Media in disbelief as Republicans like Nikki Haley flock to Trump while Biden coalition frays
Many critics of the former President have come around to endorse him as the 2024 election comes into view. Getty Images
This week, former South Carolina governor and GOP presidential candidate Nikki Haley finally endorsed Donald Trump.
And, boy, the news was an unpleasant surprise to a political media that’s convinced themselves Trump is the next Hitler.
On outlets like CNN and MSNBC, Haley was disparaged as if she were a traitor to the American republic.
The American left, it seems, continues to believe a sizable contingent of Never-Trump Republican voters can sink the former president.
It’s all just wishcasting.
Most Nikki Haley voters will be Donald Trump voters. And the fact that Haley, highly critical of the former president during the primaries, is supporting Trump is no more shocking than Hillary Clinton backing Barack Obama after their brutal primary contest in 2008 or George H. W. Bush backing Ronald Reagan after enthusiastically disparaging the Gipper for a year during the 1980 primary race.
Haley, who values her political future, continues to argue that Trump is a flawed candidate, but superior to Joe Biden.
Considering the state of the border, inflation, and our foreign policy, this is a wholly reasonable position to take.
Moreover, what was left unsaid in the media’s freakout over Haley’s “treachery” is that its Biden’s coalition that’s fraying.
Identity politics is the glue that holds together the Democratic Party.
But if the polls are correct, many of the left’s most reliable voting blocs, including Latinos and African Americans, are being whittled away.
Biden’s favorability among Latinos — a group less than enamored by progressive left’s extreme cultural extremism — has dropped precipitously.
When Biden entered office, he enjoyed a nearly 30-point advantage over Donald Trump among Latino voters in most polls — some of it probably due to the president’s alleged moderate disposition.
Today? The advantage has shrunk to under 10 points — with some polls falling as low as 3 points among likely voters.
Numerous polls also find that upwards of 20% of black voters also prefer Trump over the president in 2024. That might not sound like a huge number, but when one considers exit polls had Trump winning around 8% of the black vote in 2016 and around 10% in 2020 it becomes meaningful.
Biden has also alienated both sides of the Hamas-Israel conflict.
The administration’s cynical anti-Israel turn was intended to mollify the antisemitic faction on the progressive left, but it has soured many moderate and reliable Jewish Democrats donors.
At the same time, the pro-Hamas faction of the American left that Biden is trying to placate — not only camped out on university campuses but in states like Michigan — won’t back “Genocide Joe” until he begins carpet-bombing Tel Aviv.
Even among young voters, historically one of the most dependable continents of Democrat voters, Biden is hemorrhaging support.
One CNN poll found the president trailing Trump by 11 percentage points among young people, many of whom see the president as a “failure.”
Polls, of course, aren’t destiny. Rather, they are snapshots of a moment.
But what the media never seems to learn is that it’s “conventional wisdom” has been wrong for nearly a decade. Liberal pundits were convinced that Trump was going to have trouble building a coalition, and Biden would slide back into office backed by a big tent.
The exact opposite is happening. And that’s why they’re furious.