A north-east political scientist says that while the “non-aligned” campaign generated plenty of headlines, the votes themselves are largely symbolic.
With Nikki Haley withdrawal from the match for the President – and barring any unforeseen developments – a Biden-Trump rematch is all but locked in.
But there is another story brewing. In addition to Donald Trump being declared the clear winner in the Republican primary, Super Tuesday results showed a large group of Democratic voters declaring themselves “unattached” in the wake of President Joe Biden. declining support.
What began as a local campaign in response to Biden's handling of the Israel-Hamas war, “Listen up Michigan” has now gone national, with hundreds of thousands of registered Democrats withdrawing their support for Biden during Tuesday's primaries.
The vote was tied or “no preference”. recorded en masse in states such as Massachusetts, North Carolina and Colorado.
Nick Beauchampassistant professor of political science at Northeastern, says that while the “non-aligned” campaign generated a lot of headlines, the votes themselves — given that both Biden and Trump are running largely uncontested — are largely symbolic.
Northeastern Global News sat down with Beauchamp to discuss the results of Super Tuesday and whether the unbound push will have any staying power in November. His comments have been edited for brevity and clarity.
Let's start with your reaction to Super Tuesday. How do you read these results?
Mostly, it was what we expected. My point is that we have an establishment candidate against a semi-establishment, and what we're seeing with Biden is pretty much what you'd expect from a sitting president at this point. It's not too different from what happened, let's say [Barack] Obama.
With Trump, he's putting out a performance that's somewhere between what he did in 2016 and what he did in 2020, when he was an actual incumbent. So the rates are somewhere between what you would expect for an incumbent and what you would expect for a non-incumbent. [Trump’s] cleared the field and Biden had the field clear from the start.
The interesting question now is what happens even in the next primary in terms of what percentage of voters remain undecided and what percentage will “go home,” so to speak. What percentage of those Haley voters – many of them were former supporters [Ron] DeSantis — are they going to support Trump, and how quickly will that happen in light of these results?
What do you think about “non-aligned voters” and do you see them as a response to Biden's missteps in the Middle East? Likewise, do you think of Haley's base in the same vein — as a group that might not fall back in line under Trump so easily?
Haley's message seemed clear enough: convince us, she says. Of course, Trump's message is something like, “I am who I am, get back into the fold.” Consider, too, that many of the people who voted for Haley were true independents. Democratic independents. and a whole host of other factions that might not vote for Trump in the general election.
But some of these percentages are simply artifacts of qualifying in general. Haley appeals to voters with higher turnout. Trump appeals to less-educated whites, and Haley appeals to more-educated whites — and the latter tend to turn out much more. In some ways, the fact that primaries are inherently low-ball elections boosts Haley's numbers above what we might have seen in the general election.
On the Democratic side, you can clearly trace some of the unaffiliated voters in Michigan and Minnesota – even here in Massachusetts – directly to these coordinated campaigns, which are clearly in reaction, in large part, to the war in Gaza.
When push comes to shove, do you think these non-preferred voters will carry their campaign all the way to the general election, or do the primaries provide a space for them to capture what could be seen as protest votes?
I think that for most of these unaffiliated voters, they know that the stake is only symbolic at this stage. There is no effect on the actual election results, so these are essentially costless protest votes.
A certain percentage of primary voters say they won't vote in the general election, and there's always a percentage of Democrats who don't vote for the Democratic nominee, and vice versa. Will we see a higher percentage of voters who don't? Probably a slightly larger number.
If we trust the polls, we know that there are a good number of unhappy younger voters on the Democratic side, including quite a few disaffected black and Hispanic voters. It seems pretty clear that a certain percentage of them are either not going to vote for Biden, or are going to vote for a third party, or possibly even Trump (although that probably goes to a very small fraction of them).
I think in terms of the Biden campaign, they're going to target independent voters with a lot of inclination, because that's where the campaign really sees the marginal difference. The goal for Biden and his people is to get those voters to grit their teeth and vote for him — and avoid the scenario where they grit their teeth and vote for Trump.
