Will Pennsylvania primary results affect Trump GOP nomination?
While former President Trump easily won the Pennsylvania GOP primary, Nikki Haley supporters voted against him in droves, even though she’s out of the race.
The presidential primaries are back in the news this week as droves of GOP voters in Pennsylvania bucked the party’s presumptive nominee. Despite Nikki Haley dropping out of the race in March, she was the last challenger to former President Donald Trump still standing, over 156,000 Pennsylvanians, more than 16 percent of Republican voters, cast a ballot for the former South Carolina governor.
The outpouring of support for a non-candidate could be a worrying sign for Trump’s third run for the White House. Pennsylvania is one of the swing states that he will need to win come March if he is to regain the US presidency. It isn’t the first much needed swing state where there has been a sizeable protest vote either.
Will Pennsylvania primary results affect Trump GOP nomination?
Both the Democratic and Republican party have their presumptive nominees but those won’t be made official until each party holds their convention this summer. It is set to be a rematch of the 2020 presidential election with both Joe Biden and Donald Trump securing the minimum number of delegates to be at the top of the ticket for their respective parties in November.
Trump currently has 1,953 of the 2,429 GOP delegates that will chose the Republican presidential nominee. Haley has only 93. Even though she had a good showing in the Keystone State, it will not affect the re-coronation of the former president as far as delegates go.
Despite the sizeable protest vote cast for Nikki Haley in Pennsylvania she will not get any delegates from the Keystone State. The sixteen statewide delegates go to the winner of the popular vote, and the remaining 51 congressional district delegates, three per district, are directly elected by voters.
Likewise in Arizona, where she got nearly 18 percent of the vote, she won’t get any delegates as the state is a winner-takes-all. However, the number of Republican primary voters casting ballots for Haley far exceeds Trump’s margin of loss in key swing states which could spell trouble in the November 2024 General Election.
In Arizona, over 110,000 GOP primary voters cast a ballot for Haley, Trump lost the state in 2020 by 10,000 to Biden. 80,000 more Pennsylvanians voted for Biden than Trump in the last election, but nearly double that number protested the former president’s White House run. In Wisconsin, Trump lost by less than 21,000 in his failed second bid for the White House, but over three and half times that number voted against his third nomination to the GOP ticket.