What Went Down In The April 26 Primary Elections

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

https://twitter.com/jodyavirgan/status/725089139322961922

https://abcnews.go.com/video/55980986

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.

Listen to the latest episode of the FiveThirtyEight politics podcast.

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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