What Went Down In The Indiana Primary

The Democratic race remains fundamentally unchanged after tonight’s win by Sanders. Yes, his victory was somewhat surprising, given that all of the polls had Clinton winning and by an average of 7 percentage points. And yes, Sanders has promised to fight on in the primary until perhaps the convention. The problem for the Sanders campaign remains delegate math and demographics. Right now, Sanders looks like he’ll earn about five to 10 more delegates than Clinton in Indiana. That means Clinton will have an elected delegate lead by the end of the evening of around 280 to 285 delegates. In order to catch Clinton in the elected delegate count, Sanders would need to win over 65 percent of the remaining elected delegates. That’s actually higher than it was before Indiana voted. Perhaps as importantly, there’s not anything in the Indiana result that should make one think that Sanders has dramatically changed the result. According to a demographic model published last week by Nate, Sanders was expected to win the state of Indiana by 7 percentage points. That’s about the size of his lead right now. Indeed, you can look at the exit polls and see that Clinton is holding onto the demographic groups she usually wins. For instance, she is beating Sanders among black voters by 52 percentage points. That’s actually slightly better than she did among black voters in New York. I know that some people will think tonight’s polling error in favor of Sanders could be predictive of errors to come. As I pointed out in a different post, it’s actually par for the course so far in this primary. It’s nothing like the Michigan polling error we saw earlier in the campaign. Sanders will need far larger polling errors going forward to have a shot at the nomination. As I said at the top, Sanders will continue to fight on, and he will win votes. He looks like the favorite in the West Virginia primary, for example, which is coming up next. He’ll also do well in the remaining states in the middle of the country. Still, it looks like Clinton and Trump are going to be the nominees of their party.