Samira wrote:
Oh, come on, you know the folks in SC love them some NYC billionaires.
And yet, he got 32.5% of the votes in SC. So you can either imagine that conservative evangelical voters actually do love Trump *or* that a decent number of liberal voters in SC, who hate evangelicals, and hate Bush, and hate conservatives, might just show up to an open primary where it costs them nothing but a few minutes of their time to drop a vote for Trump in the ballot box and give a big "***** you" to the GOP.
One of those is a vastly more reasonable explanation for the votes he got. And yes, if that's the case, he's not going to get that kind of support in Nevada, which is both closed and a caucus. He'll have to rely solely on actual registered Republicans to caucus for him. And while I'm sure there are a number of folks willing to do that, and it's Nevada, which is a strange place all around, I'm not sure how he can expect to get anywhere near the kind of numbers he got in SC.
It's funny because all the pundits are talking about the primaries going forward as though the best that Cruz and Rubio can expect is a semi even three way split. But that assumes that Trump can get close to the same numbers he got in SC, and Rubio and Cruz will evenly split the remainder. I think that SC more or less represents the best he can get in a state race where everything was in his advantage. Now that Bush has dropped out, Rubio has emerged as the sole mainstream candidate, and I think that will result in a pretty significant shift of voters to him. How much that affects the Nevada race is hard to say. There's been very little time between SC and today. But I think it will have some effect at least, and more over time, as more endorsements come in for Rubio (he's already gotten a pretty large number just in the last couple days).
We'll know better over the next few hours, of course, but I suspect that, just as in Iowa, the polling data is not going to be very accurate and things aren't going to go as well for Trump as he thinks. Recall that I said the same thing in the lead up to Iowa, and that turned out to be the case. NH, and SC both allowed for a large number of non-Republican voters in the GOP primaries, so that helps mask Trump's weakness among conservatives. But he can't hide behind that in Nevada, and he can't hide behind that next week.
Edited, Feb 23rd 2016 6:08pm by gbaji