Under the surface of Pennsylvania primaries are pretty sleepy, boring and low turnout Tuesday marked a trend that has followed Joe Biden and Donald Trump across the country over the past month: a substantial protest vote.
This time, however, the candidate who attracted the most attention due to the protests he faced was not the current president but the former one.
Trump received about 36,000 more protest votes than Biden, even though Biden faced an organized protest campaign from left-wing critics of his policies toward Israel and his military campaign in Gaza. Additionally, Pennsylvania is the only front-line state to have held closed-door primaries since Biden and Trump clinched their parties’ nominations, meaning only the party’s registered voters were able to vote for — or against – the presumed candidates of their party.
This was particularly notable on the Republican side, after Trump’s allies repeatedly attributed swing states’ protest votes to independents and Democrats who were able to cross over and vote in open primaries, as opposed to any blowback in the within the party.
More than 163,000 Republican voters cast ballots for former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley, who withdrew from the presidential race last month, or submitted write-in ballots. On the Democratic side, at least 127,000 voters either cast ballots for Rep. Dean Phillips, D-Minn., who also ended his presidential bid last month, or cast write-in ballots.
To be clear, the electorate that showed up Tuesday — when few contested races were on the ballot — is very different from the coalitions that showed up in November. But in a state where Biden won by about 80,000 votes in 2020 and Trump by about 45,000 in 2016, each candidate’s ability to bring his internal dissidents back on board — or at least prevent them from joining his rival could not. be more important.
JJ Abbott, a Pennsylvania-based Democratic strategist who worked for former Gov. Tom Wolf, said Tuesday’s results offer a glimpse “of the damage Trump still has to repair within his own party.”
“I certainly believe that President Biden has some work to do with some of his supporters as well,” Abbott said. “But I think it really exacerbates the challenge for Trump. Trump has a lot of damage control to do, but that doesn’t seem to get as much attention as some of the challenges Biden is trying to address.”
The Trump campaign believes that his opponents have greatly exaggerated information regarding the protest vote. For starters, recent surveys in Pennsylvania have found a close and hotly contested race, including April surveys by Fox News And Bloomberg/Morning consultationwhich also showed Trump leading in almost every other contested battleground state. State and national investigationsincluding the recent NBC News poll, also found that about 9 in 10 self-identified Republicans support Trump in the general election, more than the 83% who voted for him Tuesday in the Republican primary in Pennsylvania.
There was also internal frustration in the Trump campaign…
