Beneath the surface of Tuesday’s mostly sleepy, boring, and low-turnout primary in Pennsylvania lies a trend that has been plaguing Joe Biden and Donald Trump across the country for the past month: massive There was a protest vote.
But this time, the candidate who drew more attention to the protests they faced was not the current president but the former president.
Trump faced about 36,000 more protest votes than Biden, even as Biden faced organized protests by left-wing critics of his policies toward Israel and military operations in Gaza. . Additionally, Pennsylvania is the only battleground state to hold a closed primary since Biden and Trump clinched their party’s nominations, meaning only registered party voters are the party’s presumptive nominee. This means that you can vote for or against someone.
This is particularly notable on the Republican side, with Trump allies arguing that protest votes in early battleground states could be contrasted with internal party backlash by allowing voters to cross borders and vote in open primaries. He repeatedly claimed that it was because of independents and Democrats.
More than 163,000 Republican voters voted or cast a write-in ballot for former United Nations Ambassador Nikki Haley, who withdrew from the presidential race last month. On the Democratic side, at least 127,000 voters either voted for Rep. Dean Phillips (D-Minn.), who also ended his presidential bid last month, or cast a write-in ballot.
To be clear, the voters who assembled on Tuesday had few issues on their ballots, but they are very different from the coalition that assembled in November. But in a state that Biden won by about 80,000 votes in 2020 and Trump won by about 45,000 votes in 2016, each candidate’s ability to bring internal opposition back into the election; Or at least they won’t be able to ride on the ability to prevent them from joining their rivals any longer.
J.J. Abbott, a Pennsylvania-based Democratic strategist who worked for former Gov. Tom Wolf, said Tuesday’s results show “damage Trump still needs to repair within the party.” Said to give insight.
“I certainly believe that President Biden is also doing some work with some of his base,” Abbott said. “But I think this makes the challenges for Trump even worse. Trump has a lot of damage control to do, but it’s not getting as much attention as some of the challenges that Biden is trying to overcome.” It doesn’t seem like they’re collecting anything.”
The Trump campaign believes news of the protest vote has been greatly exaggerated by his opponents. First, recent polls in Pennsylvania, including an April poll by FOX News and Bloomberg/Morning Consult, show that the race in Pennsylvania is close and tightly contested, and other The results show Trump leading in nearly every battleground state. State and national polls, including a recent NBC News poll, also found that nine out of 10 self-identified Republicans supported Trump in the general election, and Trump won Tuesday’s Republican primary in Pennsylvania. That’s more than the 83% who voted.
There were also complaints within the Trump campaign about the way Pennsylvania counted and ultimately tallied write-in votes. So it initially appeared that there were significantly more anti-Trump protest votes than there actually were.
And as Trump officials have said, while Biden was opening campaign offices and running ads on TV, the Trump team was working hard to prepare for the primaries, whether on the ground or in the air. It had not yet spent any of its funds in Pennsylvania.
“We’re not doing anything. We’re not doing anything,” this person said. “We don’t spend a dime in Pennsylvania, we don’t spend anything. The biggest difference they make is [36,000] If you want to call it that, then vote more in protest. ”
This person said it will take some time to figure out the members of the Haley-to-Die Coalition, which continues to vote for long-defunct candidates in the Republican primary — Biden in 2020. How many people will vote and how many will go back to President Trump in 2020? How many people will still need to be persuaded in November?
“Given the worse economic and inflation numbers than they are now, it won’t be hard to vote for Donald Trump in November,” a senior Trump administration official said. “And the movement in Pennsylvania has not yet been prosecuted.”
Trump campaign spokeswoman Caroline Leavitt said Trump “won a landslide primary victory in Pennsylvania,” adding, “The dishonest Biden campaign has spent millions of dollars gaslighting voters in Pennsylvania.” ” he added.
But Democrats argue that part of the reason for Biden’s advantage in the state is that the Trump campaign’s efforts so far have been limited in Pennsylvania.
Furthermore, while there was no organizing on the Republican side to encourage voters to vote, it was necessary to address the active, organized efforts that were actually encouraging voters to fill out “non-committal” ballots. They claim that they are the only ones who did not. Haley.
