Welcome to Trail Mix, your 2024 election sanity guide. See something interesting on the trail? Email me at jake.lahut@thedailybeast.com. To get Trail Mix in your inbox, subscribe here for free.
This week, a look at how Biden and Trump could win over Haley voters. Plus, the Biden campaign beefs up for the general election, and fallout from the California Senate race.
THE JOEVERTURE
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When Nikki Haley dropped out of the 2024 presidential race and effectively ushered in the general election campaign, the Trump and Biden teams had drastically different responses.
President Joe Biden credited Haley for being among the “few” who “dare to speak the truth about Donald Trump” and invited her supporters to back him.
“Donald Trump made it clear he doesn’t want Nikki Haley’s supporters,” Biden said. “I want to be clear: There is a place for them in my campaign.
Indeed, Trump—in his statement trolling Haley—suggested he could take or leave her supporters.
“Nikki Haley got TROUNCED last night, in record setting fashion,” Trump said in a post on Truth Social minutes before Haley actually dropped out. After some rambling, he went on to say he’d “further like to invite all of the Haley supporters to join the greatest movement in the history of our Nation.”
The glaring gap between those statements crystalizes the opportunity before Biden to win support from Republicans and independents who just couldn’t stomach Trump.
Former Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley hosts a campaign event in Fort Worth, Texas, on March 4, 2024.
Shelby Tauber/Reuters“Donald Trump is not only ignoring Nikki Haley supporters—he is driving them away with personal attacks and his extreme Project 2025 agenda,” Ammar Moussa, the Biden campaign’s director of rapid response, told The Daily Beast in a statement.
“What’s more, he’s made it clear he doesn’t want their votes,” Moussa continued. “President Biden was clear yesterday, there is a place for everyone in this campaign who cares about our shared ideals—preserving American democracy, standing up for the rule of law, and treating each other with decency and dignity and respect—and we’ll make that case to voters every day between now and November.”
As for Trump, his campaign would not say what they’re doing to court the Haley vote—if anything. Spokespeople for the Trump campaign didn’t respond to requests to comment on their plans to reach out to their former rival’s supporters.
But Alex Pfeiffer, a spokesperson for the major pro-Trump super PAC MAGA, Inc, argued the former president “embodies” the solutions Haley voters are looking for, and they’ll find their way back into the Trump coalition.
“We anticipate a broad range of voters to turn out for President Trump’s landslide victory in November,” Pfeiffer told The Daily Beast.
Looking at the responses from both Biden and Trump, some Haley supporters feel like they will be stuck in the political wilderness for the foreseeable future.
“I definitely feel like that’s where a lot of Haley supporters think they are,” Kim Rice, one of Haley’s campaign co-chairs in New Hampshire, told The Daily Beast. “I’m not MAGA, so where do I belong? Where do I fit in? And I’m not a Democrat, much to the dismay of MAGA.”
If the election were held today, Rice said, she’d still show up to vote, but without a clear idea of who to back at the top of the ticket.
For now, ambivalence is coming from the top. When Haley ended her campaign, she did not endorse Trump—and it’s unclear if she ever will, even though she has signaled she views a second Biden term more negatively.
In her speech, Haley instead put the onus on Trump to “earn the votes of those in our party and beyond it who did not support him.”
Even if they don’t have specific plans to reach Haley voters now, both campaigns will eventually need to: they could decide the election.
While Haley’s coalition couldn’t propel her to victory in a GOP primary, she has enough supporters to easily sway the outcome of another Trump-Biden matchup that will likely be decided by the narrowest of margins.
In primary elections in battleground states like Michigan and North Carolina, Haley pulled roughly a quarter of the vote; in New Hampshire, it was over 40 percent. If even a minority of those voters do not cast a ballot for Trump in November, his bid for another term in the White House will be in serious trouble.
Notably, the same type of voter attracted to Haley—college-educated, affluent, and closer to the center—is broadly the type of voter both campaigns see as crucial to winning key battleground states.
Even if they do not have any current plans to target Haley voters specifically, the Biden campaign appears more attuned to these dynamics.
“Trump is greatly underperforming with the voters who will decide the election in November,” the campaign said in a post-Super Tuesday state-of-the-race memo to the press.
“Primary after primary, moderate Republicans, independents, college educated Republicans overwhelmingly showed they do not want to support Donald Trump,” the source close to the Biden campaign said.
But there may very well be a different calculus among the donor class. According to NBC News, there has been contact this week between the Biden team and Haley donors, including from Biden national co-chair Jeffrey Katzenberg, a media executive with extensive connections.
