Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders narrowly defeated Hillary Clinton in the Michigan primary Tuesday setting up a whole new race in Ohio for March 15.
Clinton easily won the primary in Mississippi.
With 100 percent of the vote counted, Sanders defeated Clinton, 49.82 percent to 48.28 percent in Michigan, the first big Midwestern state to vote ahead of Ohio’s March 15 primary.
Clinton glossed over the Michigan race with Sanders Tuesday night and jabbed at the Republicans and their chaotic nomination fight.
Saying she expects a “busy week” in Ohio, which holds its crucial winner-take-all primary on March 15, Clinton said that she was “excited to have the campaign building across this state.”
Clinton said she was proud of the campaigns she and Sanders were running and focused her criticism instead on the Republicans.
“America is great,” she told a cheering crowd, using GOP front-runner Donald Trump’s campaign mantra. She reiterated her call to “make it whole.”
“We are better than what we are being offered by the Republicans,” she said.
The economy ranked high on the list of concerns for voters heading to the polls in Michigan and Mississippi. At least 8 in 10 voters in each party’s primary said they were worried about where the American economy is heading, according to exit polls conducted by Edison Research for The Associated Press and television networks.
Among Democrats, 8 in 10 voters in both states said the country’s economic system benefits the wealthy, not all Americans.
Sanders has sought to tap into that concern, energizing young people and white, blue-collar voters with his calls for breaking up Wall Street banks and making tuition free at public colleges and universities. Michigan, with big college towns and a sizeable population of working-class voters, should be a good fit for him. But Clinton has led in polling.
The results in Mississippi underscored Clinton’s overwhelming strength with black voters and Sanders’ stunning inability to draw support from voters who are crucial to Democrats in the general election. Clinton carried nearly 9 in 10 black voters in Mississippi, mirroring her margins in other Southern states with large African-American populations.
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