As America went to the polls Tuesday with seeming enthusiasm, numbers of voters in Somerville dropped, and fewer voted for the Democratic ticket than in either of the past two presidential elections, while numbers for the Republican ticket rose.
According to unofficial results from Somerville’s elections commission, there were 38,606 ballots cast in this election, compared with 42,379 in 2020 and 40,874 in 2016.
The number of votes for the Democratic ticket of Kamala Harris and Tim Walz was 32,047, or 83 percent of ballots. That’s barely up from the 82.6 percent of ballots eight years ago but down from the Joe Biden and Harris ticket from four years ago, when the ballots went 87.4 percent Democratic.
Meanwhile, on the Republican ticket, Donald Trump and J.D. Vance got 4,435 votes, or 11.5 percent of the vote, up from the 10.1 percent that a Trump ticket won in the past two presidential elections.
The total numbers of ballots were down despite more than 18,000 early voters. “We did nor expect to have as large a number as we had for early voting, which had been going down for several years,” said Nicholas Salerno, chair of the board of Elections Commissioners, on Monday.
Somerville Democratic City Committee chair Jack Perenick said late Tuesday from state Democratic Party headquarters that he suspected the numbers were “skewed a little bit by the number of candidates on the ballot in Somerville for president.” There were six parties in the running, including the Greens, Libertarians, independents and Party for Socialism and Liberation.
“Overall we kept strong support for the ticket, and we are still looking at the national picture to get a good idea of what’s happened tonight,” Perenick said.
Perenick said he hadn’t seen complete figures and was unable to speculate immediately on whether an issue such as violence in Gaza may have diminished Democratic turnout. After the Democrats and GOP, the biggest votes were for the Party for Socialism and Liberation (605 votes) and Green-Rainbow Party (613), followed by the Libertarians with 167 ballots and Independent Party with 102. There were 325 write-ins and 312 blanks.
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