The daughter-in-law of former president Donald Trump, Lara Trump (wife of Eric Trump), is vying for the job of co-chair of the Republican National Committee (RNC). On Real America’s Voice, the former Inside Edition producer said: “I can assure you there will be no funny business,” and “Anyone who is not on board with seeing Donald Trump as the 47th president… is welcome to leave.”
Lara Trump, the newly nominated co-chair of the RNC says that anyone who doesn’t support Trump is “welcome to leave.”
“That’s part of the reason that I’m such a great fit for this; there’s no one more loyal to Donald Trump…Than the person you’re looking at right here” pic.twitter.com/GNJpNH4BxF
— Republicans against Trump (@RpsAgainstTrump) March 5, 2024
The former president is the frontrunner in the GOP presidential race and is likely to clinch the nomination after Super Tuesday — but in states including South Carolina, his one and only GOP challenger, former US Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley, has garnered a quarter or a third of Republican votes in the primaries.
Lara Trump is inviting Nikki Haley voters to leave the GOP — is she encouraging them to vote for Biden?
Billionaire Mark Cuban made news recently saying he’d vote for Haley in the Texas primary as a protest against Trump and that he’d vote for Biden on his death bed rather than cast a ballot for 45 to become 47. Old school conservative Bill Kristol, who anticipated Lara Trump’s invitation and left the Republican party earlier, wrote this morning that he too voted for Haley in the Virginia primary.
The all-or-nothing Lara Trump approach is a risk. Pushing away Haley voters — a not insignificant statistical number in the primaries so far — in what looks like a close general election seems profligate. The calculation is based on the former President’s recent claim, where he said: “I don’t need votes, we have all the votes we need.” (This will no doubt come as a relief to Brad Raffensberger.)
Trump: I don’t need votes. We have all the votes we need pic.twitter.com/hMYyWDxeqA
— Biden-Harris HQ (@BidenHQ) March 5, 2024
As ABC News reports: “Trump has done best with primary voters who identify as Republican, winning 70 percent or more of them in New Hampshire and South Carolina, per the exit polls. He’s also done better among those who don’t have a four-year college degree (67 percent or better in those two states) or identify as white evangelical Christians (70 percent or more),” while Haley has done better among independents (around 3 in 5 of them in New Hampshire and South Carolina), college graduates, and voters who didn’t identify as white born-again Christians.
That’s a large group of people to cast out, especially the 60% of independent voters in an election where neither candidate is a popular figure.