What Went Down In The April 26 Primary Elections

That’ll do it for us tonight, people. It was a huge night for the Clinton and Trump campaigns. Clinton won four of five states and a slew of elected delegates. Trump won all five states up for grabs and probably every delegate outside of Rhode Island (which allocated its delegates proportionally). Moreover, many of the delegate candidates Trump endorsed in the loophole primary in Pennsylvania did well. We’ll have more on the Republican race in a separate post from Nate, but let’s talk more about Clinton’s big wins.

Clinton extended her delegate lead by what looks to be about 50 elected delegates. She did so thanks mostly to Maryland and Pennsylvania. She won by about 30 percentage points in Maryland (where she’ll pick up about 30 elected delegates) and more than 10 percentage points in Pennsylvania (where she’ll pick up about 20 elected delegates). Clinton will likely pick up a net of about 2 elected delegates in Connecticut, Delaware and Rhode Island combined.

Clinton did well tonight for the same reasons that she performed well in previous primaries. She won 68 percent or more of the black vote in Connecticut, Maryland and Pennsylvania (Delaware and Rhode Island didn’t have exit polls). She also won two-thirds or more of voters making more than $200,000 in both Connecticut and Maryland (there was no $200,000+ crosstab in Pennsylvania).

Simply put, the contests tonight followed the already established demographic patterns of the Democratic race. That’s very bad for Sanders.

When you combine Clinton’s net 50 delegate victory tonight with the 235 elected delegate lead she had before tonight, Clinton holds a lead of about 285 elected delegates. That’s a huge lead. In order for Sanders to catch up, he’ll have to win 64 percent of the remaining elected delegates. That seems quite unlikely given the polling that is out there. In fact, I think it’s fair to say that barring a miracle, Clinton will have more elected delegates at the end of the primary season than Sanders.

Add in Clinton’s even larger edge among superdelegates, and Clinton is the presumptive nominee. That was mostly clear before tonight, and it’s crystal clear now. Now, that doesn’t mean Sanders needs to quit the race. In fact, all indications are he will stay in. But he’s staying in without a real path to the nomination, so don’t be surprised if he cuts down on the more negative attacks on Clinton.

We’ll have a lot more analysis of both races in the coming days — Indiana is shaping up to be make-or-break in the GOP race for #NeverTrump — but thanks for following along with us tonight.

Now that all of the states voting today have been called, I can report that FiveThirtyEight’s polls-plus and polls-only models got every state right on both sides. Interestingly, despite one of the largest upsets in polling history in Michigan, that state remains the only one that that the polls-only forecast incorrectly projected on the Democratic side. Iowa, Kansas, and Oklahoma were the only ones incorrectly forecasted by the polls-only model on the Republican side.

Earlier in the campaign, Trump had a tendency to perform poorly among late-deciding voters. It didn’t always cost him states because he had a lot of his vote locked in early on, but it led to him underperforming his polls fairly often.

So what about tonight? According to exit polls, Trump won 37 percent of late-deciding voters in Maryland, 39 percent in Connecticut, and 41 percent in Pennsylvania. That’s good, although well below Trump’s statewide margins. In fact, Kasich narrowly led among late-deciders in Connecticut and Maryland.

The thing is, though, that there weren’t very many late deciders. Only 21 percent of Republicans decided on their vote in the last week in Pennsylvania, 20 percent in Connecticut, and 27 percent in Maryland.

The prediction markets agree with the conventional wisdom that a Trump-Clinton general-election matchup is looking more likely after tonight. According to Election Betting Odds, which uses data from Betfair, Trump is up to a 75 percent chance to win the Republican nomination, from 70 percent a day ago. And Clinton continues her march toward clinching, up to a 95 percent chance from 94 percent yesterday. The Clinton-Trump matchup continues to look favorable for Democrats according to bettors, who give the party a 75 percent chance of holding on to the White House.

The Associated Press and ABC and NBC News are projecting that Clinton will win in Connecticut.

With Trump racking up five more wins tonight, he told supporters and media tonight this was a “diverse victory.” He was referring to the variety of primary states that supported him tonight. However, when it comes to the more common uses of the term diversity — race, religion, class, and national origin — ideological divides between those groups are deepening. Americans in regions where employment has been disrupted by globalization are disproportionately likely to be Trump supporters. An academic study called “Importing Political Polarization?” looked at the impact of China trade on the electorate, and found a specific racial correlation as well. As an article on the findings in The New York Times put it,  “While whites hit hard by trade tend to move right, nonwhite voters move left, eroding support for moderates in both parties.”

The 2016 American electorate is the most racially diverse ever, and it may also be the most ideologically divided. Two-thirds of Republican voters support Trump’s plan to ban Muslims from entering the United States. As we noted earlier on the liveblog, new voter registrations among Latino Americans in California have doubled, probably in response to Trump’s persistent calls for a border wall and his statement that Mexicans are rapists.

Some people have argued that we have two Americas — sometimes meaning rich and poor, others black and white. But perhaps we have a politically fractured America, where questions of identity and self-interest will bring voters into conflict with each other’s goals and ideals throughout the campaign season and beyond.

The Associated Press has corrected its count in Greenwich. Sanders has now won 31 percent of the vote there. That’s still bad, though better than the 12 percent the Associated Press previously reported.

Looks like Sanders continued his fun-but-meaningless streak of winning counties named Clinton: He leads in Clinton County, Pennsylvania, by 1,690 votes to 1,647.

Here’s a projection: Trump has easily swept all 38 Maryland delegates.

Clinton just overtook Sanders’s lead in Connecticut by about 800 votes, and the remaining precincts look pretty favorable to her. About 63 percent of precincts are reporting, but that’s higher than the share of precincts reporting in Clinton-favorable cities like Hartford, Bridgeport, and New Haven.

Additionally, many locales that should be favorable for Clinton, such as Westport, New Britain, Norwalk and Fairfield have yet to report any votes at all. Sanders is doing better in small-town and rural Connecticut, which reported votes quickly. My money’s on Clinton to win the state and split the two New England contests tonight.

More evidence that rich people do not like Sanders: After winning just 21 percent of the vote on Manhattan’s Upper East Side last week, Sanders followed that up by winning just 12 percent of the vote in the wealthy suburb of Greenwich, Connecticut tonight.

Trump, who came to his victory party tonight straight off an appearance at the Time 100 Gala — he changed in between from tux to blue suit and tie — is really leaning into his against-the-establishment brand … on both sides of the aisle.

While boasting that has won millions and millions more votes than Kasich, Trump decided to offer his thoughts on the Democratic race as well.

“The Democrats have treated Bernie very badly and frankly I think he should run as an independent,” Trump said, as some in the crowd booed.

But his sympathetic advice to Sanders had an obvious self-serving point. If Sanders ran a third-party race, it would be highly advantageous for Trump, drawing votes away from Clinton.

