After winning the Iowa and Missouri caucuses and securing a landslide of delegates at the party convention in Michigan on Saturday, former president Donald Trump proceeded with his march toward the GOP candidacy.
Trump gained the support of every delegate up for grabs on Saturday, increasing his lead to 244 over former UN Ambassador Nikki Haley’s 24. For a candidate to be guaranteed the Republican nomination, they must obtain 1,215 delegates.
Sunday in the District of Columbia is the next item on the Republican schedule. Super Tuesday is two days later. 16 states will hold primaries on this day, which will be the biggest voting day of the year except for the election in November. Days later, Trump is expected to secure the nomination.
Republicans gathered in a church in Columbia, Missouri, to caucus, putting Haley’s overwhelming odds in the public eye.
Vote for Haley, Seth Christensen urged them from the platform. He did not get along well.
“Are you a Republican?” someone else in the audience yelled during the caucuses.
Once one of the organizers calmed the assembly, Christensen concluded his remarks. Only 37 of the 263 Republicans present in Boone County supported Haley in the end.
Here are the competitions for Saturday:
MICHIGAN
At their Grand Rapids convention, Michigan Republicans started assigning 39 of the state’s 55 GOP presidential delegates. All 39 of the delegates were won by Trump.
Nevertheless, a sizable segment of the party’s grassroots membership was not attending the event due to the aftereffects of a months-long dispute over the party’s leadership.
Trump won Michigan’s primary with 68% of the vote, compared to Haley’s 27%. Michigan Republicans were forced to split their delegate allocation into two parts after Democrats moved Michigan into the early primary states, violating the national Republican Party’s rules. In Missouri, voters lined up outside a church before the doors opened for the caucuses. Supporters of the candidates appealed to the crowd, urging Republicans to go in a new direction. This year was the first test of the new system, which is almost entirely run by volunteers on the Republican side.
Lawmakers failed to reinstate the primary despite calls to do so by both state Republican and Democratic party leaders. Democrats will hold a party-run primary on March 23. Trump prevailed twice under Missouri’s old presidential primary system.
In Idaho, the Republican-led Legislature considered holding a special session to reinstate the presidential primaries but failed to agree on a proposal in time, leaving both parties with presidential caucuses as the only option. John Graves, a fire protection engineer from Boise, said the caucus was fast and easy, not much different from Idaho’s usual Republican primary. He anticipated the win would go to Trump. The Democratic caucuses aren’t until May 23.
(AP)
