Half an hour ago, Donald Trump was trailing in the tabulated vote in Florida and North Carolina. Now he’s leading by 100,000 in Florida — an advantage, but not an insuperable one — and he’s got some favorable signs in the fragmentary returns coming in from Michigan, a 54 to 45 percent Obama state in 2012, and one in which both campaigns sent in their presidential candidates in the past week.
The good signs for Trump: he’s leading in partial returns from Marquette County, sometimes the most Democratic county in the Upper Peninsula, which went for Obama in 2012. He’s running well ahead of Michigan native Mitt Romney in initial returns from small rural Lower Peninsula counties: Otsego, Iosco, Kalkaska, Clare, St. Joseph, Cass. He’s running behind Romney in heavily Dutch-American Ottawa County, next door to Grand Rapids (an area where he ran third in the primary, behind Ted Cruz and John Kasich). But in initial returns from Oakland County he’s running better than Romney; this may or may not mean much, since Oakland County communities have widely varying party preferences.
This suggests at least a faint chance that Trump’s appeal to non-college whites (52 percent of the Michigan electorate) gives him a chance to carry Michigan, whose 16 electoral votes would compensate if he lost North Carolina’s 15.
