Washington – Donald Trump is sweeping all before him in the race for the Republican presidential nomination, but the primary votes have unveiled some worrying obstacles in his path to a second term in the White House.

Despite having a virtual lock on the nomination ahead of this week’s 15-state « Super Tuesday » voting bonanza, the 77-year-old has been hemorrhaging moderate Republicans, who have signaled they’d prefer someone else — anyone else — in the Oval Office.

His double-digit victories over Nikki Haley in the early voting states have also obscured flashing red lights over his standing with the independents he’ll need to prevail against President Joe Biden in November.

In New Hampshire, independents broke 2-to-1 for Haley, and she bested Trump among South Carolina’s suburban voters, a key constituency that will likely hold the keys to the White House.

Some 40% of her supporters in the Palmetto State, where she was governor for six years, said in exit polls that they were opposed to Trump.

Alyssa Farah Griffin, a communications director in the Trump White House, warned that Haley’s vote share was a « five-alarm fire » for her former boss.

« Somebody who’s running as virtually an incumbent — Donald Trump — getting 60%, and 40% being against him? That’s not a mandate, » she said on a CNN discussion panel.

Trump waved away Haley’s 43% share in New Hampshire, pointing to regulations allowing for mass participation by non-Republicans in a state deemed the former U.N. ambassador’s best chance for success.

But he had no such excuse in deeply conservative South Carolina, where pollsters found that just 5% of voters in the Republican primary identified as Democrats. Meanwhile almost half of Republican caucus-goers backed other candidates in deeply conservative Iowa.

« Donald Trump has a problem, whether he wants to admit it or not, » Haley said in a statement putting a gloss on her 42-point defeat to Trump in the latest primary in Michigan on Tuesday. Lire la suite »