United States President Joe Biden and Republican candidate Donald Trump easily won the primaries in the state of Pennsylvania, according to figures from Edison Research, but thousands of Republicans insisted on voting for former candidate Nikki Haley.
Pennsylvania, with 19 delegates out of 538 total in the electoral college, is one of the main swing states in the 2024 presidential election, which will be a rematch between Biden and Trump.
The primaries on Tuesday (23) were one of the last tests of voters’ enthusiasm in a campaign marked by low approval ratings for both candidates.
With almost 50% of the votes counted, Biden received almost 500,000 votes, or 94.4%, according to state data. Dean Phillips, a Democratic congressman who dropped out of the race, had just over 29,300 votes, or 5.6%.
Trump had 268,670 votes, or 79.4%, with 33% of the votes counted, according to the data. However, Nikki Haley, who dropped out of the Republican race, had more than 70,000 votes, or 20.6%.
Haley’s name remained on the Pennsylvania ballot after she ended her campaign in March.
Their results show that a portion of Republicans remain dissatisfied with Trump, who is on trial on 34 criminal charges in a New York bribery case.
Muslim and Arab-American voters have mounted a “Ditch Biden” campaign in Pennsylvania to protest the president’s handling of the Gaza crisis.
Biden faced similar demonstrations in other swing states such as Arizona, Wisconsin and North Carolina, with the largest protest occurring in the Michigan primary.
In Pennsylvania, organizers of these protest movements had a goal of obtaining 40,000 “uncommitted” write-in votes. The expectation is that these results will not be released anytime soon, because they still need to be recorded manually.
Trump and Biden mathematically won their party’s nominations in early March and will be officially introduced at their party’s national conventions in July and August, respectively.
In 2020, Biden won Pennsylvania by less than 1.5 percentage points, or about 80,000 votes. Trump beat Democrat Hillary Clinton in the state by less than 45,000 votes in 2016. Both have been visiting the region in recent weeks.
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