Kasich and Sanders Win by Wide Margins in East Lansing

Above: the East Lansing voting precinct map

This morning, the East Lansing City Clerk’s office provided East Lansing Info (ELi) with results of yesterday’s presidential primary elections in East Lansing. The results indicate that John Kasich easily beat his opponents on the Republican side, garnering 43% of the votes cast in the Republican race, in contrast to Donald Trump’s statewide win. In East Lansing, Trump came in second on the Republican side, with about 22% of the vote.

On the Democratic side, Bernie Sanders beat Hillary Clinton by a much bigger margin than he did statewide—with Sanders winning over about 57% of those voting in East Lansing on the Democratic side and Clinton winning about 43%.

In the student-heavy precincts, voting also went in favor of Kasich and Sanders. On the Democratic side, the results were significantly more lopsided in the student-heavy precincts than in the rest of the City, with Sanders beating Clinton by a margin of as much as 10-1.

According to City Clerk Marie Wicks, absentee voting was heavy—coming to 1,663 votes of the 7,409 votes cast—particularly among MSU students who were gone on Spring Break this week. This means over 22% of the votes in East Lansing were cast by absentee ballot. (The totals and percentages provided in this article all include absentee ballots.)

A total of 2,063 people cast ballots in the Republican race in East Lansing. The totals-per-candidate are shown here, highest to lowest:

• Kasich            887
• Trump             454
• Cruz                 338
• Rubio               290
• Bush                32
• uncommitted  25
• Carson             18
• Christie            6
• Paul                 4
• Pataki              3
• Fiorina             2
• Santorum        2
• Graham           1
• write-in           1

 
In the race for the Democratic nomination, the 5,346 votes cast in East Lansing broke down as follows:

• Sanders           3,028
• Clinton             2,283
• Uncommitted 24
• Write-in          6
• De La Fuente   3
• O’Malley         2

 
About 72% of those voting cast a vote in the Democratic primary, and 28% in the Republican primary. Eli has tabulated complete results by precinct for the Democratic election and for the Republican election.

Note: After the original publication of this article, it was updated to provide the absentee voting total.