If The Upshot’s projected margins are right, Clinton will win about 218 pledged delegates tonight compared to 166 for Sanders, very close to our projections heading into the evening, and leaving Sanders in a dire position. (Note: I’m assuming that Democratic delegates are allocated proportionally based on the statewide vote when in fact some are allocated proportionally by congressional district, but this rarely makes a difference of more than a couple of delegates.)

One thing that has to greatly worry the anti-Trump forces is that Trump is now exceeding his poll averages. Since New York, Trump has performed at least 6.5 percentage points better in every state than the average of polls taken within 21 days of the election. Before that, Trump tended to hit his polling average and win no undecideds. Now, he’s winning his fair share of undecideds and then some. That’s very bad news for his opponents, given that Trump is already ahead in Indiana, a must-win state for Cruz.

Another problem for #NeverTrump: how do 54 unbound Pennsylvania delegates possibly vote against Trump when he’s won 57 percent of the statewide vote?

It’s not so much that they think it should be over. They think it is over.

To expand a bit, I think we can assume that Trump’s support comes first and foremost from voters’ preference for him over the alternatives. And Kasich and Cruz have long been essentially niche candidates. They’re just the last ones left. When you add that to their seeming inability to win, you’ve got at least a bit of an explanation for Trump’s rising support.

To expand on Dave’s post about there being evidence of consolidation around Trump, is it possible that part of Trump’s apparent improvement is because GOP voters are just tired of this race? That they think it should be over?

Of the five states reporting results tonight, Trump’s smallest margin so far is 31 percentage points (in Maryland, where he leads Kasich 54 percent to 23 percent). Granted, these are low-turnout GOP primaries in very Democratic states that are demographically favorable to Trump. But by exceeding expectations in places like Maryland’s 8th District, Trump raises the question of whether we’re beginning to see a “rally around the frontrunner” effect on the GOP side that we simply aren’t seeing in the Democratic race.

With 62,000 votes counted in the Baltimore Democratic mayoral primary, former Mayor Sheila Dixon is gaining on State Senate Majority Leader Catherine Pugh, thanks to a slight edge in votes cast today. But Pugh’s lead of nearly 4,000 votes in early voting might be enough to hold off Dixon’s charge. Meanwhile, DeRay Mckesson, the Black Lives Matter activist, is showing signs of strength in votes today — he got 1.6 percent of early votes but has 3 percent of votes cast today.

Although Republican turnout in the Northeast is higher than it’s been in most previous Republican primaries, it’s still quite low in an absolute sense — or compared to what it’s been in other parts of the country. In New York last week, for instance, only 6.4 percent of the voting-eligible population cast a ballot in the Republican primary, the lowest in any primary state to date, according to Michael McDonald’s website. And in Delaware tonight, which has counted almost all of its vote, GOP turnout is just 9.8 percent of the voting-eligible population. Trump seems to do well in areas where there are relatively few Republicans. It may also be that Kasich and Cruz supporters, who see their candidates way behind in the polls, aren’t motivated to turn out. Here’s the data for all primaries (not caucuses) so far:

While Trump will win all 17 of Pennsylvania’s statewide delegates, the state will also send an additional 54 unbound delegates to the national convention. These delegates — three from each congressional district — were listed on today’s ballots without any indication of which candidate they might support. Many, however, have said publicly how they intend to vote at the convention (though they are free to change their minds). Below are the top three delegates right now in the districts that have reported results so far, along with how they’ve said they will vote. This list may change as more results come in. Many of the delegates have said they will back the winner of their district which, in many (if not all) cases, will be Trump.

This year’s election race is the first test of the Obama legacy – not just of its strength, but about what it actually means. Obama has toggled back and forth between attempting to fulfill his promises of change, and working within the terms of debate that he inherited from predecessors — talking about business, work, private industry, cleaning up government through things like lobbying reform.

But the conversation about equality among the historically marginalized groups that make up the Democratic coalition has shifted considerably during his two terms. It’s not clear how much of this Obama can really take credit for – he signed on to support marriage equality after public opinion had shifted, for instance. But he did put political weight behind that issue eventually, and behind repealing “don’t ask, don’t tell.”

Issues for Americans who don’t fit into binary gender categories, the high rate of imprisonment, and racial justice – these have come up, too. And while Obama hasn’t been out in front of them, the party and the country have shifted and started new (and in many cases difficult) conversations. Clinton’s rhetoric seems to reflect that, with her emphasis on lifting each other up instead of tearing each other down, and on removing barriers. It offers the potential for her to integrate her role as the first woman candidate with a more substantive policy message.

This has been a bit rocky for her – think back to the first Democratic debate. But the last two speeches have sounded some of these themes, and it seems to be working better.

The implications for Obama’s legacy suggest, for one thing, that it might have meaning beyond the Affordable Care Act or his more fraught foreign policy approach. And it defies the longer historical story that Clinton tried to tell by referring to figures like FDR. The full-throated embrace of equality for marginalized groups has been an uneven and complicated journey for Democrats.

If I’m Clinton, I have to like the look of the Connecticut map. She’s down 1.5 percentage points with about half of precincts reporting, but there are a ton of votes left in Bridgeport, Hartford and much of southwestern Connecticut. Those are all Clinton strongholds where she is winning by 30 percentage points or more. Of course, we’ll have to see what happens.

Rep. Chris Van Hollen looks like he’s won the Democratic primary and will almost certainly be the next senator from Maryland. In fact, CNN just called it.

Van Hollen is doing far better in his base (Montgomery County) than Rep. Donna Edwards is doing in hers (Prince George’s County), and he’s ahead by more than 40,000 votes statewide. This is a convincing victory for the “pragmatist” wing of the Democratic party and a bitter defeat to progressives and EMILY’s List.

“That is how progress gets made — by dreamers and doers,” Clinton said to supporters tonight in a speech focusing on economic themes. The line was also a not-so-veiled dig at Sanders (she strongly suggested that between the two, she was the doer), although she also complimented him on bringing up important issues in the race. The tension between criticizing Sanders and trying not to alienate his voters is part of a hot-and-cold rhetorical war between the two Democratic candidates. Clinton later turned her attention to attacking Trump.

If front-runners Clinton and Trump take the nominations, we might see some interesting cross-party gymnastics. A recent Suffolk University poll found that 19 percent of Republicans who wouldn’t vote for Trump would choose Clinton instead. And a poll last month from NBC News/Wall Street Journal found 7 percent of Sanders voters might choose Trump if their candidate didn’t win.

We thought Maryland would be among Clinton’s best states outside the South. Why? The state has wealthy white voters and a lot of black voters. Right now, Clinton is winning black voters by 48 percentage points and winning those making more than $200,000 by 52 percentage points.

Exit polls are showing Clinton doing much better than usual with white voters, a group Sanders typically wins. In Maryland, Clinton beat Sanders among whites by 15 points, which ABC News points out is her best performance with the group in a non-Southern state.

