Donald Trump Sees Thousands of Kentucky Republicans Vote Against Him

While former President Donald Trump won the Kentucky primary, thousands of Republican voters cast ballots for candidates who have dropped out of the race.

Trump, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, has already won enough delegates to secure the nomination, and each of his rivals has dropped out of the race. However, some moderate Republicans still refuse to vote for Trump. Instead, they are casting their ballots for other candidates like Haley, the former South Carolina governor and U.N. ambassador who ended her campaign in March.

Haley has garnered thousands of votes, even after she dropped out of the race after losing every state but Vermont. Some Republicans have continued to voice their support for Haley after claiming they will never vote for Trump.

On Tuesday, 14 percent of Kentucky Republicans voted voted for a candidate other than Trump, with most of those votes going to Haley. Haley garnered 6.4 percent of the vote, followed by “uncommitted” at 3.5 percent.

Ron DeSantis—who dropped out of the presidential race in January—also garnered some votes, with 3.1 percent of Kentucky Republicans casting their ballot for the Florida governor. Former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie got 1 percent, Vivek Ramaswamy had 0.6% and Ryan Binkley had 0.4%.

Trump has lost thousands of Republican votes in a slew of other primaries, including in Wisconsin (where Haley received 12.8 percent of the vote), Connecticut (14 percent), Rhode Island (10.6 percent), Indiana (21.7 percent) and Georgia (13 percent).

Newsweek reached out to Trump’s campaign by email for comment.

Despite the votes for other candidates, Tuesday’s outcome is similar to Trump’s 2020 primary performance in Kentucky, in which he was the only Republican on the ballot and received 86 percent of the vote. In 2016, when several other Republicans were on the ballot, including Senators Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio and Christie, Trump still won with nearly 36 percent of the votes.

Trump won the 2020 presidential election in Kentucky with 62.1 percent of the vote. At that time, support for the former president had fallen only slightly from his performance in 2016, when he received 62.5 percent.

It is unclear if support for Haley and other former Republican candidates will translate to additional votes for President Joe Biden in November, when Trump and Biden are posed to face off for the second time.

Scott Lucas, a professor in International Politics at University College Dublin, previously told Newsweek that the Republican Party is divided and Haley and her supporters may not switch their allegiance to Trump.

“Nikki Haley stayed in the race not because she thought she could win it, but she stayed in it for Super Tuesday because a lot of people behind her, a lot of Republican members, a lot of Republican donors are very unsettled about Donald Trump,” Lucas said.

“They’re very unsettled about his legal problems, they’re very unsettled because he’s unpredictable, they’re very unsettled because of the damage that he can cause on domestic issues and on foreign policy.”

However, Michael J. Hanmer, director of the Center for Democracy and Civic Engagement at the University of Maryland, said that although he was “surprised” to see Haley get so much support in the state’s GOP primary on May 14, he doubts those voters will cast a ballot for Biden in the general election.

“I suspect it will be hard for many Republicans who won’t vote for Trump to vote for Biden, but they might sit out the election or skip the presidential race,” he previously told Newsweek. “The Trump campaign seems very focused on appealing to their base rather than growing it.”