Prior to the election, Michigan was considered to be a state Clinton was favored to win. However, Trump unexpectedly won Michigan by a narrow margin of 0.23%, with 47.50% of the total votes over Clinton's 47.27%. This made Michigan 2.33% more Republican than the nation-at-large. The state was the last to be called by most major news networks due to the close nature and the need to count provisional and absentee ballots; most networks declared Trump the winner of Michigan's electors three weeks after Election Day.[4][5] This is the narrowest margin of victory in Michigan's history in presidential elections, as well as the narrowest margin of any state in the 2016 election. Trump's victory in Michigan was attributed to overwhelming and underestimated support from white working-class citizens in the state's rural areas, a demographic that had previously tended to either vote for the Democratic candidate or did not vote at all.[6] By winning Michigan, Trump became the first Republican presidential candidate to win the state since George H. W. Bush in 1988. Michigan also became one of eleven states to vote for Bill Clinton in 1992 and 1996 which Hillary Clinton lost.
Michigan's largest county, Wayne County, home to Detroit, voted for Clinton by 37 points. She also managed to hold on to suburban Oakland County, the state's second-largest county, where residents tend to be more diverse and more white-collar, where instead third-party candidates gained votes, whilst Trump flipped the state's third largest county, Macomb County, which is home to more socially conservative but economically populist white blue-collar workers. As of the 2024 U.S. presidential election, this is the last time in which Kent County and Leelanau County voted for the Republican candidate.
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