Tag Archive: 2024 Republican primaries

Warning signs for Donald Trump in Pennsylvania

The Liberty Bell may toll for Joe Biden in 2024

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.’

Republican primaries show Trump has troubles

Nikki Haley, still taking votes from Donald Trump

Last Tuesday (March 19), Florida, Arizona, Illinois, Ohio and Kansas held their Republican presidential primaries. While Donald Trump, like President Joe Biden, had previously earned the necessary number of delegates to be his party’s nominee, a look at these latest primary results show a lingering problem for Trump. Specifically, while Trump has run unopposed since Nimrata “Nikki” Haley dropped out of the race on “Super Tuesday,” March 6, Trump has not gotten anywhere near the voting percentage that he should now be getting in the Republican primaries.

In Florida, for example, Trump received just over 81 percent of the vote. Nikki Haley received nearly 14 percent, and Ron DeSantis received 3.7 percent, even though both Haley and DeSantis are no longer running. According to Newsweek:

The results suggest the former president is losing support in Florida compared with the previous election in 2020. That year, he won about 94 percent of the state vote in the primary.

As for the excuse that some votes may have been cast for Haley before she dropped out on March 6, that would not explain that (a) plenty of early votes were cast after March 6, including early in-person voting on and after March 14, and (b) not only did Ron DeSantis receive a good number of votes, even Chris Christie received nearly 9,000 votes, and each of them dropped out of the campaign last January.

President Biden scores decisive New Hampshire Democratic primary write-in victory

President Joe Biden, on a primary roll

With some votes still left to be counted, President Joe Biden won the New Hampshire 2024 Democratic presidential primary this past Tuesday without even having his name on the ballot. Biden captured 64 percent of the vote, with a margin of victory of approximately 45 percent over the second-place finisher. What is really remarkable is that all of President Biden’s votes were write-ins. That’s because, as we indicated a few weeks ago, at the urging of President Biden and his campaign, the Democratic National Committee (DNCvoted to request New Hampshire and Iowa to move their primary and caucus, respectively, to a later date, after that of South Carolina (which holds its Democratic primary on February 3), in order to “increase diversity” early in the process. However, while Iowa agreed to move its Democratic caucus to March 5, New Hampshire refused to do so. As a result, President Biden did not place his name on the ballot for the New Hampshire primary, thus only write-in votes would count for Biden.

Normally, there would have been approximately 33 Democratic delegates at stake in New Hampshire. However, due to the dispute with the DNC, no Democratic delegates will be allocated to any candidate in this year’s Granite State primary. As for the remaining states, it will take roughly 1,965-1,970 delegates (different sources give slightly different numbers) to win the Democratic presidential nomination this year.