What's motivating Haley and Trump supporters

A look at the final county chair survey results

The Republican presidential nomination contest has been down to just Donald Trump and Nikki Haley for roughly a month now, and since the race is at something of a pause until this weekend, it seemed like a good time to do one last survey of county party chairs.

For this survey, I spoke to 104 county Republican Party chairs across the country during the first three weeks of February. (The main results of this survey will soon appear in an article in Politico.)

I was curious about, among other things, what was motivating these chairs to back the candidate they were backing. I gave them five main choices, and they could pick two of them:

• the candidate was most likely to be an effective president

• the candidate cares about the issues they care about

• the candidate was most likely to defeat the Democratic nominee

• to push back at people trying to keep the candidate from succeeding

• the candidate makes them proud as Americans

The results can be seen in the chart below. What we see is that the county chairs overwhelmingly prioritize effectiveness as president, with 59% giving that answer. Roughly 40% said they wanted both someone who shares their priorities and also someone who could beat the Democratic nominee. At the lower end, with around 14% support each, were those who wanted to push back at a candidate’s critics or wanted someone who makes them proud.

When we drill down by candidate support, we get a better sense of how these rationales apply to the different candidates. Notably, Trump leads in all the categories by wide margins, with the exception of the electability question, where Haley beats Trump 49-29. And electability is, importantly, the issue Haley brings up all the time at campaign events; it’s the one issue where she has a clear advantage over Trump among at least some Republicans, even if it’s not necessarily the most important issue in their minds.

I also asked the chairs about how they plan to vote if the candidate they don’t prefer becomes the nominee.