Trump's biggest general election 'weakness' was exposed by GOP primary: analysis

Former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley failed to seriously challenge former President Donald Trump for the 2024 nomination — but she didn't have to, argued Lisa Kashinsky and Jessica Piper for Politico, because she damaged the former president in another way.

"The former U.N. ambassador beat Trump in Vermont and Washington, D.C., and won more than 40 percent of the vote in New Hampshire and Utah. And though Haley’s appeal to Republicans in those places hardly dented Trump in the primary, the results suggest very specific vulnerabilities for the former president in the run-up to the general election." Biden, they wrote, can now exploit this "weakness" in the places that Haley revealed it.

"A POLITICO analysis of primary voter data reveals that Trump struggled in places where a majority of adults are college-educated, including in key suburbs that doomed his campaign in 2020," the report continued. "And preliminary exit polling in North Carolina, Virginia and California on Tuesday showed more than two-thirds of Haley voters in each state weren’t committed to voting for the likely GOP nominee in November."

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Ultimately, continued the report, "Where Haley voters go — to Trump, Biden, another candidate or no candidate at all — could decide key races across the country."

What this means, said The Lincoln Project's Republican strategist Mike Madrid, is that there is "very strong trepidation about the [likely] nominee from the right demographics of constituencies."

Haley declined to endorse Trump directly when she suspended her campaign following the Super Tuesday contests. However, she urged him to unify the party, and make peace with the voters he has alienated.