In an article earlier this month, I asked if DeRay Mckesson could turn his 330,000 Twitter followers into 20,000 votes in the Baltimore Democratic mayoral primary. So far, it looks like he hasn’t. The Black Lives Matter activist, who entered the race just before the deadline and got less than 1 percent of support in a pair of Baltimore Sun polls, has just 1.6 percent of the vote — 482 votes in total — in early counts. State Senate Majority Leader Catherine Pugh leads with 44.5 percent of the vote, ahead of former Mayor Sheila Dixon, at 33.2 percent. More than 30,000 votes have been counted — about 40 percent of the total votes in the previous Democratic mayoral primary, in 2011.

In his speech tonight, Sanders cited his strength in hypothetical general-election polls. He’s right: He does beat all three Republican candidates in head-to-head matchups, according to the polls. But there are plenty of reasons to think those polls overstate Sanders’s general-election prospects: They’re based on an unrealistic scenario in which votes are cast today, before any Republican attacks on Sanders. Similarly, there’s reason to doubt Kasich’s lead in head-to-head polls against Clinton: He hasn’t gotten much negative attention from Democrats. Clinton leads comfortably against Cruz and Trump; she has led in the last 48 polls HuffPost Pollster has collected pitting her against Trump.

One reason Clinton looks as if she’ll do well in Pennsylvania is that she is holding her own not just in the Philadelphia area, but the Pittsburgh area as well. Clinton is winning in early returns in Allegheny County (Pittsburgh) as well as doing well in its suburbs.

So far, Trump looks like he’s on track to sweep all 38 delegates in Maryland — he’s comfortably ahead in all eight congressional districts. Projecting it out, the closest appears to be the suburban 8th District, where he currently leads Kasich 44 percent to 30 percent. Kasich is ahead of Trump in the Montgomery County portion of the 8th District by eight votes, which just isn’t good enough to offset Trump’s margins in the more rural reaches of the district.

If you thought Trump’s total dominance of media coverage was something that only applied before people started voting, you’d be wrong. In fact, the past couple of weeks have been associated with Trump’s largest share of media coverage to date, with his getting 70 to 80 percent of mentions on television among all current and former Republican candidates, according to the GDELT Project.

Sanders has broken through. The Associated Press has declared him the winner in Rhode Island.

In Baltimore, there’s a Democratic primary today in a mayoral race of particular significance. It’s the first since Freddie Gray, a local resident, died from spinal injuries suffered in police custody, and since the ensuing unrest that roiled Baltimore. (Since Democrats outnumber Republicans 10 to 1 in the city, the primary produces the de facto winner of the race, barring the most unlikely of scenarios.)

Some polling places in the city stayed open an hour later than scheduled because of administrative delays in opening, a move spurred when U.S. Senate candidate Rep. Donna Edwards’ campaign filed a court order. With voters still waiting in line, some people on Twitter asked why news outlets called the Maryland race for Clinton before all the polls were actually closed.

Now the polls have truly closed for all in Maryland, but we still don’t have exit polls or predictions on the mayoral race. However, ABC News exit polls show that 57 percent of Maryland’s Democratic primary voters were Latino or non-white, which probably contributed to Clinton’s win.

As if things could not get better for Trump, he’s above 67 percent in the 2nd district in Rhode Island. That means he would win two delegates there instead of one. Not only that, but Cruz is struggling to get above 10 percent statewide in Rhode Island. If he falls below, more delegates for Trump.

It’s pretty clear that Trump is getting all 28 delegates in Connecticut. On the Democratic side, we’re still waiting for a lot more votes from Bridgeport, Hartford and New Haven, which could help Clinton close what is now a 3-percentage-point deficit.

Another notable exit poll nugget: Trump is killing it with evangelicals. Granted, it’s not as big a group in the Northeast as it is in the South, but Cruz is losing this group to Trump by about 25 percentage points in Pennsylvania, Maryland and Connecticut, which has to smart, given that evangelicals were once seen as the Texas senator’s core constituency.

It’s not as if Cruz has had a good night, but a lot of the reason the #NeverTrump forces argued that Kasich should stay in the race is because he could steal congressional districts in the Northeast and prevent Trump from hitting 50-percent delegate thresholds in New York and Connecticut. Trump got more than 50 percent of the vote last week in New York, however, winning all but five delegates, and he looks likely to top 50 percent in Connecticut tonight as well.

It’s possible that Kasich will win a congressional district or two in Maryland and he’ll get a few proportional delegates in Rhode Island. But overall this is a miserable performance for Kasich. He’ll probably still be behind Rubio in delegates, even though Rubio dropped out six weeks ago.

One econ-related tidbit: The typical household in Maryland made $76,165 in 2014, making it the richest state in the nation by median household income. Connecticut wasn’t far behind at just over $70,000, good for third place. (New Hampshire was No. 2.) But while the two states are similar in income, they’re different in distribution: Connecticut, home to both uber-rich Greenwich and economically struggling Bridgeport, is one of the most unequal states in the country. Maryland, despite wide income disparities in the Baltimore area and elsewhere, ranks near the middle of the pack on most measures of inequality.

It’s tempting to point to those inequality numbers to explain why Sanders is doing so much better in Connecticut than Maryland. But be careful: Clinton dominated New York, which is the most unequal state in the country by most measures, and she also won other high-inequality states like Florida and Massachusetts. In fact, Clinton has tended to outperform Sanders in highly unequal states, as Philip Bump at the Washington Post showed yesterday.

It’s too early to tell for sure, but it’s looking like Trump’s margins over Kasich and Cruz will be so large that it wouldn’t have mattered if his rivals had coordinated. This doesn’t make things look good for the Stop Trump movement going forward. As many people have said many times, if this were anyone else, no one would be calling the Republican race anything but over.

It also leads me to a couple of counterfactual questions. First of all, what if this kind of coordination had happened earlier in the season? Bear with me here – what if someone in the party had seen the writing on the wall over the summer or in the early fall, and thought about the various Republican factions? There’s Trump and his supporters. There’s the Cruz wing of the party — evangelicals, organized conservatives. And finally, the Kasich wing – still conservative, but the more pro-compromise wing. Then they figured out how to get the latter two groups on the same page. Was there a candidate who could have done that? Would it have mattered?

Second, what if one of the bigger names had stuck around? Bush, Rubio, and Walker were all disappointing in the polls – and the first two in early primaries as well. But was this also part of the coordination issue? Could one of of them have gained steam if they’d played by what are maybe the new rules, rather than the old ones that require candidates to drop out sooner rather than later?

Indiana is not only make-or-break for #NeverTrump, Micah, it’s looking harder and harder given the results we’re seeing in demographically similar parts of Pennsylvania so far.

