Remember when Super Tuesday revealed Trump wasn't as popular as he thought?

Donald Trump will be the Republican Party's presidential candidate in 2024 but there have been several indications that the former president isn't as popular as he thinks himself to be among some GOP voters. One big clue came with the results of primary voting on Super Tuesday.

Nikki Haley was the last obstacle standing in the way of a presidential rematch between Donald Trump and Joe Biden. But following Haley's exit from the Republican Primary, things weren't looking as perfect as they could have for the former president. 

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Whether or not Trump would be able to beat Biden was called into question by some analysts after the former president's poor performance on Super Tuesday. Haley was able to pull in a large percentage of the vote in several important states. 

For example, Newsweek noted Haley took anywhere between twenty to forty percent of the vote in several states on Super Tuesday. Why was this important? Because it revealed that Trump might not be able to beat Biden in 2024. 

Haley was able to attract 37% of the Republican primary vote in Massachusetts, 34% in Colorado, 29% in Minnesota, and 23% in North Carolina. Moreover, exit polling by NBC News revealed voters weren’t fully sold on Trump. 

Haley’s victories revealed that there was a large block of Republican voters who were willing to choose someone other than Trump. However, whether this group would choose Biden over Trump in the general election was, and still is, unclear. But we do have a few clues from the polling at the time. 

In North Carolina, Virginia, and California, about one-third of Republican voters said that they would not vote for the Republican nominee who was at the top of the ticket in 2024. Voters also were worried about Trump’s indictments. 

The former president was facing several indictments at the time and 37% of voters in Virginia, 31% in North Carolina, and 23% in California noted that the former president would not be fit for office if convicted of a crime, NBC News reported. This may not bode well for Trump now that he has been found guilty in one of his many outstanding cases.  

“Trump also struggled among college-educated voters compared to the broader primary electorate,” NBC News wrote at the time, adding that the former president's struggles on Super Tuesday in some states “could be a potential warning sign as well-educated voters have become key to the Democrats’ coalition.”

In Virginia, Trump captured 47% of those with a college degree, losing to Haley by three points. The former president did win college-educated voters in North Carolina by fifteen points and netted 56% of them. He won 71% in California. 

How important voter blocks like college-educated individuals will be to Trump’s possible victory in 2024 is probably less important than the former president’s ability to win back those in the Republican Party who consider themselves Never Trumpers.

Political commentator and columnist Molly Jong-Fast spoke with CNN following the results from Super Tuesday about the issues that Trump may face in November and explained that there was a large “Never Trump” faction inside the Republican Party that he has never been able to win over. 

“He has only ever tried to appeal to Republican primary voters, and he cannot marshal that group together the way he needs to,” Jong-Fast was quoted as explaining to CNN according to a Newsweek report on her comments.

"Part of his trick in 2016 was, he got these low-frequency voters out, these people who almost never voted, which is why the polling was so off, and you're just not seeing that same type of enthusiasm," Jong-Fast explained. 

However, despite Trump’s poor performance on Super Tuesday, the general polling on a Biden vs. Trump rematch at the time seemed to favor the former president. RealClearPolitics had the former president up against Biden in its average of polls by 1.8 points as of March 7th.  

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Trump called his performance on Super Tuesday a “big win” and added: “They tell me, the pundits and otherwise, that there's never been one like this. There's never been anything so conclusive. This was an amazing, amazing night."

The most recent polling average estimation from RealClearPolitics as of June 13th still has the former president slightly ahead of Biden with a +0.4 lead. Trump has 45.2% of the vote while Biden sits at 44.8%. However, polls aren't everything and the race still has more than five months left before voters head to the polls.