Pennsylvania brings protest votes to center stage

Beneath the surface of Pennsylvania’s mostly sleepy, boring, low-turnout primary on Tuesday was a trend that has stalked Joe Biden and Donald Trump across the country over the past month: a substantial protest vote.

This time though, the candidate who drew more attention for the protest they faced was not the current president but the former one.

Trump faced about 36,000 more protest votes than Biden, even though Biden faced an organized protest campaign from left-wing critics of his policy on Israel and its military campaign in Gaza. What’s more, Pennsylvania is the only frontline battleground state to hold closed primaries since Biden and Trump clinched their party’s nomination, meaning only registered party voters were able to vote for — or against — their party’s presumptive nominees.

That was particularly noteworthy on the Republican side, after Trump allies repeatedly attributed earlier swing-state protest votes to independents and Democrats who were able to cross over and vote in open primaries, as opposed to any intra-party blowback.

More than 163,000 Republican voters cast ballots for former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley, who dropped out of the presidential race last month, or submitted a write-in ballot. 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 vote.

To be clear, the electorate that showed up Tuesday — when few contested races were even on the ballot — is much different than the coalitions that show up in November. But in a state Biden won by roughly 80,000 votes in 2020 and Trump won by about 45,000 in 2016, there could not be more riding on each candidate’s ability to