Above: A look at the results from Southborough’s Super Tuesday voting. (images represent share of the votes cast)
As you probably know by now, Joe Biden and Donald Trump won yesterday’s Presidential Primaries in Massachusetts. But who did Southborough voters cast ballots for? And how many voters took part?
Here’s my look at how our town weighed in, based on the Town’s “unofficial results”*.
2,282 voters took part in Southborough’s primaries. That’s only 30% of registered voters (and 27% fewer than voted in 2020).
The results don’t track which parties they belonged to, just which primaries they voted in. But the numbers offer some understanding of which race those with a choice selected.
Over 66% of voters in Southborough are unenrolled in a party and can choose their ballot. (That percent is an increase from 4 years ago, when only 60% were unenrolled)
52% of the votes were cast on the Republican ballot. The 1,184 votes represented 147% of voters actually registered as Republicans in Southborough.
Clearly, a big number were unenrolled. And that’s likely a factor in their candidate of choice. Nikki Haley won Southborough’s vote with 57% of the vote. Former President Donald Trump received 39%.
Haley’s win in blue Southborough obviously didn’t translate to big enough numbers for her to stay in the red primary. Today, she announced that her run is done.
The other candidates (who had all previously withdrawn from the race) and write-ins each received less than 2% of the votes.
The write-in campaign for State Committeewoman didn’t make much headway in Southborough. The listed candidate, Caroline Stewart Cunningham, received 652 votes, versus only 70 write-ins.
47% of Southborough voters weighed in on the Democratic ballot, which represents only 65% of voters enrolled in the party. The highest vote getter was President Joe Biden. He received 86% of the votes (and a higher total than either Haley or Trump). The second top vote getter was “No Preference”, with 7%.
Some of the No Preference voters could have just been registering discontent with the ballot choices. However, there was a campaign to encourage voters to make that choice to signal a desire for the administration to pressure for a ceasefire in Gaza. And those 77 votes were more than the votes for Dean Phillips, Marianne Williamson, write-ins, and blanks combined. (Phillips received 4% of votes and Williamson 2%.)
Only 21 ballots were cast for the Libertarian party (91% of those registered in the party). 8 were for write-ins, while 6 listed no preference. Both of those were higher than the highest number of votes cast for a candidate listed on the ballot.
Michael Rectenwald and Larse Mapstead tied with 2 votes each. Jacob Hornberger and Chase Oliver each received only one vote and Michael Ter Maat didn’t receive any.
You can view the full results here.
*The figures that I’m reporting from the Town still need to be certified by the state and don’t yet include details what names were written in.
