This article is more than 4 years old

This article is more than 4 years old

Donald Trump put recent wobbles behind him on Tuesday with convincing primary election victories in both Michigan and Mississippi.

Trump won by double-digit margins in both states just days after an underwhelming performance in Louisiana’s primary. Pundits wondered whether Trump’s crude performance in Thursday’s debate – where he bragged about the size of his genitalia – had alienated voters. However, with his wins on Tuesday, the Republican frontrunner quieted those doubts.

Hillary Clinton loses to Bernie Sanders in stunning Michigan primary upset Read more

Trump’s win in Michigan was paired with a shock upset by Vermont senator Bernie Sanders. Both candidates won by appealing to rust belt voters with their strong opposition to free trade deals.

Celebrating his two wins, Trump ridiculed the establishment Republicans who have led recent attacks on him, including heavy negative advertising.

“So many horrible things said about me in one week,” said Trump at a press conference outside Palm Beach in Florida. “Thirty-eight million dollars’ worth of lies. It shows you how good the public is that they see these as lies.”

The negative ads, combined with a slashing attack on Trump by the 2012 Republican nominee Mitt Romney, apparently made no difference against a splintered Republican field.

In Michigan, Ohio governor John Kasich (24.3%) and Texas senator Ted Cruz (24.9%) finished in a virtual tie behind Trump, who won 36.5% of the vote with 99.3% reporting. Kasich peeled away suburban moderate voters while Cruz roped in heavily evangelical western Michigan.

Former congressman Kerry Bentivolio, who voted for Cruz, attributed Trump’s success in Michigan to his emphasis on restoring the manufacturing base in the United States.

“I kind of expected Trump to win Michigan,” Bentivolio told the Guardian, adding that he thought Trump “articulated rather well … the concern about people taking our jobs”.

This appeal was made clear by Trump running up a dominating lead in Macomb County, a blue-collar area just north of Detroit that is the home of “Reagan Democrats”, the working-class white voters who embraced the GOP in the 1980s but swung back to Bill Clinton in the 1990s.

John Yob, a well-respected Republican consultant who had worked for years in his home state of Michigan, said the numbers there would be a key indicator of Trump’s appeal. His margins there reflected how strongly the bombastic billionaire’s hardline messages on trade and immigration had resonated with frustrated blue-collar voters.

In Mississippi, Ted Cruz finished a strong second behind Trump, with 36.3% to Trump’s 47.3%, but the biggest surprise was the near collapse of Marco Rubio in the state. The Florida senator finished with roughly 5% of the vote there behind even John Kasich, who won 8.8%. In contrast, Rubio had finished second in several other southern states, including South Carolina and Georgia.

Exit polls showed that the Mississippi Republican electorate was deeply conservative and evangelical. Eighty-five percent of voters identified as born-again or evangelical and 84% identified as conservative. However, Trump, a thrice-married New Yorker, faced little skepticism from those voters as he completed his sweep of the deep south.

Even more alarmingly for Rubio, the Florida senator did not net a single delegate in either Mississippi or Michigan on Tuesday night. Forty Republican delegates were up for grabs in Mississippi and 59 in Michigan. In contrast, Trump picked up more than half the delegates in Mississippi, a crucial threshold in the Republican contest.

Current party rules require a candidate to receive a majority of the delegates in eight different states to have their name placed in nomination at the convention. Mississippi became the sixth state where Trump hit that threshold. Cruz has achieved it in three, while Marco Rubio has only hit that threshold in one.

Trump is leading Ted Cruz by 458 to 359 delegates and needs 1,237 to win the nomination outright and be sure of avoiding an uncertain, or “brokered”, national convention in Cleveland this July. Both Rubio and Kasich trail far behind.



In Idaho, Cruz won a strong victory with overwhelming support from Mormon voters who looked askance at Trump. The state also marked yet another underwhelming performance by Rubio, who had campaigned there on Sunday accompanied by Senator Jim Risch, who had endorsed him. He failed to reach the 20% threshold needed to earn delegates in Idaho.

Trump won Hawaii, with 42.4% of the vote.