Donald Trump has swept three more Republican presidential nominating contests, winning caucuses in Idaho and Missouri and sweeping the delegate haul at a party convention in Michigan against Nikki Haley, who is still seeking her first election-season win.
“Donald Trump swept three more Republican presidential nominating contests on Saturday, beating rival Nikki Haley in Missouri and Idaho and winning all of Michigan’s remaining delegates.
The Associated Press called all three races for Trump, who has won every nominating contest so far by wide margins. He’s on track to have enough delegates to lock down the Republican presidential nomination by mid-March.
The latest Trump victories portends trouble for Haley, the final candidate challenging Trump. The former president won the first Michigan contest — a primary — on Tuesday by more than 40 percentage points.
Michigan Republicans, whose party rules dictated holding a second contest, held a party convention on Saturday to award the remaining 39 delegates. Trump swept those after receiving 1,575 votes from precinct delegates, compared to 36 for Haley, the AP reported.
The race will soon shift to Super Tuesday on March 5th, when 15 states hold Republican nominating contests. Haley has vowed to stay in the race through then. She has continued to campaign and raise funds over the past week in the wake of a crushing loss to Trump last Saturday in South Carolina, the state where she was governor twice.
Despite the losses, Haley has beat expectations set by polls in several of the early voting states. She won more than 43% of the vote in New Hampshire and nearly 40% in her home state of South Carolina, both states where she spent significant time campaigning.
‘There are huge numbers of voters in our Republican primaries who are saying they want an alternative’, Haley said last week.
Jai Chabria, a Republican strategist, said the latest win made clear that Haley had virtually no chance of clinching the nomination away from Trump.
‘This race has been over for a long time since Donald Trump announced he was going to become president’, Chabria said. ‘There are a few in the donor class that want us to go on, but that’s really it’”. -Stephanie Lai, Bloomberg
While a defiant Nikki Haley has vowed to remain in the race through next week’s 15-state Super Tuesday primaries despite the polls not favoring her to win anywhere in the foreseeable future, perhaps the real question is whether she will suspend her campaign ahead of the first of Trump’s criminal trials on March 25th.