Donald Trump has a massive lead over Nikki Haley in Washington’s 2024 Republican presidential primary, NPI poll finds

Neo­fas­cist Don­ald Trump’s cam­paign is on course to blow out rival Nik­ki Haley in the Ever­green State’s upcom­ing pres­i­den­tial pri­ma­ry and cap­ture all of Wash­ing­ton’s 2024 Repub­li­can Nation­al Con­ven­tion del­e­gates, a new poll con­duct­ed last week for the North­west Pro­gres­sive Insti­tute has found.

A whop­ping 77% of like­ly Repub­li­can pres­i­den­tial pri­ma­ry vot­ers sur­veyed Feb­ru­ary 20th-23rd by Civiqs for NPI said Trump was their pref­er­ence this year, while only 8% said Haley was. Anoth­er 7% said they planned to vote for Ron DeSan­tis, who dropped out after a dis­ap­point­ing fin­ish in the Iowa Repub­li­can cau­cus­es. 1% of respon­dents backed Chris Christie and anoth­er 1% backed Vivek Ramaswamy, who are also out of the race but still on the bal­lot, like DeSantis.

An addi­tion­al 6% of respon­dents said they were undecided.

It would­n’t be unprece­dent­ed for Trump to receive the sup­port of more than sev­en in ten Repub­li­can vot­ers in Wash­ing­ton, because he’s done it before.

The last time Trump appeared on a pres­i­den­tial pri­ma­ry bal­lot in Wash­ing­ton with a bunch of rivals who had stopped cam­paign­ing, he gar­nered 75.46% of the vote. That was back in May of 2016, dur­ing Barack Oba­ma’s presidency.

Trump had been com­pet­ing against Ted Cruz, John Kasich, and Ben Car­son, but they all bowed out before Wash­ing­ton’s pri­ma­ry was held. Trump crushed them: Cruz gar­nered 10.81% of the vote, Kasich got 9.78%, and Car­son got 3.96%.

Trump faced no rivals on the 2020 Repub­li­can pres­i­den­tial pri­ma­ry bal­lot four years ago (where­as Democ­rats had a large field for much of the cycle) and accord­ing­ly received 98.4% of the vote, with 684,239 Wash­ing­to­ni­ans cast­ing votes for him. There were also 11,136 write-in votes for anoth­er candidate.

Despite his incite­ment of the Jan­u­ary 6th insur­rec­tion, despite his pletho­ra of fed­er­al and state indict­ments, despite big judg­ments against him in mul­ti­ple civ­il cas­es, despite his record of los­ing, and despite his com­ments about being a dic­ta­tor on day one and let­ting Rus­sia do what­ev­er it wants to our allies, a huge num­ber of Repub­li­can vot­ers are still hap­pi­ly with Trump. And he knows it.

For­mer South Car­oli­na Gov­er­nor Nik­ki Haley has become increas­ing­ly com­fort­able cri­tiquing Trump on the cam­paign trail, but her argu­ments just aren’t res­onat­ing with most Repub­li­can vot­ers. She has yet to win a nom­i­nat­ing contest.

How­ev­er, she has still out­per­formed many pun­dits’ expec­ta­tions, and her totals in New Hamp­shire, South Car­oli­na, and Michi­gan sug­gest she could end up with more than 8% of the vote in Wash­ing­ton’s pres­i­den­tial pri­ma­ry. Those unde­cid­ed vot­ers have to go some­where, for instance, if they’re real­ly going to vote.

Add the unde­cid­ed group to Haley’s camp, and that would make 14%.

Haley’s performance in primary states

(States that have held cau­cus­es aren’t shown below)

New Hamp­shire

• Don­ald Trump: 54.4% (176,385 votes)
• Nik­ki Haley: 43.2% (140,290 votes)

South Car­oli­na

• Don­ald Trump: 59.8% votes (51,905 votes)
• Nik­ki Haley: 39.5% (298,681 votes)

Michi­gan (incom­plete results)

• Don­ald Trump: 68.2% (676,422 votes)
• Nik­ki Haley: 26.5% (263,386 votes)

It is also pos­si­ble that our poll over­states Trump’s sup­port, though the 2016 results sup­port the argu­ment that three quar­ters of Repub­li­can vot­ers in Wash­ing­ton are com­fort­able vot­ing for a sex­u­al preda­tor and a patho­log­i­cal liar.

And Haley’s per­cent­ages have been declin­ing from state to state. She was in the for­ties in New Hamp­shire, dropped into the thir­ties in South Car­oli­na, and is now in the twen­ties in Michi­gan. It’s entire­ly pos­si­ble that she’ll be in the teens when Wash­ing­ton weighs in. It does­n’t help that she has­n’t done any seri­ous cam­paign­ing here, though there is a group work­ing to build sup­port for her can­di­da­cy, which includes House Minor­i­ty Leader Drew Stokesbary.

Wash­ing­ton is what The Green Papers char­ac­ter­izes as a “win­ner take most” state. The Ever­green State’s del­e­gate allo­ca­tion will work as fol­lows:

All 43 of Wash­ing­ton’s del­e­gates to the Repub­li­can Nation­al Con­ven­tion are allo­cat­ed to pres­i­den­tial con­tenders based on the results of the vot­ing in today’s Pres­i­den­tial Primary.

