Everyone keeps claiming that Nikki Haley is “performing well” in primary states despite having already dropped out of the Republican race. That’s not true, and even a cursory look at 2016’s data, as well as understanding semi-open primaries, explains that.Transcript (automatically generated): Well, happy Monday morning. Monday, May 13, 2024. And the reason I’m doing it this way and embedding this audio for you instead of just writing down my thoughts as I usually do is, number one, I can tell that more and more people want video and more and more people want audio instead of just written word. So I’m catering to you lowest common denominator people. I’m not doing the video right now because it’s 08:00 in the morning, I’m in my bathrobe, and I haven’t brushed my hair. So you’re gonna have to deal with the audio for now.The thing I wanted to jump on here and talk about really quickly, and I thought this was only going to be a little bit of a flash in the pan over the last week. But it turns out that a lot of people keep spreading this, let’s call it disinformation because it is. There are countless headlines that I’ve seen over the course of the last few days that say, oh, my goodness, Nikki Haley took 20% of the vote in Indiana in the primary. There are just so many mentions of these sorts of stories. The Wall Street Journal had one this morning which really got my goat up, which is why I’m here. I’m here even before having my first slice of raisin toast this morning. Those of you who follow me on X will understand that reference. Latest obsession of mine.Newsweek has something, ABC has something, and I even got a message from somebody whose work I follow in the political sphere recently who said, oh, my goodness, you know, did you see all this Nikki Haley stuff? What do you make of it? I said, what are you talking about? They said, well, she got 20% of the vote in Indiana. That’s terrible for Donald Trump, isn’t it? I said, did you go back and look and compare and contrast that to the 2016 primary results? Now, obviously not the same situation, but did you even try to see what’s going on using historical precedent? And the answer was no. And I couldn’t believe it. Well, maybe I’m just that naive, but I couldn’t believe you just wouldn’t load up the Wikipedia page or the New York Times Indiana primary results page from May 3, 2016. But they hadn’t. They didn’t. And they didn’t want to sort of contextualize what happened in Indiana just a couple of days ago. That was May 10. We’re now May 13. Or rather, the last update to the results was May 10. We’re now May 13. And people are still talking about this.So let me go through it very quickly but comprehensively so that people understand that Nikki Haley is not getting one-fifth of the vote in the Republican primary in Indiana.Now, having said all of that, Nikki Haley got one-fifth of the vote in the Indiana presidential primary, the Republican primary. However, the things you need to understand for that number to make any sense are threefold. Number one, there’s nobody else in the race apart from her and Donald Trump there. You had a situation where it’s not an open, open primary, but it’s not a closed primary. It’s what they call a semi-closed, semi-open primary. And so you do have the ability for independents and Democrats to change their affiliation and cast their votes appropriately. Now, we know this has been happening in the past. We know this has happened for a long time. Over the course of the early part of this year. I even wrote an article about it on February 25, if you want to go and look that up. It’s called 40% of Republicans didn’t vote against Trump. In South Carolina, Obama operatives used Democrat voters to boost her. And in this article, it’s not too long. Impressed with myself. These things can get lengthy when you go into the details, but I went into the detail on this group Primary Pivot, which is another one of these groups convened by Lincoln Project types.It’s actually conceived by an ex Obama era USAID staffer called Kenneth Schlafler. And they were effectively en masse, texting, emailing, spending hundreds of thousands of dollars in Super Tuesday states to send to Democrats the message that, hey, you can re-register as a Republican and vote against Donald Trump. And a lot of people did that. And that was the source of a lot of votes for Trump’s opponents in the GOP primaries on the run up to Super Tuesday were, in fact, Democrats. I know a lot of you already know that. Just to reiterate that in the context of Indiana, there will be, of course, people who had done that on the run up to Indiana, hoping that they would be able to make a difference. And I suspect a significant chunk of that is reflected in those Indiana results.The second part you need to understand is how primaries work. The idea of a primary isn’t necessarily for the leading contender to take...
