Biden and Trump win Michigan presidential primaries

Biden and Trump win Michigan presidential primaries

Updated, 7:13 a.m., 2/28/24

President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump each won their respective primaries Tuesday in Michigan.

The Associated Press made the call about an hour after polls in most counties closed at 8 p.m., with just over 10% of the votes tabulated. Four western Upper Peninsula counties in the central times zone close their polls at 9 p.m.

The victories make it all the more likely that the two will face off against each other this November, in a repeat of the 2020 election in which Biden defeated Trump.

However, the results aren’t all cut and dried for either candidate.

Biden, who cruised to an 81% victory with 618,000 votes, according to unofficial returns with 99% reporting, has had to contend with a campaign to convince Democrats across the state to vote uncommitted on their ballot as a protest message over his support of Israel in its war against the militant group Hamas in Gaza.

Unofficial results show more than 100,000 voters chose to do just that, easily outpacing the 10,000 vote goal set by the Listen to Michigan campaign, approximating the margin of votes by which Trump won Michigan in 2016.

It also bested the uncommitted vote totals in the 2020, 2016 and 2012 Democratic primaries. However, with 13% of the vote, uncommitted has not won any delegates so far — and the total is only slightly higher than the 11% uncommitted received when incumbent former President Barack Obama was on the ballot 12 years ago.

Michigan’s Democratic primary is the last before Super Tuesday, with 117 delegates up for grabs.

If the uncommitted vote hits 15% or higher, state election law allows those delegates to vote as they please at the Democratic National Convention, set for August in Chicago.

The only other candidate Biden faced on the ballot was U.S. Rep. Dean Phillips (D-Minn.), who was polling under 3%. Author Marianne Williamson’s name was on the ballot and she was also pulling 3%, although she suspended her presidential campaign on Feb. 7.

Trump has 68% of the GOP vote, roughly 756,000 votes, according to unofficial returns with 99% reporting, and his rival, former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley had 27% with about 294,000 votes.

However, that margin of victory could be seen as a sign of some discontent among the party faithful, and potentially show up Trump’s own prediction.

“I mean, Nikki’s not even a factor,” Trump said in an interview on WJR-AM Tuesday afternoon. “She’s gonna lose like by 80 points tonight. She’s become a joke.”

This story was published earlier by the Michigan Advance, an affiliate of the nonprofit States Newsroom network, which includes the Florida Phoenix.

The post Biden and Trump win Michigan presidential primaries first appeared on Daily Florida Press.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Committee week in Florida’s Capitol: Welcome to the festival of ignorance

Image
Legislators came to town for the autumn ritual of political harlotry they call “committee week.” Tallahassee’s collective IQ dropped by a good 60 points. That’s bad, but what they propose doing to Florida is worse. Seems Sen. Joe Gruters, R-$ara$ota, who also is chairman of the Republican Party of Florida, was intimately involved with a plot to quash the Democratic vote. Remember that “ voting reform ” bill the governor signed on “Fox and Friends” last May? The one that restricts access to ballot drop-boxes, limits vote-by-mail applications, forbids giving people standing in long lines a bottle of water, and lets partisan poll watchers police canvassing boards? Even though Florida ran an immaculate election in 2020, Republicans goose-stepped in time with the Madman of Mar-a-Lago and claimed with straight faces they merely wanted to prevent election “fraud” — which is about as common as polar bears in Miami. (What fraud there was, was courtesy of the GOP .) Joe Gruters ...
Read more

U.S. House GOP would make it easier for feds to give public lands away to states

Image
U.S. House Republicans included in the new rules for the chamber they passed this month a provision meant to make it easier for Congress to give away public lands. The provision is a fairly technical piece of the 55-page  rules package . It affects internal House accounting and requires that anytime Congress were to give any federal lands to a state, municipality or tribe, it would not be counted as a loss to the federal budget. House Republicans had an identical rule when they controlled the chamber from 2017 to 2019. Advocates and critics agree the measure would be helpful to any effort by the House to transfer federal lands to states. But they disagree about the wisdom of such giveaways. Republicans and conservative groups see states as preferable stewards of most public lands. Those closest to the land are in a better position to make decisions on how to manage them than those in Washington bureaucracies, they say. Environmental groups and Democrats see federal divest...
Read more

Democratic governors press U.S. Senate to act on voting rights legislation

Image
WASHINGTON — Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer and 16 other Democratic governors are urging the U.S. Senate to pass two bills that aim to protect voting rights. Both measures need 60 votes to advance under Senate rules but have been stalled by Republican opposition in the evenly divided Senate. “Without decisive action by the federal government this year to protect voters’ access to the ballot and ensure the integrity and transparency of our elections, the voices of Americans across the country, especially Americans of color, will be suppressed,” the governors wrote in a Monday  letter  to U.S. Senate leadership. Governors who signed the letter include Jared Polis of Colorado, Tim Walz of Minnesota, Steve Sisolak of Nevada, Phil Murphy of New Jersey, Michelle Lujan Grisham of New Mexico, Roy Cooper of North Carolina, Kate Brown of Oregon, Tom Wolf of Pennsylvania and Tony Evers of Wisconsin, among others. One bill, known as the  John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act of 2...
Read more