Incumbent President Joe Biden overwhelmingly won Pennsylvania’s Democratic primary election last week, but an abnormally large number of write-in votes were tallied in the race.
Despite Biden’s status as the sitting president running for reelection and his deep familial ties to the Keystone State, there were so many write-in votes that the Associated Press broke with its policy of not tallying write-ins.
The increased number of write-in votes is likely the result of Pennsylvania not offering “uncommitted” as an option on the primary ballot. Given the options, nearly 130,000 Democrats in the state chose someone other than Biden. Long-shot candidate and current Congressman Dean Phillips garnered nearly 70,000 votes despite suspending his campaign nearly a month prior.
In Pennsylvania’s largest counties, the number of write-in votes swelled compared to 2020, with Philadelphia County alone seeing a 600% increase to nearly 16,000.
The massive number of write-in votes and support for Phillips are especially worrying as they eclipsed the 80,000-vote margin Biden had in his 2020 win over Trump in the state. A variety of business owners and union-member former Democrats have registered their disappointment with Biden.
Earlier in the month, nearly 50,000 voters in Wisconsin’s Democratic primary voted “uncommitted” to “send a message to Biden” over a sizeable portion of the party-base’s dissatisfaction with the President siding with Israel in its conflict with Hamas. That number doubled in Michigan, which has a disproportionately large Muslim population, when 100,000 ballots were cast for “uncommitted” in March.
EXCLUSIVE POLL: Americans are open to Trump's harshest immigration plans.
Half — including 42% of Democrats — say they'd support mass deportations of undocumented immigrants, per a new Axios Vibes survey by The Harris Poll. https://t.co/fXPKxpGlQj pic.twitter.com/UIWn2SRKn7
— Axios (@axios) April 25, 2024
Sixty-one percent of Americans polled recently regard his presidency as a failure. And while pro-Hamas voters in the Democrat Party are upset over Biden’s refusal to fully embrace an organization that murdered more than 1,000 Israelis, more moderate Democrats are concerned with the border. Recent Axios polling shows Trump’s positions on border security are popular even among Democrats, with 42% of Democrat respondents supporting “mass deportations of undocumented immigrants.”
While the issue polling is new data of disapproval of Biden’s job performance, media outlets have been reporting it this year.
