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Trump has another Super Tuesday
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Presidential election in Michigan, 2016
 Date: November 8, 2016 |
Winner: Donald Trump (R) Hillary Clinton (D) • Jill Stein (G) • Gary Johnson (L) • Vice presidential candidates |
Important dates • Nominating process • Ballotpedia's 2016 Battleground Poll • Polls • Debates • Presidential election by state • Ratings and scorecards |
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This article covering the 2016 presidential election was written outside the scope of Ballotpedia's encyclopedic coverage and does not fall under our neutrality policy or style guidelines. It is preserved as it was originally written. For our encyclopedic coverage of the 2016 election, click here.
March 9, 2016
The opportunities to stop Donald Trump’s march to the Republican presidential nomination continue to slip away and there’s no sign that his momentum is slowing.
In Michigan, with 99 percent of the precincts reporting, Trump won just under 37 percent of the state’s March 8 primary vote. But his opposition was split between Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, who finished second, and Ohio Gov. John Kasich, each won about a quarter of the vote. Florida Sen. Marco Rubio finished a distant fourth.
Trump's victory in Michigan was built on a strong showing in the Detroit metropolitan area. He carried working-and-middle-class suburban Macomb County—the home of Reagan Democrats—with 48 percent of the vote. Trump also won almost 41 percent in Wayne County, which includes Detroit, and more importantly for Trump, working class communities like Redford and “Downriver” cities and towns like Brownstone, Lincoln Park and Taylor.
Downriver Wayne has its roots in German, Irish and Polish immigrants and Southern whites who flowed north in the first half of the 20th Century to work in auto plants, particularly the assembly lines of the Ford Motor Company River Rouge factory complex. There’s a reason Taylor is often referred to as “Taylor-tucky.” (Western Wayne County also includes Dearborn where roughly a third of its 90,000 residents are Arab-Americans.) Trump also won Oakland, the more affluent suburban Detroit county, but with only 36 percent of the vote, a touch below his statewide total.
The Detroit metro area was Kasich’s best in the state and he finished second to Trump in its three core counties. He was competitive in Oakland, winning 32 percent, but he only won 27 percent in Wayne and 22 percent in Macomb.
Cruz’s best region in the state was the Southwest, traditionally Michigan’s more Republican territory anchored by Grand Rapids, in Kent County and adjacent Ottawa County. This area has a relatively high number of evangelical voters, and Cruz carried the Southwest with about a third of the vote to Trump’s 28 percent.
Overall, Trump won 72 of the state’s 83 counties; Cruz captured nine, and Kasich carried two, Washtenaw, home to Ann Arbor and the University of Michigan and Kalamazoo, home to Western Michigan University and Kalamazoo College.
Trump’s tough talk on trade had appeal in Michigan, which has lost manufacturing jobs to foreign competitors. The television networks’ exit poll, a representative survey of voters as they left their precinct polling places, asked Republican primary voters whether trade with other countries, “creates more U.S. jobs; takes away U.S. jobs” or “has no effect on U.S. jobs.” About a third said that trade creates jobs and those voters cast ballots equally among Cruz, Kasich and Trump. But more than half of the Michigan GOP primary voters said trade takes away jobs and Trump won a strong plurality of this group, some 45 percent.
Trump’s call to prevent Muslims from traveling to the United States also fared well among Michigan GOP primary voters. The exit poll asked: “How do you feel about temporarily banning Muslims who are not U.S. citizens from entering the U.S.?” Almost two-thirds backed that idea and Trump won half of those voters.
Mitt Romney, the 2012 GOP standard-bearer, whose father was the governor of Michigan, called on Republicans last week to reject Trump’s candidacy and support one of his opponents for the party’s 2016 nomination. Back in 2012, Romney won the Michigan primary and carried 30 counties. In this year’s primary, two of those Romney counties backed Kasich and one sided with Cruz. Trump won the other 27.
To many, Romney now represents the Republican Party establishment, and his message has failed to rally Trump’s opposition. The exit poll found that half of the Michigan GOP primary voters wanted the next president to be “outside the political establishment,” and two-thirds of that group voted for Trump.
The variety of Trump’s victories on March 8 was stunning. He also handily won the Mississippi primary with 47 percent of the vote and the Hawaii GOP caucuses with 42 percent of the vote. You could hardly find two more different states. Cruz finished second in both contests. The Texan handed Trump his only loss of the night, winning the Idaho Republican primary 45 percent to 28 percent.
James A. Barnes is a senior writer for Ballotpedia and co-author of the 2016 edition of the Almanac of American Politics. He is a member of the CNN Decision Desk and will be helping to project the Democratic and Republican winners throughout the election cycle.
See also
- Presidential election in Michigan, 2016
- Presidential candidates, 2016
- Presidential debates (2015-2016)
- Presidential election, 2016/Polls
- 2016 presidential candidate ratings and scorecards
- Presidential election, 2016/Straw polls