“Donors are gonna do what they wanna do,” said Rice, who donated to Haley in small amounts. “I think for the big donors, we just want some civility back in this country, and maybe that’s what they’re looking for.”
But many Haley supporters aren’t warming to Biden, even if they loathe Trump. Even supporting a third-party bid, for some, is off the table.
There’s also the likelihood that most Haley voters eventually rationalize themselves into voting for Trump, albeit begrudgingly, just like supporters for Trump’s 2016 challengers did.
“Faced with two terrible options, my sense is most people are just going to default to whichever side they fell on previously without putting a whole lot more thought into it,” the second Haley supporter said.
However, based on the demographic and exit poll data so far, Trump is going to have potentially a much harder time winning back those Haley voters, according to Democratic pollster Evan Roth Smith.
Three ABC News exit polls taken from California, North Carolina, and Virginia found at least 68 percent of Haley voters said they wouldn’t support Trump in November. It’s one of the strongest data points the Biden team has seen thus far, according to the source close to the campaign.
Trump clearly needs to shore up his coalition, Roth Smith said.
“Trump is gonna have a really hard time winning Haley voters. One of the lead findings from our current round of polling is that voters have really deep concerns around both of these candidates,” he said. “Biden, I think, has work to do. They won’t fall into his lap.”
In another memo, the Biden campaign pointed to Trump’s struggles in suburban and college town precincts as the biggest warning signs, particularly around the issues of abortion and Trump “undermining our democracy” in the wake of the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol.
Until she sees a major shakeup in the race, Rice said it’s neither Trump nor Biden who could inherit most Haley voters. Especially for the former president, at the moment, there’s too much bad blood to open the possibility of a genuine reconciliation.
Rice said there was a major turning point in the 2024 primary which made her less likely to fall in line with Trump.
“Anybody that makes a ‘Contribution’ to Birdbrain, from this moment forth, will be permanently barred from the MAGA camp,” Trump said on Truth Social in late January.
Despite everything else Trump has done to bend and break political norms, that one crossed a line for Rice.
“He broke a rule when he went after her supporters,” she said. “A lot of us took that very seriously, and we were like, ‘OK, let me go donate, then.’ You wanna threaten us because we support her? That became personal.”
President Joe Biden delivers remarks before a meeting of his Competition Council, in the State Dining Room at the White House in Washington, DC, on March 5, 2024.
Evelyn Hockstein/ReutersBIDEN’S AIDES OF MARCH
Biden’s re-election campaign is gearing up for what will be the longest general election in history, and top aides aren’t just trying to win in November—they want to win in March, too.
With Trump now all but certain to be the GOP nominee, Biden’s team sees the month of March as an “inflection point” in the race and is planning to significantly ramp up its staffing, ad spending, and travel this month.
“We are finally here in everyone’s eyes. The primary is over. The election is upon us,” Dan Kanninen, Biden’s battleground states director, told The Daily Beast. “But we have been preparing for this for a while.”
Kanninen emphasized that, while eight months out from Election Day, voters would start to see a big uptick in campaigning. For one, the size of Biden’s operation in battleground states will grow significantly in the coming weeks. “We will go from dozens to hundreds of staff in battlegrounds over the month of March,” Kanninen said.
For another, Kanninen said travel to key states —both for Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris, as well as for key surrogates—would be aggressive this month. Biden aides and top Democrats have also previously indicated they would pick up their ad spending once the general election begins.
In many ways, with Super Tuesday behind both Biden and Trump, the State of the Union speech Thursday night was the unofficial kickoff for Biden’s general election campaign. And it may finally be the moment that voters see the race as a binary choice.
While Kanninen rejected the focus on Biden v. Trump polling this early—“head-to-head polls this far out are about as useful as a weather report eight months out”—he did predict that the president’s poll numbers would shift once voters see the race as a two-man contest.
Kanninen noted there’s still “a large chunk of the electorate that doesn't get” that it’s a race between the president and his predecessor. Biden’s internal polling earlier this year, according to senior campaign officials, found that nearly 75 percent of all undecided voters headed into 2024 didn’t believe Trump would be Biden’s opponent in November.
March could be that prove-it moment for the Biden campaign, with the increase in staff, activity, and ad spending aiming to wake voters up that Biden or Trump is their actual choice—again.
“That won't happen overnight,” Kanninen said. “There'll be a bit of a tail. But I do think that will sink in more and more in this whole catalyzing moment throughout the general election.”
He added that ramping up the campaign in March was an effort to bring the head-to-head race into focus now and “accelerate that for sure.”
