President Joe Biden’s reelection campaign is making a play to win over Pennsylvania Republican voters who chose former candidate Nikki Haley over their party’s presumptive nominee in Pennsylvania’s primary this week.
The Biden campaign is making a six-figure digital ad buy to target Haley voters in the Keystone State, the campaign tells NBC 10.
The "If You Voted for Nikki Haley..." ad, which was initially released late last month following her departure from the race, features former President Donald Trump’s comments on Haley and her supporters. Those comments include Trump calling Haley, who served as UN Ambassador during his administration, “bird brain.” With the additional investment, it’s expected to run twice as often targeting Haley voters in Pennsylvania starting on Thursday, according to the Biden campaign.
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Haley, who exited the race in early March but remained on Pennsylvania ballots, received more than 157,000 votes in the Republican primary on Tuesday. About 45,000 of those votes came in Philadelphia and the surrounding suburbs, a key area for the current president in November. In Montgomery County, Haley received nearly 25% of the votes cast for president in the Republican primary.
“Our campaign has been clear from the beginning that we welcome anyone who knows that four more years of Trump would destroy our freedoms and devastate our country,” Biden-Harris 2024 communications director Michael Tyler said in a statement.
With the new data from the primary, the Biden campaign sees an opportunity to appeal to Republicans in Pennsylvania, where Biden beat Trump in 2020 by 80,555 votes.
Biden-Harris 2024 Pennsylvania campaign manager Nikki Lu said in a statement that the campaign is “dedicated to reaching voters in every corner of the Commonwealth.”
“At the end of the day, we are all Pennsylvanians, and there will always be a place in President Biden’s coalition for voters who believe in preserving our democracy and building an economy that works for everyone, not just those at the top,” Lu said.
Asked about the Haley votes and whether anything is in the works to reach out to Haley voters on Wednesday, the Republican National Committee shared a statement from Trump campaign and national press secretary Karoline Leavitt saying that “President Trump continued his winning streak and delivered a resounding primary win in Pennsylvania.”
Some Democratic primary voters also chose a presidential candidate other than the party’s presumptive nominee. Congressman Dean Phillips, who dropped out of the race last month, received about 69,000 votes, or 6.8 percent of the vote.
Thousands of Democrats also chose the “write-in” option for the presidential race instead of voting for Biden, but it’s unclear at this point what they wrote. A campaign advocating for a cease fire in Gaza and an end to U.S. military aid to Israel urged voters to write in “uncommitted” instead of voting for Biden, but it’s unclear at this time how many did so.
In Philadelphia, there were more than 14,000 write-in votes on Democratic ballots in the heavily Democratic city. In 2020, 2,515 Democrats wrote in their choice.
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