Endorsements, if they work at all (and often they don’t), work best when they give an ideological cue to a voter that they wouldn’t have otherwise had. That’s why endorsements rarely matter in general elections: Most voters already fit into one of the partisan camps and are going to cast a ballot based solely off party label. In a primary, on the other hand, the candidates are more ideologically similar, and so an endorsement can help voters make a choice.
In 2010, for example, Sarah Palin endorsed fellow tea partyer Christine O’Donnell over the more moderate and well-known Mike Castle in the Delaware Republican Senate primary. Palin’s endorsement of O’Donnell specifically highlighted O’Donnell’s conservative positions, and though it may not have won O’Donnell the primary, according to polling data, it certainly helped her along. [...]
The lesson of these different endorsements should be fairly clear: Trump voters aren’t mindless drones. They’ll take cues from the president when he’s selling them on something it makes sense for them to back.2 Indeed, much of the reason Trump won in 2016 was because he defended positions that were already popular among the base, even if they weren’t popular among the party elite. On one of the biggest issues of the 2016 primary, illegal immigration, Trump staked out a hardline position that was already highly correlated with vote choice in previous primaries. (More anti-immigration Republicans did better, on average, in GOP primaries.) He took that position when one of the so-called frontrunners for the GOP nomination, Jeb Bush, was known for being soft on illegal immigration. Trump found a lot less success when he was pushing a health care bill this past spring and summer that went against his promises to Republican voters in the primary.
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