A onetime Republican Party strategist has said former President Donald Trump is "electoral poison" and suggested that the GOP presidential candidate's voter base was shrinking.
Reed Galen, a co-founder of the conservative Lincoln Project, which opposes Trump, made the remarks on Tuesday on MSNBC's The 11th Hour with Stephanie Ruhle where he also discussed polling methodology.
Trump has won enough delegates to secure the GOP's presidential nomination and will face President Joe Biden in November as the Democrat has also won enough delegates to guarantee he will be his party's candidate.
Galen discussed polling during his appearance on MSNBC, where attorney and former Republican Ron Filipkowski was also a guest, and highlighted what he saw as issues with how polls are conducted before taking aim at the former president.
"Look at the fall of 2022, where garbage poll after garbage poll was being thrown out by every possible right-wing organization, and what happens? OK, Republicans take the House—which they might not have for much longer—and everything else was wrong," he said.
Galen went on: "Trump is an electoral loser. He's an electoral, he's electoral poison."
"His base is smaller, whiter, more extreme now than it was ever," Galen said. "I'm with Ron on this one. You know, every election he's gone into so far this year, he's losing 20, 25, 30 percent of his own base."
"These are not good numbers. I'll take the votes over the polls," he added.
Newsweek has reached out to the Trump campaign via email for comment.
Galen was referring to the results of the recent Republican primaries where Trump scored impressive victories, but saw a significant share of GOP voters cast their ballots for someone else.
On Super Tuesday on March 5, Trump lost more than 500,000 votes to former U.S. Ambassador to the UN Nikki Haley, despite the fact that she had already dropped out of the race.
In Florida, where Trump is a resident, the former president won the primary with 81 percent, amounting to more than 910,000 votes, with Haley second on nearly 14 percent (155,461 votes). Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis—who dropped out of the race after the first-in-the-nation Iowa Caucus in January—finished in third with 3.7 percent (41,233) of votes.
Haley, a former governor of South Carolina, also won a significant share of the vote in states such as Arizona, Illinois, Ohio and Kansas.
Galen is a co-founder of the Lincoln Project, which frequently produces videos taking aim at Trump and Republicans who support him. He also worked on the late Sen. John McCain's 2008 presidential bid and on the presidential campaigns of both former Presidents George W. Bush.
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About the writer
Darragh Roche is a U.S. News Reporter based in Limerick, Ireland. His focus is reporting on U.S. politics. He has ... Read more
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