I think so, yes. Or, failing that, you need some sort of massive scandal/gaffe that costs Trump before California.

So do tonight’s results essentially make Indiana make-or-break for #NeverTrump?

The farther south you go in Delaware, the better Trump is performing. Trump is taking just 51 percent in New Castle County (which is a majority of the state’s population), but farther south, he is winning 64 percent in Kent County and 72 percent in Sussex County (which are where most GOP primary voters live). This shouldn’t be a big surprise. In 2010, Kent and Sussex County’s GOP voters were responsible for Christine O’Donnell, essentially handing a Senate seat to Democrats.

Exit polls from tonight are telling us some things about the divided hearts and minds of the GOP electorate, and unlike most years, those hearts and minds have very definite feelings about the Republican nomination process itself. According to exit polls in Pennsylvania, Maryland and Connecticut, pretty much all of Trump’s supporters said the person with the most votes, not the most delegates, should be given the nomination (the opposite of the party’s official rules); six in 10 supporters of Kasich and Cruz said that those with the most delegates, not votes, should get the nomination.

Another interesting trend: this is a spite-motivated GOP electorate. A quarter of Cruz supporters and a third of Kasich’s voters said they were voting not for their candidate per se, but “against his opponents.”

It does not look like Clinton will sweep at this point. Sanders is currently running 20 percentage points ahead in Rhode Island, although none of Providence is reporting. Even if Sanders wins in Rhode Island, only 24 delegates were at stake.

Fox News has declared Clinton the winner in Pennsylvania.

As we watch Connecticut’s Democratic primary, keep in mind there should be some major regional differences in the vote. Clinton should do well in the southwest part of the state and around Hartford. Sanders holds a very small lead right now, but a lot of the southwest vote is out.

So far in Connecticut and Rhode Island, Clinton is winning upscale white areas (Portsmouth, Rhode Island and Salisbury, Connecticut) and heavily minority areas (Hartford/Bridgeport, Connecticut and Central Falls, Rhode Island), but losing just about everywhere else to Sanders. Sanders is well ahead in Rhode Island, but none of Providence is reporting yet. Like Massachusetts almost two months ago, both states look extremely competitive early in the night.

All five states have now been called for Trump, and the margins are large enough that he could sweep nearly every delegate, except in Rhode Island where allocations are highly proportional. Suppose that Trump finishes with 100 of 109 delegates tonight, for instance, not counting any uncommitted delegates in Pennsylvania. That would put him on pace for 1,209 delegates, based on the state-by-state projections that our expert panel issued last month, close enough that he could probably get over the top to 1,237 with uncommitted delegates from Pennsylvania or elsewhere. True, that panel had him winning Indiana, which is a long way from assured. But the point is that Trump has made up the ground he lost in states like Wisconsin and Colorado and put himself in the strongest position he’s been in since March 15.

As more results are reported, we’ll be posting election returns for today’s GOP primaries from each state and (where relevant) congressional district, along with what the delegate allocation would be based on those results. The delegate counts will change throughout the night as more results come in; they should be considered preliminary, as an illustration of how delegates would be awarded if the current results didn’t change. The results come from each state’s election agency. (Connecticut and Rhode Island aren’t reporting results by congressional district, so we’re estimating them based on past voting patterns.)

While Pennsylvania’s GOP voters do choose delegates in each congressional district, they’re not bound to a presidential candidate, so we’ll only be showing the statewide totals in these tables (we may post the results of those delegate elections separately as they become available).

OK, Sanders is fired up about process. He just criticized the New York primaries because independents were unable to vote. Sanders does tend to do better with independents than with Democrats, as the political scientist Hans Noel points out. And his speech – like, frankly, a lot of American political discourse – makes far too much of the role of independents, who are not so much represented among voters as among non-voters.

What’s more interesting about Sanders, though, is why independents who do vote – or try to – in primaries are drawn to him. Most political scientists agree that politically engaged independents tend to be closet partisans who mostly vote for one party or another. But clearly there’s a difference between them and Democrats when it comes to this year’s choice.

This could be about process – about Sanders as an outsider to the party and a challenger to establishment figures like Clinton. But it could also be that independents are more likely to dislike Clinton’s foreign policy record, especially on Iraq. Last year I discovered that in poll after poll, independents were more hands-off than Democrats on a variety of questions. In this post, I outlined the range of global threats where independents thought the best U.S. option was to stay out.

NBC News declares Clinton and Trump the winners in Delaware.

Trump has won Maryland, but the question is whether he will sweep all 38 delegates by winning all eight congressional districts. If there’s a district he’s likeliest to lose, it’s Maryland’s 8th District, which takes in the well-educated Montgomery County suburbs and should be favorable territory for Kasich. More than 53 percent of non-Hispanic whites 25 and older hold at least a bachelor’s degree; that’s usually a poor sign for Trump.

If there’s another district where Kasich could do well, it’s probably the 3rd District, which was one of the ugliest gerrymanders of the 2012 redistricting cycle. It snakes from the D.C. suburbs to Annapolis, ultimately forming a ring around Baltimore, and it’s the second best-educated district in Maryland. A Trump loss here is unlikely, but not out of the question.

If there’s any place Cruz could possibly surprise, most Marylanders think it’s the western 6th District. The 6th stretches all the way from the rural, very conservative western tip of the state, where Cruz could do reasonably well, to some of D.C.’s most rapidly diversifying outer suburbs, such as Germantown (now home to an outpost of my favorite area Korean BBQ joint, Honey Pig), where Kasich could hold down Trump’s vote share. It’s still a long-shot, though.

NBC News declares Trump the winner in Rhode Island.

Keep an eye on Rhode Island. Right now Trump is barely under 67 percent of the vote, and Cruz is just at the 10 percent threshold to win delegates. If Trump gets at least two-thirds of the vote in each congressional district, he’ll get two versus the one delegate from each district he would otherwise. If Cruz gets below 10 percent statewide, Trump will also get more delegates.

Yes, I know that Trump was greater than a 99-percent favorite in Maryland, Pennsylvania and Connecticut tonight, but his margins are still extremely impressive. Based on exit polls, it looks as though Trump will get into the mid-50s in each state, something he’s previously done only in his home state of New York.

A few weeks ago, Trump was only at about 40 percent in polls of Pennsylvania and Maryland, so I don’t think you can ascribe all of tonight’s performance to demographics. It seems likely to me that something — perhaps Trump’s argument about the system being “rigged” against him — shifted undecided voters toward Trump or at least encouraged his voters to turn out.

A lot has been said about the racial divide in the Democratic primary; less so about the big economic divide among white voters. That’s clearly the case in the fairly white state of Connecticut tonight. Clinton is losing by 5 percentage points among voters making less than $30,000, but she is winning by 37 percentage points among those who make greater than $200,000.