“The work that we're going to do in March isn’t necessarily about in this single month winning all the votes and mobilizing all the voters you need. But the point is that this work… takes time,” he said.
Representative Adam Schiff speaks at an event on the day of the Super Tuesday primary election, at the Avalon Theater in Los Angeles, California, on March 5, 2024.
Aude Guerrucci/ReutersCALIFORNIA DREAMIN’
After Rep. Adam Schiff’s primary victory on Tuesday, the contest for U.S. Senate in California may be effectively over—but the fight to own the narrative of the race is not.
By spending heavily to boost GOP candidate Steve Garvey in the open primary, Schiff helped power the Republican to a second-place finish, boxing out Rep. Katie Porter (D-CA) from the November general election.
Before and after the primary election, Porter and her allies howled that the move was selfish and harmful to Democrats’ overall political outlook.
The Progressive Change Campaign Committee, which had backed Porter, issued a statement after the election alleging Schiff maneuvered to help himself at the expense of Democrats in California’s many competitive U.S. House races.
“By lifting up Republican Steve Garvey,” the group said, Schiff effectively set up high turnout for “Trump voters in key House races that could determine control of Congress.”
The spin was audacious, to put it charitably. By far the most powerful driver of turnout among Trump voters this fall will be Trump himself, not a Republican running a perfunctory Senate campaign.
On the ground, there are other reasons Democrats in California and beyond are breathing a sigh of relief that an intra-party clash of the titans has been averted.
Without Schiff and Porter drawing valuable dollars from big and small donors, Democratic House candidates stand to benefit, strategists told The Daily Beast.
“The lack of a drawn-out Dem-on-Dem U.S. Senate contest… could save Democrats several million which could then be redirected into key battleground contests down-ballot,” said Dave Jacobson, a Democratic operative in California who has advised House candidates.
There will also be a precipitous drop in the number of TV ads for the Senate race in California’s pricey media markets, giving down-ballot candidates more airtime at less expensive rates. “Anything to help provide clear airwaves for the House races is a benefit,” said one Democratic strategist.
Democrats also expect that Schiff will put his time and money to use for fellow Democrats running in tough races in California. Since Tuesday, Schiff has also sent out fundraising solicitations for five Democrats in competitive House districts.
While it’s not known yet how much cash Schiff has on hand after the primary, he was sitting on a war chest of nearly $14 million two weeks before the March 5 election.
For some Senate Democrats, it might be welcome that the California race is effectively over. GOP operatives openly rooted for an expensive Schiff-Porter race that would be a distraction for liberals’ money and attention.
Instead, Schiff now has a golden opportunity to curry favor with his future colleagues and help elect some new ones. On Tuesday, while Californians were still voting, Schiff’s campaign sent out an email to its massive fundraising list asking for donations to be split between himself and Rep. Ruben Gallego, who is running for U.S. Senate in Arizona.
A bruising intraparty battle in California might have been a solid opportunity for the progressive wing to expand its influence, but few Democrats saw any benefit beyond it.
As a Democratic operative who has run House campaigns in California texted The Daily Beast, “Thank God Schiff got Democrats out of that situation.”
POLLING STATION
Four years after he left office in disgrace and amid a pandemic response he bungled and an insurrection, something unusual is happening: voters are sort of forgetting about it.
Call it Trump amnesia—or one of the biggest problems for the Biden campaign in 2024.
The Trump presidency was so unpopular with voters that Biden cobbled together a broad coalition premised on simply ending the chaos and returning the economy, public health, and democratic institutions to normalcy.
Upon leaving office in January 2021, Trump’s approval rating sat at an average of 38.6 percent following a precipitous dip in the aftermath of the Capitol riot.
A little more than three years later, a March survey from Climate Power shared with The Daily Beast found 52 percent of likely voters now give the Trump administration positive approval.
The Trump presidency might as well be “ancient history” for most voters, according to Democratic pollster Evan Roth Smith.
“You have to remind voters of all the reasons they dumped Trump in 2020,” Roth Smith said.
Notably, one reason voters might be looking more favorably at Trump is because a significant number of Americans still don’t expect the former president to actually return to office.
Only four in ten voters believe Trump is going to be the GOP nominee, according to the Climate Power survey, despite him being within striking distance of clinching the nomination mathematically.
Roth Smith’s firm, Slingshot Strategies, made a similar finding: in their March poll, only 68 percent of Americans said they think the general election will be between Trump and Biden.
These voters are “genuinely in disbelief” over the prospect of a 2020 rematch, Roth Smith said, putting the onus on the Biden campaign to hammer home just how bad things were during the Trump presidency, particularly during the pandemic.
