19,000 Georgia Republican primary voters cast their votes in the 2020 Democratic primary

This year has been a big year for candidates in both parties to send a message through primary voting. The effort is effective when the total number of voters voting is small, as has been the case since New Hampshire, where former President Donald Trump’s support was clear. President Trump and President Biden will be the candidates. However, given the relatively modest number of votes, we should be cautious about our conclusions.

Consider Georgia. The state held its presidential primary on Tuesday, allowing Trump and Biden to officially secure enough delegates to secure the nomination of both parties. Trump won 84% of the vote in Georgia, his biggest victory of the year. Second place, former United Nations Ambassador Nikki Haley, received approximately 80,000 votes.

Still, some people debated Haley’s 80,000 votes. rear Her suspension of campaigning could cause problems for President Trump in the state. After all, Biden won Georgia in 2020 by less than 12,000 votes. If these are the 80,000 votes Trump lost, that’s bad news.

The problem, as the Washington Post previously wrote, is that there is no reason to think those votes went to Trump. And now there is some solid evidence that it works. About 19,000 people who voted in the 2024 Republican primary also voted in the 2020 Republican primary, according to data on Tuesday’s voters released by the state and collected by political data firm L2, which is hardly complete. It has been shown that Democratic Party One. Perhaps some Republicans were hoping to influence the Democratic nominee four years ago. But it’s safe to assume that many Democrats wanted to send a message about Trump.

One indicator of that is that about 56 percent of those 19,000 voters cast a ballot by Election Day, but less than half of all Republican primary voters cast a ballot by Election Day. . This suggests that these are Democratic voters in the abstract sense. In recent elections, Democrats have been more likely to vote early and vote by mail. But it also suggests that these voters may have been more likely to support Haley. That is, if fewer voters turned out on election day because Haley had already dropped out.

Another indicator: About 2% of Republican primary voters were Black, while 12% of 2020 Democratic primary voters who voted in this year’s Republican primary were Black.

If most of those votes went to Haley, that would be a big chunk of her support. Statewide, she received about 78,000 votes, which would account for about a quarter of the votes she would have received if all 2020 Democratic primary voters supported her. .

Haley’s support was stronger in urban and suburban counties than in rural and metropolitan small counties, similar to Biden’s support in the state in 2020. More than 8,500 of the 2020 Democratic primary voters were in suburban counties. That’s about 23 percent of the total votes Haley received in the same place.

However, it’s helpful to remember that Trump and Biden each received more than 1 million votes in the same county. Even the 37,500 votes Haley received in suburban counties was less than 2 percent of the votes cast in those areas, not to mention the 8,500 votes cast in crossovers. In other words, this does not necessarily indicate that a significant portion of Trump’s base has defected.

One can assume that some of the support Haley saw came from people she persuaded to oppose Trump and who will likely oppose him in November. But exit polls and L2 data suggest that much of the support for her comes from people who are unlikely to support Trump anyway.