What Went Down In The Indiana Primary

We’re always on the lookout for potential new ways to forecast election results, even as we remain skeptical about whether they work. Here’s an update on how two measures of online interest in the candidates did in the Republican race today: Google search volume continues to be a decent proxy for how Republican primaries and caucuses will play out. Trump dominated in searches all day — until Cruz announced he was suspending his campaign and achieved a Pyrrhic victory. Meanwhile, TweepsMap projected a Trump landslide based on its analysis of the geographic location of the candidates’ Twitter followers and their engagement in the last 24 hours before the primaries. On the GOP side, Trump had the most Indiana followers, and was the subject of the most positive hashtags in the state. This has less of a track record than the Google Trends approach, but at least today, in this race, it pointed the right way.

Now that we can call Trump the presumptive nominee of the Republican Party, I suppose, Democrats seem to be bouncing back and forth between glee and panic. Which is the more evidence-based emotion? Back when we thought political science mattered, there were two pretty consistent schools of thought that suggested candidates and campaigns were less important than news reports often suppose. Election forecasts based on what political scientists like to call the “fundamentals” — the state of the economy, how long the incumbent party has been in office, and how popular the incumbent is — are usually pretty accurate. Second, polarization has emerged as a powerful force in American politics. With an electorate that’s pretty set in its party preferences, it’s not too hard to figure out what the vote might look like. All of this suggests that the GOP nominating a wild card like Trump doesn’t matter that much. But candidates do sometimes underperform based on what the “fundamentals” suggest, and campaigns may well play a role in helping voters figure out the cues from the political environment. In particular, voter mobilization seems to have been a big part of the story for Obama’s last two campaigns. Mobilization is perhaps the biggest question mark for a Trump general-election candidacy. He’s made some friends within the elite party tent, but not that many. Will the party coalesce around him and mobilize on his behalf? Or does the candidate really matter when it comes to inspiring these efforts?

The exit polls on the Democratic side look familiar: Sanders dominated among young and independent voters, Clinton among old voters and black voters. Consistent with Sanders’s gains as votes were counted, he also won among late deciders, getting 55 percent of the vote from people who decided in the last few days. That could mean his campaign’s claim that voters in upcoming primaries will turn toward him as they get to know him more has some merit. It could also reflect the decision by the Clinton campaign to spend virtually nothing on advertising in Indiana, since it has such a formidable lead among delegates.