NC primary results: Clinton and Trump win big; Connect NC Bond passes

Casey McAnarney | News Editor

UNC Wilmington students and North Carolinians alike ventured out to the polls for the NC Primary yesterday, and the results are now in.

In the presidential race, Hillary Clinton won the Democratic primary while Donald Trump won the Republican vote.

Based on information from WUNC News, with 95 percent of precincts reporting, the polls showed that Clinton had 55 percent of the vote and competitor Bernie Sanders had 41 percent. And for the Republican presidential primary, Trump had 40 percent of the vote, being closely trailed by fellow candidate Ted Cruz at 37 percent.

“I’m not too surprised about the results of the primary in regard to the winners being Trump and Hillary,” said UNCW sophomore Paige Myers. “I like and voted for Hillary, so I am glad she won our state.”

However, not every candidate was as fortunate. After only earning eight percent of the votes in North Carolina’s primary and after losing in his own state of Florida, CNN’s Tal Kopan reported that Republican candidate Marco Rubio officially dropped out of the presidential race.

“America is in the middle of a real political storm, a real tsunami and we should have seen this coming… while we are on the right side, this year, we will not be on the winning side,” said Rubio in Miami on Tuesday to his supporters after his loss.

The fourth Republican candidate in the race, John Kasich, also had significantly less percent of the vote compared to Cruz and Trump with only 13 percent of the vote in the primary.

And, although the votes are in and represent the choices of the state of North Carolina, not everyone is happy about the results or even the choices presented to them on the ballot.

“I’m not satisfied with the results, and I had hoped for a better outcome as to which candidate would win,” said UNCW sophomore Dana Weber. “I’d say it was a really difficult decision to pick which ballot I wanted to vote [for] since I am unaffiliated, [and] I was not extremely satisfied with any of the candidates.”

Luckily, for those unsatisfied with these results, North Carolina is not a winner-take-all state for delegates.

For the Democrats, with 82 of the 121 total Democratic delegates, Clinton will receive 56 delegates while Sanders receives 26. And with 62 of the 72 Republican delegates allotted, Trump got 27, Cruz received 24, and Kasich and Rubio each earned seven and three delegates respectively.

Besides the presidential race, some of the other issues to vote over on the ballot included the race for governor, United States Senate seat, some smaller political positions throughout the counties and states, and on the Connect NC Bond.

In the governor’s race, incumbent Gov. Pat McCrory was declared the Republican primary winner with 82 percent, and he will run opposite Democratic primary winner Roy Cooper in November.

Sen. Richard Burr won the Republican primary for the U.S. Senate seat and will compete for this seat against Democratic primary winner Deborah Ross in the fall general election as well.

For state and county positions: incumbent Democrat June Atkinson and Republican Mark Johnson will run for the State Superintendent position; Republican Buck Newton and incumbent Democrat Josh Stein will run for Attorney General; and Democrat Linda Coleman and incumbent Republican Dan Forest compete for the position of Lieutenant Governor.

And for those in support of the Connect NC Bond, who came out the polls in droves and passed the bond with a two to one margin, according to the report by WUNC, the bond will use $2.2 billion for statewide upgrades of infrastructure, building projects on state college campuses and will go towards the improvement of state parks.