The most effective messaging Slingshot's Blueprint polling project has tested thus far has centered around Trump as an an out of touch rich man who’s only looking out for himself, the pollster said, rather than focusing on his handling of the pandemic or even Jan. 6, though the firm has found the latter still has some staying power.
“We can afford for voters to forget a lot about Trump,” Roth Smith said. “We cannot afford for them to forget that he is a rich guy who helps other rich guys.”
OFF THE BEATEN PATH
Au revoir, J.R. One of MAGA’s biggest losers of the 2022 election, Ohio Republican J.R. Majewski, has pulled off a rare feat in politics: the double dropout.
In April 2023, Majewski launched a comeback bid against Rep. Marcy Kaptur (R-OH)—who defeated him by a wide margin in 2022—but dropped out weeks later, citing his mother dealing with a health issue.
By September 2023, Majewski was back in the race—until February, when he said he was considering dropping out before vowing not to do it.
Finally, last Sunday, he dropped out, again, for good.
Even by the standards of a wacky candidate who dubiously claimed to be a combat veteran—and claimed to be a congressman at a D.C. nightclub—the saga was bizarre and confusing.
Apparently, the confusion extended to Majewski’s own campaign. A senior Majewski aide told The Daily Beast they had no idea he was going to resign until the candidate posted the announcement on X.
“Basically what it was looking like outwardly was what it was looking like on the inside,” the now-former Majewski staffer said, requesting anonymity to discuss the final days of the campaign. “When he put out that tweet, I didn’t even know about it.”
Majewski was under significant pressure from Trump’s orbit and from House Speaker Mike Johnson to step aside and clear room for new recruit Derrick Merrin, but nobody could seem to convince him.
On a podcast in February, Majewski went on a rant about “Democrats living in mom’s basement,” calling the opposition party “fucking retarded” in an attempt at a joke about the Special Olympics. The episode once again showed Majewski’s unfitness for a campaign, the former aide said.
“I don’t think he’s a bad guy,” the former Majewski staffer said. “He’s just an idiot and doesn’t think.”
His next destination, the aide said, will likely be an Ohio-based role on the Trump campaign.
Primary colors. Super Tuesday offered some glimpses into MAGA discontent with lawmakers perceived as not being fully on board the Trump Train. While no incumbent lost a primary challenge, several from safely Republican districts performed markedly worse than they did in previous election cycles.
Rep. Steve Womack (R-AR), for instance, eked out a narrow victory of 54 percent to 46 percent over Clint Penzo, an Arkansas state senator who ran to his right but raised and spent less than $100,000 in the race. In 2022, Womack defeated Neil Robinson Kumar in a primary by a margin of 79 percent to 21 percent. Womack vocally lamented the ouster of Kevin McCarthy by a far-right faction and faced MAGA disdain for refusing to back Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH) as his successor.
In his GOP primary, Rep. Dan Crenshaw (R-TX) won by a margin of 59 percent to 40 percent over Jameson Ellis—the same hard-right opponent he defeated by a 74 percent to 16 percent margin two years ago. Crenshaw has tangled prominently with Trump-aligned colleagues and did not endorse the former president until a month before Super Tuesday.
In his northeast Texas district, Rep. Jake Ellzey (R-TX) won just over 60 percent of the vote, while two MAGA candidates each polled at roughly 20 percent of the vote. In 2022, Ellzey won over 70 percent of the vote. Like Womack, Ellzey did not support Jordan for Speaker, and aligned with the GOP’s center wing to back government funding and Ukraine aid. He and Crenshaw both endorsed Trump on the same day.
CAMPAIGN LIT
Florida ‘panhandling.’ A breakaway super PAC is ruffling feathers in Trumpworld and causing some serious drama around Mar-a-Lago, Roger Sollenberger and Reese Gorman report.
Another disappearing independent Sinema. Ending years of speculation, Sen. Krysten Sinema (I-AZ) announced she won’t seek re-election in 2024, Sam Brodey reports.
Trying to GAF about IVF. A glaring weakness for the GOP emerged once again after a wave of copy and paste statements from Republican candidates revealed their hypocrisy over in-vitro fertilization, Riley Rogerson reports.
Despair in the departure lounge. The general election kicked off Wednesday with dropout announcements from Nikki Haley and Dean Phillips, Jake Lahut reports.
Carolina hurricane. Trump favorite Mark Robinson is officially the GOP nominee for governor in North Carolina and brings an unprecedented level of baggage to the nationally watched race, Jake reports.
