I’ve got to say, I don’t understand why CNN is letting their broadcast turn into a half-hour or more Trump campaign commercial.
Maybe Trump admitting that he follows the New York Yankees will burst his bubble. 
Michigan has been called for Trump.
Reading 538, and they’re saying the parts of Wayne County that have reported in so far are 100% outside of Detroit city limits, so not a single vote in the statewide total thus far reflects Detroit. I lean toward thinking Hillary probably wins statewide by a couple points, although Grand Rapids isn’t reporting yet at all and will probably be competitive, nor has Ann Arbor–which should lean heavily Bernie. What we can safely say is Bernie definitely won’t lose Michigan by 20% which was the weight of polling.
More like 0.45%. Kasich did not get that close second that he needed tonight, Rubio is doing his best imitation of the Hindenberg in Mississippi. If you finish in single digits in Mississippi, he’s going to be equally impotent in the Florida panhandle.
Sanders having a better than expected run in MI, of course we’ll have to wait for the perennially tardy Wayne County votes to come in to get a result.
Poor, poor Rubio. Maybe he can eke out a win in Hawaii.
Now that more results are in I think Hillary may, in fact, lose a close race in Michigan. A big batch of Wayne precincts just came in and cut Bernie’s statewide from 5% to 2%, but there’s still a lot of western counties that are only 50% in, and Ann Arbor is only about 15% in, and Hillary is doing well but not “crushingly” well in Wayne, and Genesee where Flint is is only slightly favoring Hillary.
If that ends up being the story tonight I think it’s hard to say what this foretells for Illinois and Ohio. Ohio is very similar to Michigan in that the 538 “demographic predictions” suggested Bernie would win a close race there, but he’s polling very badly–so if Michigan is predictive he could surprise versus the polls in Ohio. Illinois Hillary is demographically expected to win a fourteen delegate margin there, so it’s a little different from both Michigan and Ohio. But if Michigan is telling us that Hillary isn’t nearly as strong with Northern black voting blocs as she is with Southern, it could mean a lot of close contests throughout the Midwest.
Of course that just makes the campaign more of a horse race, but I suspect won’t ever put Hillary in serious peril–the Southern fire wall ended up being real, and beating Hillary by 5% in a lot of Midwestern states simply can’t erase the apocalypse for Bernie in the deep south.
Michigan is closer than I’d expected, thus far. Sanders might split with Clinton about 50/50, though I’ll put it closer to 60% Clinton and 40% Sanders.
If it’s my guess, then it’s in line with the pre-election polls; if it’s split 50/50, then there was something significantly off about the polls.
Also, what’s up with Shiawassee county? I know the area; there’s all of about 40 people there! 
And even if he loses a close one, and underperforms his 50/50 metric, that may be the story: the polls in these states may be putting him 20 points or more down but they may not mean much afterall.
Obviously I am Hillary guy but I salute this performance by Team Sanders and look forward to wherever this takes us! (As long as it includes beating any of the current GOP crowd in November.)
Wow.
Keep in mind delegate wise, this just means Bernie avoids falling into the abyss. He still is actually going to lose delegate margin on Hillary tonight, and he may also lose margin vs his “538 50/50 race” standings as well.
Oh Harry Enten on 538 made that point already Martin. The 50/50 metric would have him up 4 delegates here and making up lost ground needs more than that. His odds are still pretty dang abysmal. But again, a result that swings 20 points from where extensive polling put it? That will put a lot of wind in Team Sanders’ sails.
It’s also worth noting, like a lot of states where Sanders has beat expectations, he’s outspent Hillary. It may be the case after tonight that Hillary stops allowing that to happen. I think this has occurred because Hillary is playing a conservative, national delegate count game and wants to preserve money if it tightens up later. But she and her team may decide that they are tired of PR losses and spend heavily on the 3/15 states, bringing more money to bear than Bernie will, or at least equaling his spend.
Plus, it looks like Bernie is going to over perform in all the open primary states, so that may also be where Hillary decides to step up her game money wise.
Florida will be a good test of the closed/open primary theory, because it’s a “true closed” primary state. Meaning to vote in the Democratic primary you must be a registered Democrat, and your party change papers must be in more than 29 days before election day. So any “casual independents” have already missed the deadline if they haven’t bothered to switch to Democrat already. Hillary is projected to win in Florida by the same margin, roughly, as she was projected to win in Michigan.
The yapperheads are talking about how Cruz, Rubio, and Kasich should all stay in the race to take votes from Trump and deny him a majority at the convention.
Has anyone told these guys that the big states up ahead are winner take all? That means that unless one of the three can beat Trump, it doesn’t matter if they have 100 candidates siphoning votes off of him. If he gets 4 votes in WTA state and the other 100 get 3, Trump wins every single state delegate, and he racks up those delegates to get a convention majority.
The only possible way is for two of those guys to drop out and throw their support to the one who can win. Maybe have Cruz and Rubio ask their supporters to vote Kasich in Ohio and for Kasich and Cruz to ask their supporters to vote Rubio in Florida. But this strategy would be disastrous for other reasons.
There will be no brokered convention. These three may pick up a state here or there, but the Trump steamroller is on.
I live in the most conservative city in the most conservative county in Michigan. I haven’t seen precinct-by-precinct results yet, but I wouldn’t be surprised if Hillary got just one vote (me) and Bernie got just one vote (my wife) in our precinct.
My observation from inside the state of Michigan: Bernie was everywhere in the past weekend. Hillary didn’t seem to have as much presence. I’m on both Hillary’s and Bernie’s email list, and since last Tuesday, I received zero emails from Hillary, and three from Bernie. I know emails don’t amount to GOTV, but he’s definitely been building his statewide buzz better than Hillary has been.
As a Hillary supporter, I’m pretty disappointed in her showing here. As an American human being, I’m extremely disappointed in Trump’s showing here.
How shocking would a Sanders win here be? It was supposed to be the death knell to his campaign, and 538 predicted there was a >99% margin Clinton would win, and Sanders may pull it out.
Am I understanding correctly that if it’s 49-48-3% (other), it’ll be delegated proportionally? But if it’s 51-48, Sanders takes all the delegates? He’s sitting at 50.3% now, so if that’s the case, whether he finishes at >50% or at like 49.9% would be huge.
I’m guessing that Bernie’s lead will evaporate when the Detroit vote comes in.
this primary makes me sad. Bernie and Trump are sowing dissent that doesn’t need to exist and ought to go back in the closet.
No, it’s proportional unless a candidate is under 15%. The 50% winner-take-all cutoff is a feature of some Republican primaries, but not any Democratic ones.
The Michigan Democratic delegate haul will be pretty much a tie.
Yeah, keep in mind in 2006, in prep for the 2008 primaries, the Democrats fully standardized all of their primaries in terms of delegate allocation. It’s straight proportional in every state, with a 15% threshold to receive any delegates (if there are sub-15% candidates then their votes essentially get divvied up proportionally to the candidates who clear the threshold.)