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Bucking both national and state outcomes, Nikki Haley beat Donald Trump by a two-to-one margin in Sudbury’s Republican Presidential primary election. President Joseph Biden won handily in the Democratic primary.
Haley won 1,201 Republican votes to Trump’s 647 in the unofficial results of the Super Tuesday March 5 voting, according to the Town website.
Biden received 2,255 votes. The “no preference” option on the Democratic ballot received 148 votes. Opponents of the administration’s response to the situation in Israel and Gaza had mounted a late effort to use the “no preference” option as a protest vote.
The Town Clerk reported 4,521 votes were cast in the election, representing 32% of the town’s 14,050 registered voters. Since it was a primary election, by definition a party election, voters enrolled in a political party had to take that party’s ballot. Unenrolled voters could select any ballot. Voting the Democratic ballot were 2,574 voters; the Republican ballot, 1,925 voters; and the Libertarian ballot, 22 voters.
A breakdown of the vote by precinct is on the Town website.
The primary election ballots also included candidates for each party’s state committeeman and committeewoman, and the candidates for each party’s Sudbury town committee.
In the only contested race in Sudbury for those positions, Dorothy Bisson ran a write-in campaign for Republican state committeewoman, opposing Caroline Stewart Cunningham; both candidates live in Sudbury. Cunningham received 925 votes. There were 149 write-in votes, with no names listed.
According to a recent Boston Globe article, some members of the state Republican party launched a late effort to elect a slate of conservative state committee members supported by Geoff Diehl and Jim Lyons in opposition to the more moderate current leadership of the state Republican party under Amy Carnavale.
In a letter announcing her write-in campaign, Bisson noted she has been chair of the Sudbury Republican Town Committee for five years. She said Cunningham is not a member of the Sudbury Republican Town Committee and worked for the Baker administration as a fund raiser.
The results of all the party committee races are also on the Town website.
Nancy Brumback is a freelance reporter who lives in Sudbury.