Though the presumptive presidential nominations from the Republican and Democratic Parties this year are already set, Pennsylvania — which attracted a lot of attention around the 2020 presidential election — held primaries on Tuesday… and in the Democratic presidential primary, incumbent President Joe Biden finished with many, many more votes than those won by Donald Trump over on the GOP side.
The comparison suggests strength for the Democrat in the state ahead of November, assuming some kind of correlation between turnout in the primary and turnout later this year.
In the Democratic primary, in which former challenger Dean Phillips was still listed on ballots, Biden got some 93 percent of the vote — which translated to roughly 930,000 votes and counting. On the GOP side, Trump’s share was just above 83 percent, and his vote total was just past 789,000 on Wednesday afternoon, when these numbers all originate. Nikki Haley, who left the national GOP primary weeks ago, still managed to get 16.6 percent of Pennsylvania’s Republican primary vote.
Pennsylvania will also have a Senate race this year pitting incumbent Democrat Bob Casey against GOP challenger Dave McCormick, who ran unsuccessfully in the last Republican primary for Senate in the state, losing to Mehmet Oz — aka Dr. Oz, who then lost the general election to Democratic candidate John Fetterman. Fetterman, formerly Pennsylvania’s lieutenant governor, took over a Senate seat formerly held by GOP’er Pat Toomey, who left office. The result, combined with strong Democratic showings across the United States in that year’s (2022) elections, meant Dems actually increased the size of their Senate majority, though the electoral map suggests difficulty for Senate Dems this year.
Casey and McCormick faced no primary challengers and are already on their way to November. National polling from the presidential race, meanwhile, remains mixed, sometimes showing Biden in the lead while other data boosts Trump.