“The difference is that the Biden campaign, at least in Pennsylvania, is doing the work necessary to ‘unify the party,’ building local infrastructure, opening offices, getting people out and having conversations.” We’re here,” Abbott said. It added: “The last time Pennsylvania Republicans won a major statewide election was in 2016. Trump will have to rebuild his coalition, but the 2016 Republican Party, including Donald Trump in 2020, No one has been able to do that since.”
“Warning sign”
Both Democrats and Republicans said it also matters where those votes are cast. In the collar counties surrounding Philadelphia, key suburban areas where presidential campaigns have fought for generations, Haley won between 20 and 25 percent of the vote, well above the 16.5 percent she received statewide. He also polled around 20% in Erie County, a typical battleground state, and Lancaster County, a pro-Trump area that the Biden campaign aims to chip away at this fall.
A Republican strategist based in Pennsylvania noted that Sen. Bernie Sanders (R-Vt.) opposed Biden in the 2020 primary even after he withdrew from the race and won the majority of the primary vote. “I think this is a red flag,” he said. .
“I don’t think this is the end. But if you’re a Trump campaign, you have work to do in the suburbs,” the strategist continued, adding, “Most of them will end up voting for Trump. ” he added.
NBC News spoke with two Haley primary voters in Pennsylvania about the primary. And their answers confirmed that point. One of them, Jim Nixon, said he would ultimately vote for Trump in the fall and criticized the former president’s current hush-money criminal trial in New York, calling it a “kangaroo court.” Another, Joan O’Donnell, said she voted for Biden in 2020 but will probably vote for Trump this time unless he is convicted.
For Democrats, the largest portion of write-in votes came in Allegheny and Philadelphia counties, home to Pittsburgh and Philadelphia. Declining turnout in Democratic districts in the region could have a dire impact on Biden’s ability to win.
“I think the Democratic Party is at least slightly more united,” said the Republican strategist. “But again, all of these problems are fixable.”
Former Rep. Keith Rothfuss (R-Pennsylvania) said the protest vote takes on an even more significant level given how narrow the margin of victory was in both 2020 and 2016. Rothfuss said that normally, if Trump received 83% of the vote, it would be considered a landslide victory.
“In many of these rural counties, 10% or more voted against Trump,” he says. “That should be 98% territory.”
Ultimately, Rothfuss said Biden should be more concerned about the protest vote, noting that Democrats remain divided over the course of the war between Israel and Hamas.
But another factor in Democrats’ preference for anti-Trump votes in the Republican primary is that recent election history shows that some Pennsylvania Republicans are open to voting Democratic. That is what has been shown. Republican turnout in Pennsylvania was strong in 2022. The party’s problem was that too many Republicans voted for Democratic Governor Josh Shapiro and Sen. John Fetterman (D).
Exit polls at the time showed Shapiro won 16% of Pennsylvania Republicans, while state Sen. Doug Mastriano, the Republican gubernatorial candidate, won just 3% of Democrats. (In 2020, the percentage of bipartisan voters was almost evenly split between Biden and Trump.)
One Democrat working on a 2022 effort in the state said, “There is a real group in Pennsylvania, in this case registered Republicans… They are Trump and his brand of politics, “We continue to reject this brand of chaos and extremism.” “And that’s a really important piece of the puzzle heading into November.”
The Biden campaign issued a memo pushing the results after Tuesday’s vote, writing that the former president’s “general election problems have gotten even worse,” and campaign spokesperson Ammar Moussa said Pennsylvania was “too good for the president.” “This is major additional evidence that there is no path to building the necessary coalition.” Obtain 270 electoral votes. ”
The Trump campaign fired back with its own memo on Thursday, appearing to accuse Biden of having “many problems,” including with the Democratic base.
“There are many differences of opinion within the White House,” wrote top Trump campaign advisers Chris LaCivita and Susie Wiles. “There is disagreement over how Biden should respond to the situation in Israel, where a majority of Americans support Israel’s right to self-defense. We have a radical staff that engages regularly with people who promote “.
Others still felt like the whole ordeal was no big deal. Lou Capozzi, chairman of the Republican Party of Cumberland County, Pennsylvania, where Ms. Haley received more than 21% of the Republican primary vote, said he thinks the focus on anti-Trump and anti-Biden protest votes is going too far.
“To be honest, it doesn’t make much sense,” he said. “At the end of the day, those guys will come home to roost.”
