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Nearly 17 percent of Republican voters in Pennsylvania cast their ballots for the former U.N. ambassador on Tuesday. Nikki Haley – even though she is no longer running in the presidential primaries. The vote was largely a protest against Donald Trump, and some worry that Haley’s ability to continue winning over primary voters is a sign that the former president is a weaker general election candidate than polls indicate.
Although Trump won his third Republican nomination in a row last month, Haley, who suspended her campaign in early March, still received 156,539 votes on Wednesday morning, with only 5 percent left to count.
Trump still dominated the state with 82.8 percent of the vote in the inconsequential primary and every single county in the state voted for the former president. Pennsylvania is a state of major importance to the 2024 general election that could ultimately decide the outcome in November.
President Joe Biden won the swing state in 2020 with 80,500 votes, but Trump won Pennsylvania from Hillary Clinton in 2016 with 68,000 votes. The Keystone State has a closed primary, meaning only those registered with a specific party can participate in those Pennsylvania primaries.
And even though Pennsylvania voters knew Haley couldn’t win and was no longer an official candidate, 16.4 percent of Republicans still felt it was worth casting their ballot as a sign that they voted against Trump and another term in the White House.
Zombie voting is not a new phenomenon and is a way for voters to still cast their votes for preferred candidates – or to protest against other candidates still in the running. And Haley’s persistently large minority voting bloc is proving effective as a way for anti-Trump Republicans to make their voices heard at the primary ballot box.
Trump and Biden have already earned the number of delegates needed to clinch their respective parties’ presidential nominations in 2024 — meaning the 2020 rematch, which most voters said they didn’t want, is upon us.
Biden also decisively won his primaries in Pennsylvania on Tuesday with 88.2 percent of the Democratic votes. But Rep. Dean Phillips (D-Minn.) earned 6.5 percent in the state from Democrats who don’t want Biden to earn a second term.
Phillips was one of Biden’s few legitimate challengers and he dropped out of the primaries in early March. Ten states remain that must hold both their Democratic and Republican primaries before this summer’s conventions, where the parties will officially nominate their candidates. But neither result will have any impact on the November elections.