Thousands of voters signal protest against Trump and Biden in primaries | US Elections 2024

Between 15% and 22% of voters who participated in the four Republican Party primary elections that took place on Tuesday — including in Wisconsin, one of the states that will be decisive in choosing the next President of the United States — chose to vote for candidates who dropped out of the race more than a month ago. Although Donald Trump has already secured enough support to be his party’s official candidate for the general election, the results indicate that the former US president has not yet secured the vote of an important slice of the Republican and independent electorate.

Trump’s landslide victory in Tuesday’s four elections was never in doubt. Not only has the former US president already won a sufficient number of delegates since the beginning of the primaries in January to be considered the Republican Party’s presumptive candidate for the White House, but he is also his only serious opponent at a relatively late stage in the race. — former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley — dropped out of the campaign nearly a month ago.

On Tuesday night, the only open question was the extent of the drain of votes from Trump to other candidates whose names still appear on the ballots — although it is impossible to understand, at this point, to what extent this movement will have a decisive impact on the general election.

Unsurprisingly, the former US president received between 78% and 84% of the votes in the four elections (Rhode Island, Wisconsin, Connecticut and New York), with the most significant victory being recorded in Rhode Island (84.4% ).

In the same state, 10.7% of voters (1,356 out of a total of 12,707) voted for Haley and 1.2% indicated their preference for former New Jersey governor Chris Christie — two names whose candidacies were largely based on a message anti-Trump.

The best result for the former governor of South Carolina was recorded in Connecticut (13.9%, against 77.9% for Trump), followed by New York (12.9%) and Wisconsin (12.8%).

In total, 20.8% of voters who voted in the Republican primary in Wisconsin (a state that Hillary Clinton lost to Trump in 2016 by just 22,000 votes, and where Joe Biden defeated Trump in 2020 by just 20,000 votes ) registered 76 thousand votes for Haley; 20 thousand to Florida Governor Ron DeSantis; ten thousand in Christie; and five thousand to businessman Vivek Ramaswamy.

In the Republican primary in Wisconsin, there were still 12,834 voters who did not commit to supporting any of the names that appeared on the ballot papers.

On the Democratic Party side, the protest vote in the same four states, on Tuesday, had as its main reason the Biden Administration’s support for the Israeli Army’s attacks in the Gaza Strip, a sensitive point among a typically younger and progressive and that could harm Biden in Michigan — another state that will be decisive in November —, where the largest Arab-American and Muslim community in the USA is found.

In Rhode Island, for example, 14.9% of voters who voted in the Democratic Party primary signaled that they are not yet in a position to support Biden in the general election, despite the US President recording a landslide victory on Tuesday ( 82.6%).

Similarly, between 8.4% of voters in Wisconsin and 11.5% in Connecticut selected the “uncommitted” option. In New York, where this option was not available on the ballot papers, the size of the protest can only be assessed by the number of blank votes, which will be released later.