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.

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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.

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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.

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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.)

		DELEGATES BASED ON PROJECTED MARGIN
STATE	PROJECTED MARGIN	CLINTON	SANDERS
Pennsylvania	Clinton +9.6	104	85
Maryland	Clinton +30.9	62	33
Connecticut	Clinton +2.2	28	27
Rhode Island	Sanders +12.2	11	13
Delaware	Clinton +20.6	13	8
Total		218	166

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.

Trump is now greatly exceeding his poll averages

STATE	TRUMP OVERPERFORMANCE
Average Since New York	+9.0
Connecticut	+7.0
Delaware	+6.1
Maryland	+10.1
New York	+6.5
Pennsylvania	+11.7
Rhode Island	+12.3
Average Before New York	+0.2
Alabama	+4.1
Arizona	+7.9
Arkansas	-1.2
Florida	+4.5
Georgia	+1.7
Idaho	-1.9
Illinois	+3.8
Iowa	-5.8
Kansas	-7.3
Kentucky	+0.9
Louisiana	-1.3
Massachusetts	+2.8
Michigan	-1.6
Mississippi	+6.2
Missouri	+4.8
Nevada	+3.9
New Hampshire	+2.9
North Carolina	-1.0
Ohio	0.0
Oklahoma	-4.7
South Carolina	-1.3
Tennessee	-5.1
Texas	-0.9
Utah	-2.0
Vermont	-0.7
Virginia	-4.0
Wisconsin	+1.0

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:

Low Republican turnout in Northeast, except New Hampshire

STATE	TURNOUT AS SHARE OF VOTING-ELIGIBLE POPULATION
New Hampshire	27.8
Wisconsin	25.6
Alabama	23.9
Ohio	22.3
Missouri	20.7
South Carolina	20.3
Idaho	19.7
Arkansas	19.2
Mississippi	19.1
Georgia	18.8
Michigan	17.8
Tennessee	17.6
Virginia	17.0
Oklahoma	16.5
Texas	16.4
Florida	16.3
North Carolina	15.8
Illinois	15.3
Massachusetts	12.8
Vermont	12.5
Arizona	11.4
Delaware	9.8
Louisiana	8.9
New York	6.4

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.

Pennsylvania’s Delegates

DISTRICT	DELEGATE	PERCENTAGE	STATED PREFERENCE
1	Vogler, Christopher M	37.42%	Uncommitted
1	Hackett, David	31.75	District Winner
1	Kaufer, Seth W	30.83	Uncommitted
2	Havey, Elizabeth	29.30	District Winner
2	Tucker, Calvin R	29.16	Uncommitted
2	Cohen, Aaron J	25.82	Uncommitted
3	English, Philip S	17.66	Uncommitted
3	Ryan, Carol Lynne	11.27	Trump
3	Yates, Robert J.	11.14	District Winner
4	Sacco, Joseph A	13.38	Trump
4	Jansen, Matthew R	11.40	Trump
4	Scaringi, Marc Anthony	10.90	Trump
5	Klein, James Feuer	16.72	Trump
5	Mcclure, C Arnold	13.72	Trump
5	Khare, Ash	12.84	District Winner
6	Costello, Ryan A	25.32	District Winner
6	Lightcap, Vicki	14.27	District Winner
6	Buckwalter, Wayne	14.08	Trump
7	Puppio, Michael V	25.86	District Winner
7	Willert, Robert J.	24.10	Unknown
7	Miller, Joan M	23.42	District Winner
8	Worthington, Samuel James Jr	18.74	District Winner
8	Casper, Barry Robert	17.07	District Winner
8	Quinn, Marguerite C	14.50	Unknown
9	Shuster, William F	19.34	District Winner
9	Ward, Judith F	16.31	District Winner
9	Taylor, Debra D	13.45	Trump
10	Sides, Carol D	13.99	Unknown
10	Scavello, Mario Michael	10.04	District Winner
10	Pickett, Tina	9.44	District Winner
11	Morelli, Richard	16.28	Trump
11	Mcelwee, David J	12.68	Trump
11	Shecktor, Andrew	9.25	Trump
12	Steigerwalt, George F	10.80	Cruz
12	Vasilko, James J	9.69	Trump
12	Morrill, Monica	9.25	Trump
13	Ellis, Thomas Jay	17.29	District Winner
13	Cox, Gilbert W Jr	15.86	Unknown
13	Casper, Lauren Elizabeth	14.51	District Winner
14	Meloy, Mary A	35.65	Uncommitted
14	Devanney, Michael	34.78	Uncommitted
14	Linton, Cameron S	29.57	Kasich
16	Brubaker, Douglas W	22.86	Cruz
16	Denlinger, Gordon Ray	22.74	Uncommitted
16	Dumeyer, David M	17.43	District Winner
17	Villano, Teresa Lynette	18.50	Trump
17	Bonkoski, Carolyn L	17.79	Trump
17	Snover, Gloria Lee	15.10	District Winner
18	Means, Sue Ann	13.39	Cruz
18	Deplato, Justin Phd	13.13	Trump
18	Petrarca, John Thomas	12.94	District Winner

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.

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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.