WASHINGTON (AP) — The presidential election calendar has officially ended with weekend victories for the Democratic president Joe Biden in Guam and the US Virgin Islands.
Both Biden and Republican Donald Trump already clinched their party nominations in March, setting up a historic general election rematch between the current and former presidents.
According to polls, many Americans did not want a rematch in 2020, and both Biden and Trump are generally unpopular. But the two lost a total of just three of more than 100 contests, a reflection of how the Democratic and Republican bases rallied behind Biden and Trump despite both facing significant political challenges — and in Trump’s case, four criminal charges , one of which led to felony convictions.
Both Biden and Trump faced protest votes. While these votes didn’t come close to changing the primary results, they provide insight into the November general election rematch and are already shaping both campaigns’ strategies against each other.
Easy wins for the Democratic incumbent
Biden won the Democratic caucuses in Guam and the Virgin Islands on Saturday. He received 467 of the 469 votes cast during the Virgin Islands caucuses, giving him all seven delegates at stake. Self-help author Marianne Williamson and “Uncomposed” each received one vote, according to local Democratic Party officials.
Earlier in the day, the president also wiped out all seven available delegates in Guam. Voters there did not directly cast votes for presidential candidates, but instead chose individuals to serve as national convention delegates, all of whom have pledged to support Biden.
The contests marked Biden’s 53rd and 54th victories of the primary campaign. His only defeat came at the hands of relatively unknown candidate Jason Palmer in the American Samoa caucuses, where only 91 votes were cast in total.
Biden’s journey to reclaiming the Democratic nomination began in 2022, when he proposed eliminating Iowa and New Hampshire from their traditional first-in-the-nation ballots in favor of South Carolina, which played a crucial role in reviving his 2020 campaign. The Democratic National Committee approved the new plan, but New Hampshire opposed the demotion and scheduled its primaries eleven days before South Carolina. Biden then chose to skip the New Hampshire primary rather than violate the new party rules he had championed. Instead, his supporters in the state waged a successful letter-writing campaign on his behalf, sparing the incumbent president the potential embarrassment of starting the year with a loss in a contest in which he had barred himself from participating.
After Robert F. Kennedy Jr. abandoned his short-lived Democratic primary campaign in favor of a third party in the general election, Biden faced no major primaries from Williamson, Palmer, U.S. Rep. Dean Phillips or anyone else. A handful of Democrats are appearing on ballots across the country.
A robust Republican field fails to stop Trump
The Republican presidential primary season ended June 4, when local parties in Guam and the Virgin Islands held their GOP events earlier this year. Trump prevailed in all but two of the 2024 elections: the primaries in Washington, DC and Vermont, both of which went to former UN Ambassador Nikki Haley.
Trump began his campaign to return to the White House in mid-November 2022, when many Republicans blamed him for the party’s poor showing in the midterm elections just days earlier. Since then, Republican voters have largely rallied behind the former president following his indictments in four federal and state criminal investigations, with most of his rivals for the presidential nomination reluctant to criticize him for much of the year.
In January, he scored his first major victory in the Iowa caucuses, which remained first in the Republican Party pecking order, followed by another victory in the New Hampshire primary, where Haley had hoped moderate Republicans and independents would push her toward an upset would drive victory. Trump also won a symbolic victory in a non-binding “beauty contest” primary in Nevada, where he did not appear on the ballot, but his supporters backed the “None of these candidates” voting option over Haley.
Haley was Trump’s last major challenger when she suspended her campaign after a disappointing performance on Super Tuesday. Others running against Trump included Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, U.S. Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina, entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy and Mike Pence, the former vice president.
The meaning of the protest votes
Biden’s main rival in the primaries came in the form of organized campaigns in several states to vote for “Uncommitted” in protest of his support for Israel in the Israeli-Hamas war.
Variants of ‘Uncommitted’ received more than 793,000 votes in 24 states and Washington DC. In terms of raw votes, the campaign culminated in Michigan, where nearly 102,000 voters chose that option. The highest share of votes “Not Recorded” received was in Hawaii at 29%, although that was only 463 votes cast. The campaign continued until the end of the calendar, with “Uncommitted” receiving between 8% and 10% of the vote in the last four Democratic presidential primaries of the year where it appeared on the ballot.
After becoming the presumptive nominee, Trump faced an apparent protest vote of his own in the form of voting for Haley. In the 21 contests held since Haley withdrew from the race, she still received more than 1.3 million votes. As a non-candidate, she received more than 20% of the votes in Maryland and Indiana and more than 15% of the votes in Washington state, Nebraska, Arizona, Pennsylvania and Kansas. Additionally, just under 49,000 voters in seven states cast ballots for some form of “Uncommitted.”
One immediate takeaway from these primary protest votes is that both campaigns have now begun efforts to sway voters dissatisfied with the other candidate and bring them into the fold. For example, the Trump campaign has appealed to Arab Americans in Michigan, while the Biden campaign is launching an effort to reach moderate Republicans.
