Congratulations to Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley for her big victory in the Vermont prim — what’s that you say? She ended her campaign after losing every Super Tuesday state besides Vermont?

Oh. Well, then. As Lou Reed put it, “Something flickered for a minute, and then it vanished and was gone.”

It’s pretty clear that Haley won Vermont thanks to our wide-open primary system in which any voter can select any primary ballot. The numbers from last night show that Haley’s win was fueled by independents and Democrats wanting to stick it to Donald Trump.

I took a deep comparative dive into the 2024 and 2020 presidential primaries. Now, every election has its own dynamics so no two are directly comparable, but the numbers are overwhelming. Trump’s vote total was virtually identical: 33,139 in 2024 versus 33,019 in 2020.

But that 33,019 represented 84% of the 2020 Republican primary electorate. Last night, 33,139 only represented 45% of the vote. With the same number of votes, Trump won overwhelmingly four years ago and lost by a significant margin this time.

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