At times throughout the past couple of weeks, we at FiveThirtyEight, along with a lot of other news organizations, have referred to today’s voting as the “Acela Primary.” That’s produced some backlash: former Obama advisor Dan Pfeiffer, for example, tweeted: “calling it the Acela Primary is a great way to highlight the great chasm between political/media class and the rest of America.”

I take issue with that backlash for a couple of reasons.

First, the people who live in the states that are voting today probably know what Acela is, so it’s not media elitism we’re talking about here so much as geographic parochialism. Yes, the Acela is the high speed train, aka, more expensive, but “Acela” is a bit more sonorous than “Northeast Regional” (the slow train), right?

Second and more importantly, nicknaming any primary days is dumb, so why single out “Acela” in particular?

“Super Tuesday,” “Super-duper Tuesday” — the internet feels a need to come up with a name for every single day deemed “crucial” for the election. The cute-sification and Twitter noise surrounding the naming is a bit grating from a sheer aesthetic point of view, but also frames election days in the same way we do sports contests. They’re not the same thing at all.

Of course, my writing this is inherently unhumorous and hypocritical — I’ve dropped the terms and my bread is partially buttered by participating in, ahem, blogs of these events and podcasts dissecting them after the fact — but a girl can bite the hand that feeds her once in a while. Naming primaries, Acela or otherwise, is both irritatingly in-crowdy, and trivializes the votes of citizens not in states deemed “important.” It’s a bit moony to say so but there you have it.

Voting in America matters from a philosophical point of view, not just the hard campaign math side of things.

And just to prove I’m an idiot, exit polls in the Maryland Senate primary have Van Hollen ahead of Edwards by 8 percentage points, quite close to pre-election polls.

And here’s where the early exit polls have it on the Democratic side:

• Connecticut: Clinton 50, Sanders 47
• Pennsylvania: Clinton 54, Sanders 45
• Maryland: Clinton 64, Sanders 33

If these results hold, Clinton will win Maryland by a larger margin than polls anticipated but will win Pennsylvania by a smaller margin, consistent with what we might expect based on the states’ demographics.

We know that Trump has won all 17 statewide delegates in Pennsylvania, which doesn’t include the district delegates allotted in the loophole primary. He has also won at least 14 delegates in Maryland. Trump will win a lot more than that, but we don’t know how many yet.

Right now, Trump seems to be in a fairly strong position to sweep all the delegates in Connecticut. He’s above 50 percent in the exit polls and leads in the New York suburbs, which is where Connecticut’s 4th district is located.

Living in Connecticut for five years did not yield nearly as many politically interesting moments for me as living in Wisconsin has. But there were a few good moments, like when I happened to pick up a copy of the Economist while traveling, only to discover that my governor was headed to prison. Or when businessman Ned Lamont ran against three-term incumbent Senator Joe Lieberman, a former vice presidential candidate, in the Democratic primary and won. Lamont’s 2006 bid was essentially a challenge to Lieberman’s support for the Iraq War, in a year when the electoral tide turned on the president and the war. It wasn’t enough to bring Lieberman down in the general, and he won his seat again as an independent.

The Lieberman-Lamont story in some ways marks the beginning of two related arcs that have since come to animate party politics. One was the ideological sorting of the two parties. The 2006 midterms turned moderate New England Republicans like Nancy Johnson out of their seats. And Lieberman, who continued to caucus with the Democrats, eventually broke with the party. He became a public supporter of John McCain in 2008 and is now trying to lead the “No Labels” campaign. The 2006 midterms were a major turning point in the Democrats’ effort to become a more uniformly liberal party.

Perhaps more consequentially for this year’s contest, the Lamont-Lieberman showdown foreshadowed some of the importance of the Iraq War as a wedge between Democrats. It was the big policy issue difference in 2008 between Clinton and Obama. These themes have come back this year. One question I’d love answered is whether this is a real rift in the Democratic Party or if it’s somehow specifically stuck to Clinton. I’ve said elsewhere (in a totally speculative way, to be clear) that her Iraq vote is one thing that Clinton likely did with the idea of running for president in mind – and that has backfired. Few such Democrats are still in the Senate, although some, like John Kerry and Joe Biden, have managed to stay afloat politically. Many others lost their seats in 2010 and 2014, like Blanche Lincoln and Mary Landrieu, or left the Senate around then, like Evan Bayh.

So as we watch this all go down this evening, in some sense we’re back where it all started. But Clinton’s standing in the polls suggests that this division may no longer be motivating Democratic primary voters in the Northeast.

What Jody called the “second-northernmost-quarter-of-the-Appalachian-Trail-primary” is taking place in states with significant black and Latino populations, both key in recent years to Democratic victories. Black voters, particularly in the South, have also been instrumental to Clinton’s margin of victory in the primaries. Maryland, at 29 percent, and Delaware at 22 percent have the largest proportion of black citizens. Rhode Island and Pennsylvania have the largest proportion of Latino residents, each with 13 percent. Not surprisingly, as is the case in the rest of the country, the Latino population is growing far more rapidly than the black population. In fact, in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania — known as the horse-and-buggy-filled Amish Country — Latino residents surpassed the number of Amish by 2010.

ABC News has declared Trump the winner in Connecticut, Maryland and Pennsylvania. Clinton has been declared the winner in Maryland.

It’s appropriate that Trump weighed in on the threat by the actress Lena Dunham, a Clinton supporter, to move to Canada if he were to become president. According to an analysis by TheRedPin, a Toronto-based brokerage that has a business interest in knowing about migration to Canada, Trump is by far the main subject of tweets about moving to Canada. Keep in mind that there is some circularity in that ranking: Some of the counted tweets are by Americans urging Dunham and others to move to Canada.

I’m more interested in which delegates win in the loophole primary in Pennsylvania. Remember, all 54 of the district delegates in Pennsylvania will be selected separately from the statewide winner, and none of the district delegates are bound to support a specific presidential candidate. The presidential winner of each congressional district only matters if the unbound delegates on lists like this one say they’ll support the presidential candidate who wins in the district. The number who says they will support the candidate that wins their district has been shrinking over the last few weeks.

In Maryland, the most recent polls show Chris Van Hollen ahead of Donna Edwards in the Democratic primary for U.S. Senate, a de facto general election given that Democrats are highly likely to win Maryland in November. But there are a couple of things that make me think the race might be more of a toss-up. One is that locally-based pollsters like the Washington Post and the Baltimore Sun showed Edwards narrowly ahead in March, which I’d give some weight to even though the polls are less recent. The other is that Edwards is both black and very progressive, making her a good match for the turnout we’re expecting tonight.

Donald Trump does better with voters who are men than he does with women, thanks in part to a series of misogynistic remarks. Trump also usually gets a higher share of women than his two Republican rivals.

