Vice President under an equally traditional George H. W. Bush, is being touted by Trump and the Trump-controlled RNC as complete. Nikki Haley’s continued success among Republican voters indicates there is more to the story.
Or maybe it is just same as it ever was in presidential politics, as the following tweet asserts:
If you tweet like you know nothing about political history then you deserve to be told you know nothing about political history.https://t.co/Szs5ZbGgPv https://t.co/aaV1l2tRMk pic.twitter.com/d4RHJLhzra
— Chris (@chriswithans) May 8, 2024
[NOTE: Former Indiana Governor Mike Pence, who served as Trump’s Vice President and who has declined to endorse Trump in 2024, is a sort of hybrid Republican — beginning as traditional, then going MAGA while in the Trump administration, and now — for the moment — outside of the Republican power centers.]