On Tuesday, Pennsylvania held its 2024 Democratic and Republican presidential primaries. While President Joe Biden and Donald Trump each won their respective party’s primary as expected, more warning signs popped up for Trump. Specifically, while President Biden won the Democratic primary with over 88 percent of the vote and over 926,000 votes cast, Trump had just over 83 percent of the vote and only 789,000 total votes.
This Trump deficit is significant because Pennsylvania is one of a small number of “battleground” states that will likely determine the 2024 presidential election. As the Pennsylvania publication York Daily Record explains:
Pennsylvania has a long history of being consequential in presidential elections — choosing 20 of the last 25 presidents.
With 20 electoral votes up for grabs, it is considered by some analysts as the most important state in the 2020 presidential election.
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‘Campaigns know if their messaging works here, it can probably work nationally,’ said Jesse White, a political strategist at Perpetual Fortitude, a Democratic consulting and digital management firm. ‘To be able to come in here as a national campaign and have the resources and messaging to effectively win a state as diverse as Pennsylvania is real work.’