REGIONAL—A rematch between President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump appeared all the more likely after both candidates swept most primary contests on Super Tuesday, including the contests in Minnesota.
Statewide and in most of northeastern Minnesota, Biden won a slightly higher percentage of his party’s votes than did Trump, who failed to pick up nearly one-in-three GOP voters in the state, with the vast majority going to former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley. Haley announced late Tuesday that she’ll be leaving the primary contest, leaving Trump as the sole candidate in the race for the GOP nomination.
Biden has faced a different challenge, of sorts, as he lost nearly one-in-five Democratic primary-goers to “uncommitted” in Minnesota. That was the highest uncommitted vote of any primary state thus far in the country, and likely reflected the organized nature of the state’s large Somali population, with many of its leaders urging an uncommitted vote as a protest against President Biden’s support for Israel in its current war on Gaza. About 40 percent of the statewide uncommitted vote came from the state’s Fifth Congressional District, currently represented in Congress by Ilhan Omar, a critic of Israeli policies. Third District DFL Congressman Dean Phillips tallied just under eight percent of the statewide vote on Tuesday.
Donald Trump received the most votes statewide in Tuesday’s contest, tallying 232,919 to Biden’s 171,299, although that likely reflects the higher interest in the GOP contest, which still faced a viable contest heading into Tuesday’s vote.
Statewide trends mostly held true in northeastern Minnesota, although Biden won a larger percentage of the Democratic vote in the region than he did statewide, mostly as fewer voters cast their ballots for uncommitted. Trump won a slightly higher percentage of the vote as well, as support for Haley proved somewhat lower than statewide.
Unlike the statewide totals, Biden received slightly more votes than Trump (8,858 to 8,215) in St. Louis County and twice as many in Cook County. Trump received 70 more votes in Lake County than Biden.
Locally, results varied considerably, but both Trump and Biden easily won in almost every precinct in northern St. Louis and Lake counties, although the number of votes favoring Trump typically outpaced votes for Biden in their respective primaries, contrary to the county-wide results.
The most unusual results of the night came from Field Township, whose vote totals posted on the Secretary of State’s website Wednesday morning defied every voting pattern of the evening.
“When I saw them, I thought I was having a stroke,” said Leah Rogne, a local DFL activist.
The unusual results appear to be due to a mix-up in the computer disks provided to county officials. That’s according to Phil Chapman with the St. Louis County Auditor’s office. “That’s why the votes posted are labeled unofficial,” said Chapman. He said the county would have certainly caught the results as part of their normal auditing process.
He said the disk provided to the county as the results disk was almost certainly the disk that the township’s election officials used for testing purposes ahead of the voting.
Field Town Clerk Pat Chapman said the numbers that initially appeared on the state results webpage were not consistent with the actual results from the township’s election. The webpage was updated shortly after noon on Wednesday with the correct results.
The voting in other area communities was more typical. Respective vote totals in Ely were close, with Trump picking up support from 179 voters, while Biden picked up 172 votes. Places like Orr and Tower were more lopsided in favor of Trump, who picked up 21 votes in Orr to just four for Biden. In Tower, Trump garnered 32 votes to nine for Biden. Biden did somewhat better in Cook, picking up 21 votes to 35 for Trump.
Primary results, of course, don’t necessarily reflect vote totals in a general election. Unofficial totals show that 585,312 Minnesotans cast ballots on Tuesday, or just under 17 percent of registered voters. If Minnesota’s voter participation matches previous general elections, as much as 90 percent of the electorate could turn out in November.