Both of these things are true because Trump has won so many states by large margins. In the 22 states that voted before today and for which we have exit polls, Trump did, on average, 7 percentage points better among men than women, and nowhere did he poll higher among women. Cruz did about the same, and Kasich was a point stronger among women than men. (Marco Rubio explains some of the gap: He tended to do better among women than among men.) Nonetheless, Trump beat Cruz on average by 10 points among women, and Kasich by 22 points. For Cruz and Kasich to stop Trump, they’ll have to start beating him more regularly among women.

I know it’s sort of amusing for those of us in the Northeast to see people in other parts of the country mispronounce the term Acela, which refers to the “high-speed” Amtrak trains that run from Washington to Boston and pass through all five states holding primaries today. I’ll also admit to getting a kick when out-of-towners mispronounce New York’s Houston Street like the city in Texas instead of as “how-stun,” as it’s pronounced locally.

But we should be forgiving; Acela is an extremely obscure term. According to Google Trends, it’s searched for only one-thirtieth as often as the term Amtrak, and almost all of those searches are in the Northeast. It’s also roughly as obscure on Google as the city of Pierre, South Dakota, which I only learned a few weeks ago is pronounced more like “peer” instead of like Pierre as in Trudeau. How many people riding the Acela would get that one right?

Twitter follower counts are consistent with Trump’s expected edge in the states voting today: He has a greater share of his U.S. followers there than do his Republican rivals. These are estimates based on Twitter users’ profile texts from TweepsMap, a Toronto Twitter analysis company.

Keep in mind two things with these numbers: 1) Not every follower is a supporter; and 2) Trump has way more followers than his Republican rivals. For instance, the number of Trump followers in Pennsylvania is about 63 percent the number of Kasich followers throughout the country.

One thing to watch out for tonight is whether Trump exceeds his polling averages. Before New York, Trump rarely exceeded his polling average by more than a couple of points. In New York, he got over 60 percent of the vote after polling at just 52 percent in the FiveThirtyEight polling average. If Trump does far better than his polling average, it could mean that he is winning over undecided voters in a way he hadn’t done previously. That would be very dangerous for Cruz in a state like Indiana, where Trump is leading but only with 38 percent of the vote.

And here are the GOP numbers:

We’re about 30 minutes from the polls closing in all five states, so we’ll have the real votes to look at soon. But here’s one last look at our weighted polling averages and forecasts for today’s Democratic contests:

Last Friday, Gov. Terry McAuliffe of Virginia signed an executive order restoring voting rights to 200,000 felons who have served their time. It’s an issue worth keeping an eye on as the political season unfolds. Laws vary widely by state, with some allowing all felons to vote, including those currently incarcerated; others allowing those who’ve completed their sentences to vote; and some barring convicted felons from voting for life.

Unlike some fights that initially took place or are taking place on a state level, like same-sex marriage or marijuana legalization, it’s not as clear whether the re-enfranchisement of felons will become a state-by-state trend. Just this February, Maryland passed a law similar in effect to Virginia’s executive action, giving 40,000 convicted felons the right to vote. But in Kentucky, Gov. Matt Bevin initially struck down a wide-ranging felony re-enfranchisement executive order by the previous governor, and then just this month signed a more restrictive law granting some felons the chance to vote. It applies only to non-violent offenders who’ve not been convicted of a crime in five years, and they must pay $100 to reinstate their voting rights.

Many legal advocates have noted that felony disenfranchisement laws are the most stringent in areas with high black populations in the South, and date from the post-Reconstruction era when white politicians sought to suppress new black voters. The effect of laws like Virginia’s could be small but significant in the presidential race. Most convicted felons are probably Democratic voters, but — like many other Americans, disproportionately those lower-income and lower-educated — they do not exercise that newfound right to vote.

One of the overlooked stories of the 2016 primaries might be how decisions made in the congressional redistricting process four or five years ago are having unforeseen consequences in this year’s GOP presidential fight.

Democrats didn’t get to redraw a lot of states’ congressional boundaries after the 2010 Census (in fact, Republicans drew about four times as many districts), but there were two important states where Democrats resorted to some creative tactics to draw themselves additional seats: Illinois and Maryland. It just so happens those gerrymanders are helping Trump.

In Illinois, Democrats diluted a lot of Republican votes in the Chicago suburbs by adding them to minority-majority districts based in the city. Under Republican National Committee rules, every district gets the same number of delegates, so these voters had a lot of power. And GOP voters living in close proximity to minorities have tended to be among Trump’s best supporters.

In Maryland, the situation is a little different tonight. In 2012, Democratic mapmakers decided to dilute Republican votes in western Maryland by splitting them into two different districts: The 6th and 8th congressional districts, both anchored by the Montgomery County suburbs of D.C. Kasich should do well in wealthy, well-educated Montgomery County, but as others have pointed out, Trump could do well enough in Western Maryland precincts to overcome Kasich in both districts.

Speaking of Google Trends, there were signs earlier in the Republican primary that Election Day searches were decent indicators of how candidates would do at the polls. Those numbers suggest what the polls do: Trump leads by big margins in Google searches today in Connecticut, Delaware, Maryland, Pennsylvania and Rhode Island.

A quick point about “momentum,” which I should probably take up at more length at some point in the future.

There’s a tendency among data-y types (like us here at FiveThirtyEight!) to dismiss momentum every time the term is invoked on television or in the newspaper. That skepticism is mostly for the good:

• Demographic differences between the states are often mistaken for momentum — the Democratic primaries of 2008, which were highly predictable from demographic patterns, are a great example of this.
• The way most political analysts use the term “momentum,” it’s more often a lagging indicator (in which direction were things moving last week?) than a leading one (how will things develop from here?).
• The news cycle progresses so quickly that momentum, even it exists for some period of time, may not last long enough to persist until Election Day. Sometimes, perceived momentum may even backfire on a candidate because it raises the media’s expectations for his future performance. Rubio’s purported momentum after Iowa probably contributed to the schadenfreude over his poor debate in New Hampshire or his mediocre showing on Super Tuesday, for example.
• Relatedly, whether a candidate is perceived to have momentum in the first place is also largely a function of expectations. A candidate who wins a state overwhelmingly may be perceived to have lost momentum if the media was expecting an even more overwhelming victory. Since the media’s expectations fairly quickly adjust to new polls and other types of information, this can make momentum fairly random.

But like most things, the anti-momentum arguments can sometimes be taken too far. True, momentum usually isn’t all that helpful in a predictive sense. (If candidate X wins state A, that might or might not increase her likelihood of winning state B; it depends on a lot of things.) That sometimes leads to the dubious conclusion, however, that primary campaigns are static and that the timing doesn’t matter at all.

To take a more specific example, if Trump wins Maryland with more than 50 percent of the vote tonight after only having gotten 35 percent in demographically similar Virginia on Super Tuesday, that would suggest that something about the Republican race had changed. It might not be “momentum” per se and it might not tell us all that much about what will happen in Indiana next week (then again, it might). But it would suggest that demographics alone weren’t enough to predict Trump’s share of the vote.

