Nikki Haley got 77,761 votes — or 13.2% — in Georgia's primary election yesterday against frontrunner Donald Trump — and she wasn't even on the ballot.
And the South Carolina governor's percentage points more than tripled in parts of Atlanta, shooting up to 40% in DeKalb County and 38% in Fulton County, according to Meidas Touch Network.
We're talking about a state in which Republican candidates won the presidency for 20 years straight — from 1996–2016, according to USElectionAtlas.org. It wasn't until 2020, after Georgians got a load of what a MAGA presidency looked like, that the state turned blue again, with the majority voting for President Biden (by a slim margin).
"This is BIG! Trump's problems in the suburbs continue in Georgia," said longtime Republican and co-founder of The Lincoln Project Mike Madrid, via Newsweek. "Lemme say it again: Trumps got a real problem with the Republican base."
And from Meidas Touch:
Nearly 60% of Nikki Haley primary voters have consistently said in polls they will never vote for Donald Trump. Trump's underperformance in the largest counties in the state in the primary are a massive red flag for his campaign ahead of the general election in November.
If that level of "never Trump" vote holds, Trump will have a very hard time winning Georgia's 16 electoral votes, which are crucial for winning the presidency.
The Trump Party all but officially replaced the grand ol' Republican Party on Monday. And if the mindless MAGA mob, whose memory is non-existent, doesn't change their tactics — which they won't, being that Trump owns them — it's going to be hard to avoid a repeat of 2018, 2020, and 2022.