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I might not vote,” Johnson shrugged. “I just don’t like either candidate.”

Trump did not need Johnson’s vote to post a decisive rout over Haley in Michigan. He won the state’s primary 68.1 percent to Haley’s 26.6 percent, his biggest margin in the four contested state primaries so far.

But he might need it to beat Biden in the fall — and Haley’s extant challenge is laying bare nagging reservations about the former president among independents and moderate Republicans in some of the very same places that cost Trump reelection in 2020.

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Bloomfield Hills, a well-heeled Detroit suburb — and home to the tony Cranbrook School where Republican Senator Mitt Romney of Utah was educated — backed Trump in 2016 before narrowly supporting Biden in 2020. It’s part of Oakland County, where Biden beat Trump by 14 percentage points that year, up from the 8 percentage points by which Hillary Clinton led Trump in 2016.

And it is here that Haley posted one of her better countywide showings in the state, carrying 34 percent of the vote, the latest datapoint showing Trump lagging with affluent and often college-educated voters in some pivotal areas of the country.

Exit polls from South Carolina and New Hampshire showed Haley outperforming Trump among college graduates and voters who identified themselves as independents. She narrowly beat Trump among voters earning more than $100,000 annually in New Hampshire, and narrowly lost among that group in South Carolina. In both states, she performed well in urban and suburban areas, and along parts of the coasts.

“Nikki Haley represents what remains of the Reagan-Bush coalition within the Republican Party,” said Whit Ayres, a Republican pollster. “Her performance in the primary so far shows that millions of Republicans are resistant to Donald Trump and his message.”

It is too soon, Ayres said, to know whether there is a real risk of Trump-averse voters siding with Biden in the fall. “The vast majority of them think he’s way too old,” Ayres said. A lot could happen to influence their behavior, including proceedings in Trump’s criminal trials and other events.

But the Biden campaign is likely paying close attention to where Haley performs best.

“I do think where Haley did well — she had some pockets of strength in places like Oakland County and the Grand Rapids area. These are places I think Biden probably has some room to improve in the general election,” said J. Miles Coleman, an associate editor at Sabato’s Crystal Ball, a newsletter for political analysis run by the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics.

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Trump and his campaign have done almost nothing to reach out to these voters. In fact, earlier this year, Trump said anyone who donated to Haley would be “permanently barred” from his Make America Great Again movement — a threat she immediately printed on a T-shirt and made central to her campaign.

Haley has committed to staying in the race through Super Tuesday on March 5, but she’s said little about what would come after that. She has made Trump’s general election viability, particularly how he has sent some moderates running from the GOP, a central part of her pitch.

Campaigning this week in Denver, she pointed out how Republicans running statewide have struggled since Trump became president.

“Everyone sees what’s happening in Colorado since Trump was president,” Haley said. “It has moved to the left, further left, and it has moved the Republican Party to leave our values and fiscal responsibility.”

Trump’s campaign says Haley gives him nothing to worry about.

“Republican voters have delivered resounding wins for President Trump in every single primary contest and this race is over,” said Steven Cheung, a campaign spokesman. “Our focus is now on Joe Biden and the general election.”

Indeed, the Michigan polls were full of Republicans more excited than ever to vote for Trump. Blase Keating, a sales professional from Troy, cast a vote for the former president alongside his wife and one of his daughters to stop the “two-tier justice system” he said was persecuting Trump, as well as corruption in the federal government.

And in Bloomfield Hills, Lori Stillwagon, voted for Trump because of the “border invasion,” and urged Haley to drop out of the race.

“The people have spoken pretty loud and clear,” Stillwagon said.

Some of the Democratic voters in Michigan illustrated another possible vulnerability for Trump: How motivating he is to the other side.

Margo Campbell, 73, a retired photographer from Bloomfield Hills, said she considered not voting in a Democratic primary that was hardly competitive.

“But then I thought of a guy that’s running and trying to take my rights away,” she said. She trudged to the polls.

In the nearby city of Rochester Hills, which, like Bloomfield Hills, backed Trump in 2016 and then Biden in 2020, Debra Puvogel, a retiree and an independent voter, said she was voting for Biden even though she wasn’t excited about it.

“What choice do we have?” she asked. She had voted for Trump in 2016, she said, but no more. “Everything he’s done is not presidential. Like too many lawsuits.”

Michigan also revealed the depth of Biden’s problem with typically Democratic voters angry over his administration’s support of Israel’s war with Hamas, which has killed some 30,000 people in the Gaza Strip, according to the Gaza health ministry.

“We Arabs, we feel that it’s a hopeless time in the US,” said Luna Yazji, a voter in Bloomfield Hills who said she “used to be a Democrat” but was now voting “uncommitted” to register her displeasure with Biden. More than 100,000 voters in the state joined her — a figure that could spell trouble for Biden in the fall in a state that is often won or lost narrowly.

Yazji said she wasn’t yet sure who she would vote for in a Trump-Biden contest.

“It’s so sad that the whole USA has only these two,” she said.

That was the refrain from James Guisinger, 66, a financial adviser and lifelong Republican from Troy, after he emerged from an Orthodox Church where he cast his vote for Haley.

“Trump’s just a complete fool, can’t be trusted,” he groused, but said he is “certainly not going to vote for Biden.”

Guisinger wrote his children’s names onto the ballot in 2016 and 2020, he said. He is mulling supporting Trump in the fall, but might just skip the presidential election altogether.

“It’s such a sad situation that we have to choose between Trump and Biden,” he said, “and that’s why Haley would be great.”

Contact: [email protected]. Follow @jessbidgood on Twitter.