Question

“Is it too early to ask who Clinton will choose for her VP?” — commenter Bilal Muhammad

Answer

Well, it’s too early to ask a normal person. But I am mildly obsessed with VP picks. For the sake of the argument we’ll start by assuming Clinton becomes the nominee. There have, of course, been calls for her to select Sanders. This would clearly be an important gesture toward party unity. But it would also be two older, white candidates on the ticket for a young and diverse party.

Let’s think a bit more about one of the main factors that go into VP selection: balancing. The research says the evidence for this is mixed. Figuring out what constitutes a “balanced” ticket can be a bit of an empirical challenge. How much of an age difference is big enough to balance a ticket’s age? Should we look at the candidates’ years of experience, or the type – legislative, executive, etc.? We’ve certainly seen some presidential tickets with big age and experience differences recently. When President Obama picked Joe Biden in 2008, Biden had been in the Senate for most of Obama’s life. In 2012, Mitt Romney chose a running mate who was both decades younger and also had a lot of legislative experience that Romney, a former businessman and governor, lacked.

For Clinton, this is an even more interesting conundrum. She’s got lots of varied experience, but she’s also an unconventional candidate by virtue of being a woman and the former first lady. Will she pick someone – as Obama did – who brings conventional credentials and demographics to the ticket? Or will she consider women and people of color?

The latter seems likely given the make-up of the Democratic coalition. Perhaps paradoxically, I think that Clinton may be more likely to make a bold pick if things look electorally safe. If she’s likely to win, then perhaps she’ll make a point about the many, many all-male presidential tickets we’ve had in the past and select another woman – Elizabeth Warren, Kamala Harris or Kirsten Gillibrand – perhaps?

There are some other important considerations. William Adler and I have been working on some research about whether Democratic nominees have different running-mate priorities than Republican nominees; one of our hypotheses is that Democratic nominees use the VP selection to reach out to specific constituency groups while Republicans use the pick to affirm their ideological commitments. It’s possible that Clinton won’t have to pick between these. But in the event that she needs to make offer an olive branch to the Sanders-Warren wing of the party, her choices for a nominee who also represents the black or Latino (to name a few) constituencies within the party will be pretty slim.

“Super Tuesday” interest on Google has gotten supersized. According to Google Trends, relative searches for the term in the U.S. in 2004 peaked at 4 percent of this spring’s high, reached 47 percent of this year’s peak in 2008 and fell to just 11 percent in March 2012.

The American people have spoken, and there was only one Super Tuesday this election: the one on March 1. Search activity for Super Tuesday the day after the March 15 primaries was just 8 percent of its level on March 2, and is basically imperceptible today.

Parts of the media can keep trying to make Super Tuesday happen again, but Americans’ Google searches suggest it already happened almost two months ago.

Look at the preliminary exit polls, and you can’t help but think this is going to be a very strong night for Clinton and Trump. More than half of Democratic voters in Connecticut, Maryland and Pennsylvania say they want the next president to continue President Obama’s policies. Clinton has cleaned up among those who feel that way in previous contests. The same exit polls show that more than half of Republican voters would “definitely vote” for Trump in the general election, while the numbers are far worse for Kasich and especially Cruz.

Here are the results from the most recent competitive Republican (2012) and Democratic (2008) primaries in Pennsylvania:

Those tempted to believe the Trump phenomenon will usher waves of new voters into this fall’s electorate may be right — except, those may be waves of anti-Trump voters. Ever since Trump began dominating the 2016 news cycle, Democrats have been salivating over the prospect of record engagement among young voters and Latinos. Now, there’s some evidence that surge may be arriving, with potentially disastrous consequences for the GOP.

California political data guru Paul Mitchell sounded a siren late last week, observing in the Sacramento-based Capitol Weekly that new voter registrations doubled among Latinos, rose 150 percent among young voters and tripled among Democrats compared to this point in 2012. Consider that Trump’s favorability/unfavorability has recently been pegged at 17/74 among millennials and a mind-boggling 9/87 among Latinos.

Sure, Republicans never had a chance to win California to begin with. But if we begin to see similar registration numbers in many other states, Republicans could be headed for the electoral apocalypse many Democrats have predicted.

After tonight, Sanders and his advisors are going to “reassess” his campaign, according to The New York Times, though the paper said Sanders “is adamant that he will remain in the race until the Democratic convention this summer.”

What Sanders is doing here is basically the political equivalent of the freshman year of college “Thanksgiving talk,” that five-day period during which high school sweethearts would initiate a slow, painful breakup that would be completed by the end of Christmas break so as to be free-and-clear to date, say, that cute baseball player in their hallway come second semester.

If polling is to be believed — an existential question that’s too weighty to be taken on in the space of this em dash — Sanders will not do well in the five states voting tonight, with his chances to win the nomination devolving more and more into the realm of magical thinking. He’s probably not going to be the Democratic nominee, and his campaign advisors know it, but it’s a difficult thing to leave an enterprise one is so passionate about. While the campaign won’t end tomorrow, this reassessment might be the first step in strategizing how Sanders will make his exit from the race.

“If we have a really good day, we are going to continue to talk about winning most of the pledged delegates because we will be on a path toward it,” Tad Devine, a Sanders advisor, told The Times. “If we don’t get enough today to make it clear that we can do it by the end, it’s going to be hard to talk about it.”

Confused? This might speak to a certain internal divide in the Sanders campaign. After last week’s New York primary, Sanders’s campaign manager, Jeff Weaver, said on MSNBC that the campaign would try to “flip” superdelegates between the last primary contest and the convention, while Devine gave the more tempered response of  reassessing. In the House of Bern, there is dissent, perhaps.

The Political TV Ad Archive tracks select media markets around the country, including Philadelphia, the fourth-largest local television market in the nation. Pennsylvania’s quirky party primary rules mean that there are only 17 bound GOP delegates (out of 71), while Democrats have 189 pledged delegates (out of 234 total). The campaign ad spending in the media market tracks with the stakes at hand, with the Democratic contenders making more ad buys, and making them earlier in the season.

Clinton and Sanders began airing ads within the first seven days of the month, while Cruz and Trump only began airing ads on April 20th and 21st respectively. The campaigns also differed in how many different types of advertisements they aired.

The Clinton campaign aired an ad boasting of her foreign relations credentials 217 times between the start of April and Monday. “The world a president has to grapple with,” a narrator says in voiceover. “Sometimes you can’t even imagine.” Sanders’s most-played ad, with 187 airings during that time span, focused on him speaking directly to the camera, asserting that there are “two Democratic visions for regulating Wall Street,” and on his plan to “break up the big banks.” Trump and Cruz only ran one ad each. Cruz’s ad, aired 132 times, uses a voiceover to assert that “Obama was a failure, Hillary could be worse,” before turning to Cruz’s plans to end the Affordable Care Act. Trump’s ad, aired 187 times, has the candidate speaking to the camera, declaring that “Washington is broken” and going through a list of his plans, from blocking lobbyists to building a border wall. Super PACs were absent from the ad buys during this period in the Philadelphia market. One strategy they abandoned: anti-Trump attack ads. Those had a brief run… and didn’t work.

