Haley clearly left behind
“Swing State” Michigan also votes for Trump
February 28, 2024, 4:18 a.m
Donald Trump continues his triumph in the Republican primaries. In Michigan, according to projections, he is around 30 percent ahead of his rival Nikki Haley. Unsurprisingly, Joe Biden is winning the Democratic race – even if quite a few voters refuse to vote for him.
Donald Trump has won the US Republican primary in the state of Michigan. According to projections, he once again prevailed against his internal party rival, former UN Ambassador Nikki Haley. In this case there was a clear gap, after around 10 percent of the votes were counted, the two were a good 30 percentage points apart.
Just last Saturday, in the primary election in South Carolina, he was about 20 percentage points ahead of Haley, who lives there and was once governor of the state. With the victory in Michigan, Trump has come closer to his goal of securing the 1,215 delegate votes necessary for nomination as the Republican presidential candidate by mid-March. The Republican nomination convention will take place in mid-July.
For Trump, the vote in Michigan, which has a population of ten million, was important because of its demographic structure. His popularity there had been expanding in the past. According to surveys, he is less popular with voters in urban areas and with people with college degrees. In the 2016 presidential election, when he ran against Democrat Hillary Clinton, he won the state by just 11,000 votes. Four years later, he lost to now-President Joe Biden by almost 154,000 votes. Michigan is considered a so-called “swing state” that cannot be firmly assigned to either Democrats or Republicans.
Many Democrats are at odds with Biden
US President Joe Biden also won the Democratic primary in Michigan, according to US broadcaster forecasts. Anything else would have been a big surprise; the Democrat has no serious competition within his party in the race for the presidential nomination. According to forecasts, around 16 percent of voters voted “undecided”. How high the number actually is will only become clear when more votes are counted. There are many Muslims living in Michigan who disagree with Biden’s support for Israel in the Gaza war and therefore may have voted against him as protest voters.