By Stephanie Lai, Bloomberg News
Former President Donald Trump swept two more Republican presidential nominating contests on Saturday, beating rival Nikki Haley in Missouri and winning all of Michigan's remaining delegates.
The Associated Press called both races for Trump. Republicans in Idaho are also awarding delegates in a caucus on Saturday.
Trump has won every nominating contest so far by wide margins, putting him 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 5, 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.
Haley has argued that she should stay in the race despite the unlikely odds in order to give voters a choice beyond the former president. She has made the case to voters that Trump's legal challenges would distract him from the campaign, making him a less desirable candidate to challenge President Joe Biden.
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 gonna become president," Chabria said. "There are a few in the donor class that want us to go on, but that's really it."
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