One big disadvantage for Sanders tonight is that all states but Rhode Island are holding a closed primary, as New York did last week, which means that only registered Democrats can vote. (Rhode Island is holding a modified primary instead; both Democrats and unaffiliated voters may participate, although not Republicans.) As we’ve described before, Sanders does better with voters who identify as independent than he does with only Democrats. In fact, the differences are quite dramatic. Among states where exit polls have been conducted, Sanders has won independents in all states but Alabama, Georgia and Mississippi. However, Clinton has won Democrats in all states but Vermont and New Hampshire (she also tied Sanders among Democrats in Wisconsin). Overall, in the average state where exit polls have been conducted, Sanders has won independents by 27 percentage points while Clinton has won Democrats by 29 percentage points.

How much, exactly, does a closed primary hurt Sanders? There are a couple of problems that make this trickier to analyze than you might think. For one thing, the exit polls ask about voter self-identification — whether they usually think of themselves as Democrats, Republicans or independents — rather than which party they’re registered with. As you can see from the table above, for instance, some voters who self-identify as independents were nevertheless registered as Democrats and voted in the New York Democratic primary last week. Another complication is that the states with open primaries tend to be different than the ones with closed primaries. In particular, open primaries are more common in the South, where Clinton performs strongly. Also, there are different degrees of openness and closedness; New York has a very early deadline for changing party registration, for instance, which may have especially hurt Sanders. Still, a regression analysis suggests that closed primaries hurt Sanders by at least a couple of percentage points and possibly a bit more than that. Tonight’s results will provide some useful data on the magnitude of the effect.

Here’s how Maryland Republicans and Democrats, respectively, voted in their most recent competitive primary:

Here are the results from the last competitive Republican primary and competitive Democratic primary in Delaware:

As the Clinton vs. Sanders battle gradually transitions from competitive to symbolic/cathartic, tonight’s Democratic drama will be further down the ballot. Rep. Chris Van Hollen of Maryland looks like the favorite to win his state’s crucial Democratic Senate primary, but one of the most compelling House primaries I’ve ever observed is the one to replace Van Hollen in Maryland’s 8th District.

The primary pits a former local news anchor, Kathleen Matthews (the wife of MSNBC’s Chris Matthews), against State Sen. Jamie Raskin (who is married to Deputy Treasury Secretary Sarah Bloom Raskin). But if you live in the D.C. media market, chances are you’ve been inundated with ads from a third candidate named David Trone, who owns the popular wholesaler Total Wine and More and has poured a stupendous $12.4 million of his own money into the race.

My sense is that Trone’s self-funding has been so well-publicized in this highly educated, politically connected district that it’s turned off a lot of Democratic primary voters who already bristle at the notion of too much “big money” in politics. In fact, Trone’s ads brag that his personal spending means he can’t be bought — but that sounds a lot like the message coming from a certain GOP presidential candidate.

Trone isn’t the first House candidate to seek to win by brute force, but he’s shattered all records for personal money spent in a House race. Back in 2002, Jim Humphreys, a West Virginia attorney and a Democrat, spent $7.8 million of his own money on a losing bid that earned only 65,400 votes — in other words, he spent about $119 per vote. Trone looks very likely to exceed that ratio tonight. At least he probably won’t spend $9,100 per vote like Jim Gilmore did in Iowa.

We love Tim Robbins here at FiveThirtyEight. “Bull Durham” and “The Shawshank Redemption” are almost perfect movies. He might be the best actor among the all-star cast in “Mystic River.” I saw “Cradle Will Rock” on opening day.

But yesterday Tim Robbins took to Twitter and rolled out some incredibly sketchy polling numbers — which is basically the same as putting up the FiveThirtyEight bat signal. As it happens, Robbins tweeted just as we were going into a taping of our elections podcast, where we were planning to talk about the state of exit polling anyway. I asked Nate (Silver) and Harry (it’s just Harry) about the Robbins tweet, and in general why exit polling seems to be off so often. Here’s what Harry had to say:

The reason it was off in New York City is because there was an overestimation of how many young voters there would be, and what percentage they would make up of the electorate. And young voters obviously went overwhelmingly for Bernie Sanders, so it tainted the sample.

Exit polls have a bias often times towards having too many young people in the sample and in this particular case, it clearly manifested itself with Bernie Sanders doing better than he eventually ended up doing.

And here’s Nate’s reaction to the Robbins tweet:

Some of these numbers are cherry picked, or wrong. The sourcing isn’t very good. So I’m not sure that this analysis really passes initial journalistic quality standards. But leaving that aside, to allege there’s a conspiracy among organizations in all 50 states to rig the election against Bernie Sanders, versus the fact that the exit polls could be systematically (statistically) biased in one direction or another?

For more on why we’re not buying Robbins’s argument, take a listen to the full podcast below. After that, watch “The Hudsucker Proxy” again. So good.

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Here are the results from the most recent competitive Republican (2012) and Democratic (2008) primaries in Rhode Island:

Welcome to the third edition of this primary season’s “Super Tuesday” series. Five Northeastern states are voting today, and it looks like each party’s front-runners — Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump — will get most of the delegates up for grabs. If the polling is anywhere close to the mark, Trump will win every state — Pennsylvania, Connecticut, Maryland, Rhode Island and Delaware — but it’s not clear  whether he can sweep all the delegates in Connecticut and Maryland, or how he’ll do in the “loophole” primary in Pennsylvania. (The loophole refers to the unbound delegates — three in each congressional district — who will be selected by voters today but are free to support the candidate of their choosing.)

Clinton looks like she’ll win at least three states and end the night with an overall elected-delegate lead over Bernie Sanders of somewhere near 300. That’s a big, big, dare-I-say insurmountable advantage.

The night will unfold rather simply. We already have our first look at the exit poll data from Connecticut, Maryland and Pennsylvania (no exit polls are being conducted in Delaware and Rhode Island). As we learned again last week in New York, where Clinton led in early exit polls by 4 percentage points but went on to win by 16 points, exit poll results are preliminary and often off by a lot. Still, we’ll be diving into the exit poll data for a little bit as we wait for the real returns.

In about two hours (8 p.m. EDT), the polls will close in all five states, and the networks will probably call several races. The fine people of Connecticut, Delaware, Maryland, Pennsylvania and Rhode Island have ensured that we will probably all get to bed at a reasonable hour tonight. Of course, that also means we’ll have an action-packed hour or two right after the polls close, filled with results.

So sit back, enjoy and follow along with us.

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