Nikki Haley is said to be banking on Ron DeSantis supporters coming to her side now that the Florida governor has suspended his campaign for the Republican presidential nomination, but pollster Jim McLaughlin told Newsmax on Monday that might be a misguided assumption.
"There weren't that many DeSantis voters, especially in South Carolina and New Hampshire, when it was all said and done," McLaughlin, whose firm is associated with former President Donald Trump's campaign, told "The Chris Salcedo Show." "It's one of the reasons why [DeSantis] got out. But what you're seeing in our polling, also what you're seeing in some of these other polls that have come out in New Hampshire, the DeSantis voters go to Donald Trump by about a 2-to-1 ratio, sometimes even better. They are conservatives, and the DeSantis voters and Donald Trump, they have a lot in common."
Haley, a former South Carolina governor and U.N. ambassador in the Trump administration, is hoping to score a big upset in the New Hampshire primary Tuesday, where the FiveThirtyEight average of polling shows her trailing Trump by 14.2 percentage points. She also is targeting her home state's primary Feb. 24, but she trails Trump in the polling average by an even wider margin, 36.1 percentage points, in that race.
"Unfortunately for Nikki Haley, the two-person race isn't going to be what she asked for," McLaughlin said. "It is a two-person race right now, but it's not between Nikki Haley and Donald Trump. It's a two-person race between Joe Biden and Donald Trump."
McLaughlin said Haley, who is of Indian heritage, has hurt herself by claiming she was a victim of racism while growing up in the Deep South because of her brown skin.
"This doesn't sell in Republican primaries," McLaughlin said. "The whole, I am woman, hear me roar, I am brown. This is the kind of stuff that Republicans just despise. They want Americans to be united. They want Americans to be together.
"… This is the kind of messaging that just backfires with Republican primary voters. They don't like it. They don't like it when Joe Biden plays this card, and they're not going to like it when Nikki Haley plays it."
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Michael Katz ✉
Michael Katz is a Newsmax reporter with more than 30 years of experience reporting and editing on news, culture, and politics.
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