Across Pa., 12% of Democratic voters snubbed Joe Biden. Not all of them live in big cities.
The president won the Democratic primary easily, but he also faced a swell of protest votes across the state. Here’s where those voters live and what it could mean for November.
Although the outcome of Tuesday’s Democratic presidential primary was never in doubt, that didn’t stop almost 130,000 Pennsylvania Democrats from thumbing their nose at President Joe Biden by either casting a write-in vote or picking another candidate.
Former President Donald Trump faced his own revolt from Republicans with more than 150,000 GOP voters statewide backing former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, despite the fact that she dropped out of the race last month.
Both candidates will have to find ways to curb that dissent within their parties before November to win a state decided by narrow margins. After all, Biden won Pennsylvania by only 80,000 votes in 2020. Four years earlier, Donald Trump won by just 44,000.
Biden’s campaign has posted on social media multiple times since Tuesday about Pennsylvania Republicans voting for Haley. But the president faces a comparable number of defections within his own party.
As of Thursday’s count, 69,000 registered Pennsylvania Democrats — more than 6% of those who participated in the closed primary — voted for U.S. Rep. Dean Phillips, the centrist Minnesota Democrat who suspended his campaign on March 6.
And another 60,000 – nearly an additional 6% – wrote in something else. Although statewide write-in data from the 2020 primary weren’t immediately available, county-level data suggest that this year’s count is likely far greater.
Since Biden had long since sewn up the nomination in that year too – Bernie Sanders and Tulsi Gabbard were still on the ballot, but had withdrawn – it’s likely the spike in write-in votes this year stems from an organized campaign urging voters to write “uncommitted” in protest of the administration’s stance on the Gaza war.
The energy behind that campaign comes from the party’s left flank, as precinct-level results from Philadelphia show.
The Associated Press does not normally track write-in vote totals, but it added those votes to its tabulations Wednesday evening after the uptick in write-in votes in the Democratic primary this year. It has not done a similar tabulation of write-in votes in the GOP primary.
But on a proportional basis, it wasn’t the state’s progressive areas where Biden was the weakest.
Where was the anti-Biden vote strongest?
In relative terms, opposition to Biden came most strenuously not from left-leaning urban areas, but from the rural, conservative counties in the state’s center and west. In many of those counties, a combination of votes for Phillips and write-ins dragged Biden’s vote share below 80%.
In tiny Elk County, Biden’s support stood below 75%.
But rural Democrats comprise an increasingly marginal and estranged part of the party’s coalition. Loss of rural support might be symbolically important to a president who identifies strongly with Pennsylvania, but votes lost and gained in populous places matter much more.
The Philly suburbs remained loyal to Biden
In nearly all parts of the state, Biden lost meaningful support to both the write-in campaign and to Phillips. Rural areas, exurbs, and cities both big and small all saw varying degrees of protest voting.
But the Philly collar counties were uniquely steadfast, putting up margins for Biden above 90%.
This is perhaps a bright spot for the Biden campaign. Winning Democratic coalitions in Pennsylvania are increasingly reliant on votes from the Philadelphia suburbs. The relatively few protest votes cast there in comparison to the city suggests that suburban Democrats remain supportive of the administration.
”Biden, in my opinion, is our best chance to have more cohesion and less division,” said Andrew Mongeluzzi, a 33-year-old Biden supporter who lives in Bryn Mawr. “I have never seen this level of hatred and discrimination toward minorities in my entire life. I feel Biden is a push away from that.”
Charlotte Valyo, the chair of the Chester County Democratic Party, said the uncommitted campaign was less active in the suburbs than it was within Philadelphia.
Additionally, she said, voters in the county tend to be more moderate and feel a greater sense of trust in Biden, who was commonly called Pennsylvania’s third senator for much of his career.
”He’s a Pennsylvanian to us. We don’t think of him as someone from outside the state or outside the county, we think of him as one of us,” Valyo said. “I think that really resonates with everyone here it makes us analyze the situation and say, ‘Well, we believe he’s doing the best he can.’”
How do we know who voted “uncommitted?”
While the protest vote for Phillips came from moderate to conservative parts of the state, the write-in vote was harder to characterize. In most counties, write-in responses haven’t yet been tabulated.
Some of the write-ins came in from rural parts of the state where the pro-Gaza “uncommitted” cause may not be as visible. It’s possible that disgruntled Democrats in those parts of the state simply vented their frustrations by writing in other names.
In an email to the Inquirer, Thad Hall, the elections director in rural Mercer County, said he had skimmed his county’s write-in ballots and found that only around 10 voters picked “uncommitted.” Far more of the 282 write-in ballots, he said, listed names like Trump, Haley, and Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.
But in the big cities, it seems clear from the pattern of precinct-level results that “uncommitted” was a major part of the write-in vote.
Just how big a part may not be known for some time – if ever. Pennsylvania election code requires counties only to report write-in votes cast for a “person.”
“If write-in votes are cast for something other than a person, the counties have the option to report those write-in votes in a category labeled ‘scattered,’” a spokesman for the Pennsylvania Department of State said in an email.
Some counties, like Philadelphia, have said they are unlikely to identify votes that are not cast for a “person.” Others in the region are still determining how they will report write-in votes and don’t expect to finish counting them until late this week or early next week.
That uncertainty didn’t stop Uncommitted PA from claiming victory on Wednesday. The organization claimed solidarity with all the state’s 130,000 Democrats who “withheld their votes from Joe Biden.”
“Uncommitted PA believes that the outcome of the primary election serves as a strong indicator of voter sentiment in the November election,” the statement read. “Voters in Pennsylvania feel conflicted about voting for Biden, as demonstrated by the write-in and undervote.”
What does this mean for Biden in November?
If Biden is to repeat his narrow 2020 victory in Pennsylvania, he will need to manage a fractious statewide coalition ranging from working-class moderates to left-wing urbanites.
This spring’s primary results may hint that both the left and the right flanks of this coalition are fraying. The open question is whether dissenting primary voters will return to the fold to defeat Republican Donald Trump in the fall.
But Biden’s biggest problem may not so much be the voters who opposed him this spring, but those who didn’t vote at all. Far fewer voters turned out for this year’s primary compared to 2020.
Tellingly, turnout declined most sharply in the part of the state most supportive of Biden in this primary: the Philadelphia suburbs.
Staff writer Rita Giordano contributed to this article.