Haley’s Pennsylvania voters aren’t all ready to fall in line behind Trump

Fleetwood, Pennsylvania CNN —

Joan London is carrying a 40-year-old newspaper, its edges frayed and turning yellow. She beams as she unfolds it to show a black and white photograph of her earliest political activism — holding a 1984 Reagan-Bush campaign sign.

On her phone, more GOP pride: photos of London at a rally for a Republican candidate for Pennsylvania governor and in Washington, DC, for a Tea Party event during the Obama presidency.

“When I was 18, I registered as a Republican,” London said. “I’ve been a Republican for many years until a month ago when I changed by registration from Republican to Independent.”

Just before the switch, one last ballot cast as a Republican: a vote for Nikki Haley in Pennsylvania’s April presidential primary, even though the former South Carolina governor had bowed out of the race seven weeks earlier.

“It’s time to pass the baton to a new generation in the Republican Party, and I felt that she was it,” London told CNN in an interview. She cast her Haley protest vote, then left Donald Trump’s GOP.

“I have a different vision of what conservatism is,” London said. “I came up in the 80s under (Ronald) Reagan. I’ve always had a very positive vision of self-sufficiency and personal responsibility. … I’m seeing a change more toward populism which carries some unpleasant baggage, which I didn’t see myself as part of. Didn’t see it reflecting my values.”

London is hardly alone. Haley garnered nearly 17% of the primary vote statewide this year — approaching 25% in the suburban collar counties around Philadelphia. More than 155,000 votes in all — a potentially decisive bloc in a presidential battleground that Trump carried by 44,292 votes in 2016 and Joe Biden won by 81,660 in