Former adviser to President George W. Bush Karl Rove warned Donald Trump that the former president’s attitude toward Nikki Haley’s supporters threatens his reelection bid this November.
Rove claimed that with the electoral makeup of the 2024 election so close, Trump should not upset supporters of the former U.N. ambassador because their lack of support for him could benefit President Joe Biden instead. More than 76,000 voters chose Haley in Tuesday night’s Wisconsin primary, representing a significant percentage of voters still not sold on Trump.
“Mr. Trump’s attitude to his rivals’ supporters has gone from dismissiveness—’they always bend the knee’—to indifference, saying he doesn’t need ‘too many’ Haley supporters to win in November. He’s wrong,” Rove wrote in a Wall Street Journal op-ed on Wednesday.
Haley also won nearly 250,000 votes for the Republican nomination in North Carolina on Super Tuesday and another 77,000 in the Georgia primary a week later. Although Trump is the presumptive Republican nominee, he will likely need to court Haley’s voters in order to return to the White House. Haley has withheld an endorsement of Trump so far.
The former deputy chief of staff in the Bush White House noted that Biden also faces challenges this election after a Wall Street Journal poll found that he was trailing Trump in six out of seven swing states. Wisconsin, which is worth 10 Electoral College votes, has Trump and Biden tied if they are the only two candidates in the race.
Trump won Wisconsin in 2016 but lost the state by 20,000 votes in 2020.
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The other swing states of Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania all had Trump leading by 1-6 percentage points, respectively.
Rove attributed Biden’s low polling numbers to a likely “lack of enthusiasm.” But he noted that the 2024 election is still wide open and that “every candidate’s conduct on each day of the campaign could influence the outcome profoundly.”
