Harry Enten on Republican Primaries: ‘Trump’s Endorsements Have Been as Good as Gold’

COLLINS: “But all of that may not matter because we are about to find out tonight just how strong Donald Trump‘s grip is on the Republican base and if his opinion is the only one that matters. This race pits Good up against the Trump-backed state senator in Virginia, John McGuire. Those polls closed at 7:00 P.M. Eastern and here‘s where the results stand right now. 66% of the vote is in, so we still have more to come, but look how close this race is. You can see John McGuire right now has 50.6% of the vote, Bob Good is at 49.4%? Look how close those margins are. It is incredibly close as we are watching all of this tonight, this test of Donald Trump, who was endorsed the name you see there to the top, John McGuire, against Bob Good, the chairman of the very influential House Freedom Caucus. My source tonight to help put these numbers into context that we are seeing here as we are watching all of this, CNN’s senior data Reporter, Harry Enten. Harry, I mean, obviously, this race is so close right now at this moment.”
ENTEN:” Razor, razor-tight. My goodness gracious. You rarely — I get excited on nights like this, where, you know, I watch these old videos and I see how tight the races were in like election 2000, and finally we get a race tonight, as tight as we have it right now.”
COLLINS: “Yeah. And so, obviously, the question here is about Trump‘s endorsement and how powerful that‘s ultimately going to be. Because really, there‘s basically no policy differences between these two Republicans on anything substantive, but Donald Trump is backing one of them and not the other.”
ENTEN: “Correct. As you mentioned, the incumbent committed the cardinal sin of initially backing Ron DeSantis. How dare he. How dare he. And you looked at primaries so far this season, and Trump‘s endorsement has been as good as good as gold. Before tonight, only one candidate who he backed lost their primary. Look at that, 88 wins to 1. And I went back, I looked at 2022, I looked at 2020, I looked at 2018. More Trump-endorsed candidates are winning this year than in any year prior, at least as a percentage so far. So tonight is an ultimate test of Trump‘s power.”
COLLINS: “Yeah, and that‘s really interesting because the other part is, lightening speed after Ron DeSantis got out of the race, Bob Good came out and did endorse Donald Trump, so he did try to make up for it. Clearly, it didn‘t mean a lot to Trump. But the other thing here that matters, if Bob Good goes down, is it‘s an incumbent being defeated.”
ENTEN: “It‘s exactly right. I feel like we have a power match-up here, right, between Trump‘s endorsement and the power of incumbency. And so far this year, incumbents have been winning all over the place. Look at this: re-nominated, 228, just one has lost and that was to a fellow incumbent. So, you rarely ever see incumbents lose, so this evening we have this thing where you see incumbents rarely lose and you see Trump-backed candidates rarely lose. One of those two powers is gonna go down tonight. Which one? We‘ll have to wait and see.”
COLLINS: “Okay, Harry, I‘ve a question about a few other races for you, but stand by because I know you‘re watching all these numbers.”
ENTEN: “You know I am.”
COLLINS: “We have a projection, we are going to make it here, but we also have some context here of this big race in Virginia that normally we would not be talking about, but because of the dynamics here that we just laid out, it matters and we‘ll see what the implications of it are, what we can read from the results.”