What Went Down In The April 26 Primary Elections

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.