Apr.03

electoral-vote.com

Dem 51

   

GOP 49

Four More States' Voters Head to the Polls

Voters in four more states registered their presidential preferences last night. Largely speaking, the presidential contests were the only games in town, as Connecticut (Aug. 13), New York (June 25), Rhode Island (Sept. 10) and Wisconsin (Aug. 13) will all hold their other primaries later in the year.

Here are the results:

These numbers will change a little in the next 48 hours, as the states are all reporting between 91% and 95% of the vote in as of the end of the evening on Tuesday. As you can see, outside of Rhode Island, Biden continued to do a better job of holding on to his party's voters than Trump. And in case you are wondering, Wisconsin has an open primary, Rhode Island has a semi-closed primary (independents can participate on either side) and Connecticut and New York have closed primaries. This means that the potentially most instructive result of the night, in swingy Wisconsin, could well have been affected by ratfu**ing on either side, and so isn't instructive at all.

For comparative purposes, here's what happened in these four states the last time there was a non-competitive Republican primary (namely 2020):

There was no GOP primary in New York in 2020, but in the other three states, turnout was higher in 2020 than in 2024, and in two of the three, Trump's share of the vote was considerably higher. Does that suggest less enthusiasm for Trump this year than four years ago? Probably.

As to Joe Biden, here are the comparative numbers for him versus 2012, when Barack Obama was an unchallenged sitting president and, of course, went on to win the election. We could theoretically have used 2016, when Hillary Clinton faced only token competition, but 2012 is more analogous to Biden's current situation:

In 2012, both Connecticut and New York canceled their primaries, leaving us with only two states to work with here. On one hand, even correcting for population growth, turnout was way higher this year than in 2012; that should be good news for Biden. On the other hand, Biden considerably underperformed Obama in Wisconsin. There were many stories yesterday about how the Wisconsin results could presage troubles with Muslim and/or progressive voters for Biden. Maybe so, although Wisconsin is not Michigan or even Minnesota, and the population there is only 0.5% Muslim. As to the progressives, that could indeed be an issue. On the other hand, it could also be the case that a lot of otherwise Biden voters crossed the aisle to vote for Haley.

In short, squeeze as we might, the only thing we can extract from last night's numbers is that enthusiasm for Donald Trump appears to be down from 2020, and probably a bit lower than enthusiasm for Biden. Or, it might be more accurate to say that enthusiasm for Donald Trump appears to be down from 2020, and probably a bit lower than enthusiasm for not Trump.

Despite the general lack of downballot races, there were a couple of other results yesterday. In Wisconsin, residents approved two ballot measures. The first, approved 54%-46%, and triggered by Mark Zuckerberg's money-giving, bans private funding for state and local elections. The second, approved 58%-42%, and triggered by alleged informal advising from nonprofit groups, says that Wisconsin elections may be administered only by "election officials designated by law." Both of these initiatives were proposed by Republicans in the Wisconsin legislature.

And finally, there was a runoff in MS-02 last night, for the Republican nomination. The winner was Ron Eller, who hates abortion and undocumented immigrants, and loves guns and Jesus. He believes this whole separation of church and state thing has gotten out of hand, and bases that position on his close reading of... the Northwest Ordinance of 1787. That's a new one. In any event, the 62.9% Black, D+11 district is surely going to return its current representative, Bennie Thompson (D-MS), to Congress, so Eller just won himself the right to do 6 months' worth of useless campaigning.

Next up are Democratic primaries in Alaska and Wyoming on the 13th of this month, then the Republican primary in Puerto Rico on the 21st. The only really interesting election this month is in Pennsylvania on the 23rd, when the Keystone State will not only vote on presidential candidates, but also candidates for the U.S. Senate and House. (Z)