Trump, Clinton take more presidential primaries
Both dominate in South; Rubio’s collapse a setback for anti-Trump voters
WASHINGTON— Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton won more presidential primaries on Tuesday, padding their delegate leads as their rivals run out of time to stop them.
The day was better for Trump than for Clinton, who lost to Bernie Sanders in a major upset in Michigan. The nativist Republican earned easy victories in both Michigan and Mississippi, and the Michigan triumph came with an added bonus: Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, the candidate of the Republican establishment, failed so spectacularly that he received no delegates at all.
With 80 per cent of the Mississippi districts reporting, Trump had 48 per cent of the vote, Texas Sen. Ted Cruz 36 per cent, Ohio Gov. John Kasich 9 per cent, and Rubio a mere 5per cent. With 70 per cent of Michigan districts reporting, Trump had 37 per cent, Cruz and Kasich 25 per cent each, and Rubio 9 per cent.
“There’s only one person who did well tonight: Donald Trump,” Trump said in his victory speech at the Trump National Golf Club in Florida.
His latest victories came after he was subjected to a well-funded barrage of attack ads and a stinging denunciation from the previous party nominee, Mitt Romney. The kitchen sink had little effect. Trump remains on track to essentially seal the nomination next Tuesday.
“It shows you how brilliant the public is,” Trump said. “Because they knew they were lies.”
Clinton won a landslide in Mississippi, cementing her dominance of the Deep South. Bernie Sanders, though, delivered an unexpectedly strong performance in Michigan, where he was widely expected to lose to the former secretary of state, senator and first lady by 20 or more points.
With 76 per cent reporting in Mississippi, the state appeared to give Clinton the biggest margin yet: she had 83 per cent, Sanders 16 per cent. The Michigan race was far closer than every single poll had suggested; Clinton, expected to win by 20 points or more, was trailing 50 per cent to 48 per cent when the Associated Press called the race for Sanders.
“This has been a fantastic night in Michigan,” Sanders said in a hastily scheduled statement in Florida, thanking supporters for “repudiating the pundits.”
The left-wing Sanders invested heavily in Michigan, a state with a high concentration of union members and a skepticism of free trade. His performance brought encouraging signs: he lost by a relatively nar- row margin with the young AfricanAmericans who have spurned him in the south, and he won with whites.
But he is trailing badly in the delegate count with almost half the race over. Though Michigan may change the media narrative surrounding his candidacy, Clinton’s Mississippi dominance means she will emerge from the day with a bigger lead than before.
“I want to be the president for the struggling and the striving, for the people who have a dream and who are looking for a way to achieve that dream. And we’ve got to resist forces trying to drive us apart, whether they’re political forces or economic forces,” Clinton said in Ohio. “There are a lot of them out there. They seem to have forgotten what made us great in the first place.”
Rubio’s collapse comes at the worst possible time for him and for the party’s disorganized anti-Trump forces. The plot to wrest the nomination from Trump at the party convention in July is heavily reliant on Rubio winning the winner-take-alldelegates primary in his home state next Tuesday.
Trump made an intermittent effort to sound presidential. Speaking more softly than usual, he called Romney a “nice man” and thanked House Speaker Paul Ryan, whom he threatened last week.
Yet he also devoted much of his lengthy address to promoting Trump-branded businesses, including the defunct Trump Steaks and Trump University, sounding more like a shopping-channel pitchman than a major party’s front-runner.
The only good news for the party establishment was the relatively strong Michigan performance of Kasich, who may quickly replace Rubio as the default establishment favourite. Campaigning as the civil “adult in the room,” he appears to have surged as the better-known Rubio has faltered.