• Each of the state’s 10 con­gres­sion­al dis­tricts is allo­cat­ed 3 delegates. 
  • If a can­di­date receives a major­i­ty of the vote or only 1 can­di­date receives 20% of the vote, that can­di­date receives all 3 delegates.
  • If there are 2 can­di­dates who receive at least 20% of the pri­ma­ry vote, then the top vote get­ter will be allo­cat­ed 2 del­e­gates and the oth­er can­di­date will be allo­cat­ed 1 delegate.
  • If no can­di­date receives at least 20% of the vote or more than 2 can­di­dates receive at least 20% of the vote, then the top three vote get­ters each receive 1 delegate.
• 13 at-large del­e­gates (10 base at-large del­e­gates plus 0 bonus del­e­gates plus 3 RNC del­e­gates) are allo­cat­ed based on the statewide vote. At-Large can­di­dates must receive at least 20% of the total statewide vote in order to be allo­cat­ed delegates. 
  • If a can­di­date receives a major­i­ty of the statewide vote, that can­di­date receives all 13 delegates.
  • Oth­er­wise, allo­ca­tion is in pro­por­tion to the total statewide vote NOT the total vote of those can­di­dates receiv­ing 20% or more of statewide vote. 
    • Com­pute the num­ber of del­e­gates allo­cat­ed to each Pres­i­den­tial can­di­date: 13 del­e­gates × can­di­date’s vote ÷ total statewide vote. Round to the near­est whole number.
    • If more than 13 del­e­gates are allo­cat­ed, sub­tract 1 del­e­gate from the can­di­date or can­di­dates fur­thest from the round­ing thresh­old until 13 del­e­gates have been allocated.
    • If few­er than 13 del­e­gates are allo­cat­ed (due to the 20% thresh­old or round­ing), those del­e­gates become unbound.

Note that the above only gov­erns del­e­gate allo­ca­tion to the Repub­li­can Nation­al Con­ven­tion. Demo­c­ra­t­ic Par­ty rules have some sim­i­lar­i­ties, but dif­fer in many ways. Democ­rats will also send a larg­er del­e­ga­tion to their convention.

Here’s the exact ques­tion we asked and the answers we received:

QUESTION: If the Repub­li­can pres­i­den­tial pri­ma­ry were being held today, who would you vote for?

ANSWERS:

• Don­ald Trump: 77%
• Nik­ki Haley: 8%
• Ron DeSan­tis: 7%
• Vivek Ramaswamy: 1%
• Chris Christie: 1%
• Unde­cid­ed: 6%

Before ask­ing this ques­tion, we asked our respon­dents how they felt about Don­ald Trump. 57% of them said they had a “very favor­able” opin­ion of him, while 27% said they had a “some­what favor­able” opin­ion, for a total of 84% favor­able. Only 16% had an unfa­vor­able opin­ion. 1% were not sure. Here’s the exact ques­tion we asked and the respons­es again, this time in list form:

QUESTION: What is your opin­ion of Don­ald Trump?

ANSWERS:

• Very favor­able: 57%
• Some­what favor­able: 27%
• Some­what unfa­vor­able: 5%
• Very unfa­vor­able: 11%
• Not sure: 1%

Our sur­vey of 522 like­ly 2024 Wash­ing­ton State Repub­li­can pri­ma­ry vot­ers was in the field from Tues­day, Feb­ru­ary 20th through Fri­day, Feb­ru­ary 23rd, 2024.

The poll was con­duct­ed for NPI by Civiqs, among select­ed mem­bers of the fir­m’s research pan­el. All sam­pled indi­vid­u­als were emailed by Civiqs and respond­ed using a per­son­al­ized link to the sur­vey at civiqs.com. The sur­vey has a mar­gin of error of ± 5.5% at the 95% con­fi­dence lev­el, account­ing for the design effect.

Like­ly Repub­li­can pri­ma­ry vot­ers are respon­dents who answered “Yes, in the Repub­li­can pri­ma­ry” to ques­tion 1 of the sur­vey, which asked if they were plan­ning to vote in the Wash­ing­ton pres­i­den­tial pri­ma­ry in March. Respon­dents must have also self-iden­ti­fied as a Repub­li­can or Inde­pen­dent in a pre­vi­ous Civiqs sur­vey. Only Repub­li­can and Inde­pen­dent vot­ers in Wash­ing­ton were sampled.

Wash­ing­ton’s 2024 Repub­li­can and Demo­c­ra­t­ic pres­i­den­tial pri­maries will con­clude on Tues­day, March 12th. For a vote to count, it must be cast for only one can­di­date from one par­ty, and the vot­er must affirm they wish to affil­i­ate with the major par­ty of the can­di­date they are vot­ing for by check­ing a box on the bal­lot return enve­lope. Bal­lots are due back by 8 PM Pacif­ic Time.

We have an exten­sive Q&A about vot­ing in the pri­ma­ry here for those inter­est­ed.