What Went Down In The April 26 Primary Elections

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.