What Went Down In The April 26 Primary Elections

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.