United States – According to Edison Research, U.S. President Joe Biden and Republican contender Donald Trump easily won their primaries in their battleground state of Pennsylvania Wednesday, but thousands still cast the vote for Nikki Haley, the former candidate.
With 19 of the essential 270 Electoral College votes, the swing state of Pennsylvania is a top prize and a toss-up in the 2024 race between Biden and Trump, who face off again, as reported by Reuters.
Low Popularity Ratings
Tuesday’s vote, in which both candidates had low popularity ratings, was the last test of how much the voters were into the race.
Biden secured 920,274 votes, 95% of which were in, which equates to a whopping 93.1% based on Maine state election data. Dean Phillips, a Democratic congressman who ran out of the presidential election, obtained 6.9% of the votes in Minnesota state data.
According to state data, Trump received 786,485 votes, which is 83.5%, with 49% of the votes counted. Haley, who followed, dropped out of the race, mustered 155,829 votes, or 16.5%.
Nikki Haley’s Surprising Vote
Haley, who was previously the South Carolina governor and UN Ambassador, still appeared on the Pennsylvania ballot despite her exit from the race in March. By restricting the state’s primary voting to registered Republicans only, she squeezed out the independent voters who were likely to vote for her.
Utilizing her own data, she points out that not all Republicans are in favor of Trump, as he is facing 34 criminal charges in New York.
Political Strategies and Voter Campaigns
Arab and Muslim-American voters launched an “Abandon Biden” campaign in Pennsylvania to trigger a negative reaction against the president for his position on the Gaza conflict. In these swing states of Arizona, Wisconsin, and North Carolina, the same efforts were taken where he got the biggest rejection in the primary, which was a 13% uncommitted vote in Michigan.
The organizers in Pennsylvania were looking for only about 40,000 write-in “uncommitted” votes. On Tuesday nights, those figures will not appear on their website as they must be entered manually.
Biden won the nomination, and Trump gained the Republican nomination in early March. He had no real opponents in his primaries.
In 2020, Biden narrowly edged his rival by a mere 1.5% or approximately 80,000 votes. Trump had an edge of less than 45 thousand votes over Hillary Clinton in 2016. The recent state visits by Biden and Trump have been mainly focused on the general elections, not Tuesday’s elections.
Biden has a humble origin with part of his childhood spent in Scranton, Pennsylvania, and he also has decades of political experience relying on neighboring Delaware in particular, as reported by Reuters.
Implications for Senate Control and State Dynamics
First in this contest is incumbent U.S. Senator Bob Casey, a Democrat, who gained the Democratic Party’s nomination without a direct primary opponent. Then came his Republican rival, Dave McCormick, who also secured his party’s nomination facing no direct primary opponent. The nearest race, which opinion polls advise that it is 50-50, could be critical for holding up Democrats control of the Senate.