April 23 (UPI) — Pennsylvanians voted in Republican and Democratic primaries on Tuesday with 17 House seats up for election in November.
Though the nominees for the presidential race are already set, there were several contests closely watched in the state. Seventeen U.S. House seats will be on the ballot in November and U.S. Sen. Bob Casey, a Democrat, is running for re-election against Republican David McCormick.
Casey and McCormick ran unopposed in their respective primaries.
Unofficial state results showed President Joe Biden secured 93% of the vote share in the race with Rep. Dean Phillips of Minnesota, who dropped out of contention in March, garnering the remaining 6%.
In the Republican race, former President Donald Trump won 83%, with Nikki Haley, former governor of South Carolina who also dropped out in March, netting more than 16% of the vote.
Polls opened at 7 a.m. EDT and remained open until 8 p.m. EDT.
Nominees for state offices were determined by Tuesday’s primaries, including for what will be an open attorney general’s office, as current Attorney General Michelle Henry, a Democrat, is not running for re-election.
Henry was appointed to office in 2023 after former attorney general Josh Shapiro was elected governor.
Eugene DePasquale won a tight race for the Democratic nomination for attorney general, beating out four other contenders with nearly 36% of the vote.
“It’s official, we are the Dem nominee for attorney general!” he said on X Tuesday night. Thank you for trusting me to take on the fight against #MAGA extremism.”
MAGA is the acronym for the far-right Make America Great Again nativist political movement, made popular by Trump.
On the Republican side of that race, David Sunday trounced Wendell Craig Williams, the only other contended, with 70% of the vote to 29%.
Erin McClelland, a government consultant and behavioral health worker, bested Ryan Bizzarro, a former state legislator, to be the Democrat nominee to challenge Republican State Treasurer Stacy Garrity.
Unofficial state results show that McClelland won 54% of the vote to Bizzarro’s 45%.
According to the Pennsylvania Department of State voter registration records from September, there are more than 8.7 million registered voters in Pennsylvania. Democrats represent a small majority of registered voters with more than 3.8 million. There are more than 3.4 million registered Republicans and about 1.2 million unaffiliated or “other” voters.
The Senate and House races across the country will be critical as Republicans and Democrats vie for control in Congress. Democrats currently hold a narrow majority in the Senate. Likewise, Republicans have a slim majority in the House which has created challenges for passing legislation in the past year.
The Keystone State was one of the crucial swing states won by President Joe Biden in 2020. Biden was born in Scranton, Pa.
